WUP - Product Design | Foundation Course

The 1st semester, the so-called »WUP« or Warm-Up Semester is an interdisciplinary design foundation course. The WUP semester for the Major in Design is divided into two teaching modules: »Product Design« and »Visual Communication«.

WUP-PD:
Variations and path: these are the keywords of the course, thought as a collection of tools, experiences, and experimentations, errors are included and welcomed, useful to start handling design with the caution due to a discipline with rules, methods, history and processes.

Variations understood as design acts, based on self-criticism, useful to investigate the possible solutions of a problem; path understood as the preeminence of the method over the result because, as Pausania said in the Symposium, an act is not in itself, neither beautiful nor ugly, but is such in its fulfillment.

Three workshops cover the disciplinary horizon with different but complementary approaches and methods.

“Let’s do it” is getting your hands dirty: measuring, drawing, cutting, engraving, bending, making mistakes, trying again, simplifying, setting; it is understanding forms, spatiality, materials and structures through manual experience.

Abecedario: is dedicated to knowledge, culture, theory, essential components in the melting pot of a good project. Born as an introduction to design and related disciplines, it sometimes contaminates other workshops stimulating curiosity and changing points of view.

“No score”: two simple design experiences with a common goal: the irrelevance of the result in favour of the path and variations. The ping pong racket is the object to observe first, and then vary in shapes, scenarios, elements, functions, materials. The ping pong table is a dilated functional space to be searched, investigated, analysed; its “optional” is the essential result, but the real Score are the intermediate steps to get there.

The outcome are models of fruit and vegetables, primitive rackets, drawings inspired by the artistic currents of the 20th century, archetypes, cars and hooks, analysis of case studies, technical drawings, research, brainstorming, mock-up’s in different materials, reliefs, lectures connecting the Greek temple in Behrens to Swatch; dynamic experiences, which sometimes merge together generating cross-contaminations and cross-checks.

WUP Project Assistants – Product Design
the 1st-semester students of the Foundation Design Course WUP-PD were tutored by:

Ada Keller
insalata-mista.com

Matthias Pötz
insalata-mista.com