An exploration workshop equipped with design
Project completed in 2020
As part of my research-project presented in my thesis, I carried out an exploration workshop equipped with design.
Goals
This tool takes place in a class of students in the French Orientation and Learning Module (MOAF) at Lycée Le Corbusier, where these people devote one school year to learning French. This workshop presents different objectives intended to advance my research. It is used to make contact with people with an immigrant background and to get to know each workshop participant better by making them talk about their current situation and what they would like to become. It seems easier to develop a project with people who can project themselves, so this exploration workshop allows these people to imagine themselves in the future and analyze these projections. In addition, the workshop allows them to study their willingness to get involved in an activity, even though they have not chosen to participate.
Activities
The activities of the exploration workshop are broken down into two distinct stages: a mutual presentation activity and a personal projection activity. The presentation activity allows each person (designers and participants) to get to know each other better, to stimulate interactions and to create group dynamics for the 2nd part of the workshop. According to a presentation protocol, each participant states the first name, age, city of birth, city of residence and hobbies of another participant. For the screening activity, participants imagine their appearance, the people they live with, their work, their place of life and their hobbies in 10 years.
The posture of the designer
During this workshop, the designer is responsible for the organization: he designs the workshop, sets it up and establishes instructions given to the participants. The latter did not participate in the construction and the modalities of the unfolding. Only the opinion of Maryse, the head of the MOAF, was requested. On the other hand, the team of designers took care to avoid the development of a hierarchical relationship between them and the participants. This is why the Tasse Loquace agency, made up of Salsabîl, Clémence and me, participated in the mutual presentation activity and produced examples for the projection activity. Each actor was listened to and helped during the various activities. During the screening stage, the participants had a certain capacity for action since they could choose their way of answering the questions of the protocol, between drawing, collage and writing.
Course of the session
Before this exploration workshop, an immersion phase is set up, lasting one month, for five hours of MOAF studies. This step allows you to know the audience approached, that is to say the class with the best level of French. This immersion also allowed acculturation, by making us know the functioning of this public anchored in a school environment. It also allows participants to better understand our posture as designers, which differs from that of other stakeholders they encounter in their training. These first exchanges remain unequivocal and not very interactive: these people answer the questions without initiating a dialogue.
The exploration workshop lasts four hours and is divided into two two-hour sessions. It takes place in four parts: a presentation of each actor in the project, a presentation of the workshop, its realization and then the presentation of the participants’ productions.
Workshop photographs
Workshop photographs
Equipment
A fabric pouch has been designed for the participant presentation stage. It was intended to contain the first names of each. For the projection stage, a number of tools were available to users of the activity, intended to help them express themselves graphically to achieve their portrait by answering the questions in the protocol. There were stamps with pictograms depicting activities, stencils of parts of the world, normographs with landscape and weather elements, organic and geometric paper shapes, silhouettes of humans, comic speech bubbles , scissors, glue and pens. With these tools, they worked on an A3 sheet presenting a non-gendered silhouette and a horizon line. They could draw on the projection examples of the members of Tasse talkative.
Workshop materials
The documentation of the immersion and the workshop
The immersion phase was documented by note taking. The exploration workshop was documented by photographs of participants in action and their accomplishments, as well as recordings of mutual presentations and individual explanations of each projection. The collection of this different information constitutes a set of data to analyze, then to invest in the writing of the thesis.
Photographs of the participants
Participants’ achievements