This workshop series invites participants to explore the wider issues and challenges in Vancouver through a design lens.
Sunday afternoons (2:30-5:00pm) throughout April, the Museum will curate a series of playful explorations and thoughtful workshops in conjunction with the Your Future Home exhibition and its central themes: Affordability, Density, Mobility and Public Space.
Each workshop session can be experienced as a standalone event, or participate in all of them for maximum engagement!
April 3: Modify Vancouver: An Introduction to Design Fiction
Hosted by the Vancouver Design Nerds, this workship will introduce participants to Design Fiction through the research of guest speaker Ian Wojtowicz. It will spark creativity, collaboration and a methods for generating conceptual ideas as they pertain to local issues around Vancouver’s mobility and public space.
Participants will work in small groups to put theory into action, re-imagining a Vancouver without any limits. Designers use the practice of Design Fiction to propose and provoke discussion about what is and what could be, to produce projects that sit between the plausible and imaginary. This is a unique technique that takes a speculative approach to creative work; think science fiction for the present! Join the Design Nerds and use your creative imagination to design near future realities around such areas as public transportation and public space.
Workshop leaders and registration info.
April 10: Dear Vancouver: An Experimental Letter Writing Campaign on Public Space
This workshop invites participants to brainstorm and create a new and experimental campaign for communicating with, through and across the city of Vancouver. Workshop coordinators - Justin Langlois and Alicia Medina Laddaga - will lead participants through creative forms of writing to synthesize letters that will be documented and subsequently distributed though post and/or online.
Letter writing campaigns have long been the first line of action by citizens asking for change in their communities. Whether writing to city hall, letters to the editor, or even posters in public places, the ways in which we address our city and one another goes a long way in shaping how we think about and live within Vancouver. Dear Vancouver workshop will implement collective letter drafting of enthusiastic praise, important demands, and open-ended questions to get to know where we live, and how we live in Vancouver. No experience in letter writing is necessary. Non-English speaking community members are highly encouraged to attend.
Workshop leaders and registration info.
April 17: Make It Rain
This workshop, facilitated by members of The Vancouver Public Space Network (VPSN), explores the concept of making public spaces in rainy climates usable and enjoyable all year round. Participants will review and discuss precedent studies, followed by a “live” analysis of remote video feeds from around the city of Vancouver. In an effort to work through solutions for more rain friendly city spaces, participants will be asked, ‘what are the impacts of a predominantly rainy climate on the design of public spaces?’
This workshop will develop materials and documentation that will be used as a basis for advocacy and education directed towards making Vancouver’s public spaces better adapted for the rainy months. After participating in the Make it Rain workshop you will be inspired to connect and celebrate one of Vancouver’s most overlooked assets: the rain.
Workshop leaders and registration info.
April 24: Improv-ing the City. Designing Policies through Participative Theatre
Alec Balasescu and Jonathan Bleackley of Civic Renewal Lab host a role-playing and improv workshop that will explore Vancouver’s development, housing, and affordability policies. Guided by the question, "for whom is the city built?" and borrowing from similar policy-based theatre work, participants will be led in acting out the impact of key housing policies and policy questions, with an interest towards helping residents understand the stakes, opinions and goals of the various players involved, and why finding solutions can be difficult.
Actors will be assigned diverse roles such as homeowner, renter, real estate agent, foreign investor, contractor banker. They will be provided with a current or proposed policy and be asked to act out the implications of that policy. The eventual goal of Improv-ing the City is to help participants better understand the complexity of the issues, what is causing the real estate crisis, and identify what policy changes Vancouver could adopt moving forward to address the problem.
