Project MANDALA

Sept 2008

Working with teenagers is sometimes not an easy task and getting them to draw might be even more challenging!

This is one of Yanki’s ‘Design Participation’ projects with the Villiers High School in West London. With designers Paula Dib, Fernando Maculan, Renata Mendes from Brazil, and Clara Gaggaro (RCA Industrial Design Engineering graduate), we were invited by the school with students of multi-culture to initiate and deliver a series of design workshops, which aims to enage the students and the teachers in their school improvement programmes.

In order to draw the student’s interest to the creative process of design, the team developed different methods of engagement. One of the most successful exercises is called ‘Music and Drawing’ - while different music of preference were played to stimulate the students to respond to the music and draw freely, the graffiti slowly conquered the drawing table and emerged with interesting and crazy presentation. After the warming up exercise, the students were then working together to design a symbol to express their personal message of ‘Peace’ to the world.

These symbols were collected, digitalised and toyed by the design team as a dialogue with the environment and the theme “Peace” to create a massive Mandala on the playground for the school as a wellcoming present to all the delegates of the International Student Conference.

The work is one of the latest development created by the new design initiative, ‘Designing across boundaries’ developed by Yanki and Paula. The first experiment was initiated in Sept 2007. More information can be found in:

http://bas.blogs.com/design_documentaries/2007/09/designing-acros.html.

Image Courtesy: Yanki Lee and Paula Dib