This is not a liveblog but a retrospective account of the first day.
Welcome by Joao Mota of University of Aveiro, the organizer of the Summer School.
The doctoral colloquium organized in an impromptu fashion as the original organizer was not able to make it was done by Balder & Stefan. We all had a chance to present madness style (1-minute) our PhD work with a poster if we had one. Stefan took pictures of each person, hopefully these will be available before the end of our time here.
We had a series of negotiation games, which I found very entertaining. We put two words on opposite ends of a long space, and had to negotiate who we thought ought to be where. The warm-up was A on one end and Z on the other and we had to line up by first name. I happened to love that one as I’m very obviously always first. Then we lined up with Art on one end and Engineering on the other, not nearly so cut and dried and lots of negotiation there. One where it near and far was interesting and I was wrong. It was near and far from Aveiro in relation to where you were born. I was convinced since I was born in Washington state I was the farthest, some of the people from Brazil thought they were farther. Our Chinese colleagues were there but didn’t speak up too much. In the end I stood my ground, but it was our Chinese colleagues who should have gotten the far distance as it’s farther by almost 1000km. And for the record Brazil is MUCH closer.
After a break we had a session with Nigel Cross who talked about Creative Cognition in Design. Nigel studied with John Christopher Jones after a kind of winding course though engineering and architecture. We jump into case studies from DTRS 2, the well-known data set that was analyzed by a number of different teams, then there was a symposium then a book was written. It was very interesting to hear Nigel talk about the different ways the data can be viewed. It was very good to see that all the different approaches from various disciplines were all respected.
Kudos to Nigel for taking short Q&A breaks throughout his time. Some people did remark though that the presentation style was not very dynamic, and I tend to agree, but I was fairly enthralled since he’s such a well known figure.
Then case studies with a number of well known designers. The story of Gordon Murray the F1 race car designer was intriguing as he had some kind of objective measure of success: he wins races. He was given a set of rules that changed and it wasn’t about staying in the rules, but how can I satisfy them but get around them in some way too. He also discussed Kenneth Grange, Richard MacCormac, Geoffrey Harcourt, Denys Lasdun, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
In some ways the designer will make their job more difficult, by blowing up the conflict, making the problem more grand that it perhaps was to start, but then it makes the resolution even better. There’s framing of the problem using first principles.
We then met soon for a long and winding bus ride with a few missed turns to a winery out in the country. The champagne flowed very freely and all but a few of us were tipsy, of course I was one of the few choosing not to partake. Along with the champagne (well it wasn’t properly champagne but a sparkling wine, but that is not too important I suppose) we had loads of appetizers. Many different kinds coming around on trays. There was so much so often we all ate quite a lot. Not a lot of vegetarian choices and so a few had to suffer. We then had a tour of the winery and it was quite nice. Then dinner we sat down to a table with 5 glasses 4 knives and 4 forks. I quickly turned my wine glasses upside down and they were cleared away but there were all these different things for people to sample along with more appetizers, then a more formal starter which was fantastic. A nice goat cheese wrapped in filo dough and then honey drizzled over it along with arugla in a nice local olive oil on the side. We were all quite full when the main dish came out: a rather large fish dish presented in a tall rather large form. Greens on the bottom, fish in a nice creamy sauce all topped with bread crumbs on the top. I only got through 1/3 of mine, though a few people did manage all of it. The dessert was a pinapple carppacio with fruit coulis and a ball of coconut ice cream. It was very artistic looking but really not the best. We stayed at the tables for a time and some of us were restless to leave as it was after midnight. We got people to start standing up and soon we were on our way back in the bus. Hilarious conversations of vegetarianism and what that meant and why some people and the atrocity that is food production in America was discussed along with people that smelled of horses and cigarette smoke. Yes it was bizarre and I have no idea how much of it came up. We arrived back at the hotel not too much before 1am. The LONGEST dinner of my life by far.