This spring my friend and inspiration Ayse Birsel invited me to co-teach her class for the first year students in the Products of Design masters program at the School of the Visual Arts (SVA) in New York.
The backstory
Ayse published her newest book in December of 2022 and having read the pre-release version I decided to surprise her with a launch party gift.
It turns out that in the book she shared how I like to make super hero action figures of people I love or that inspire me. She noted that, even though I’ve known and collaborated with her for quite a long time, I had never made a super hero action figure of her.
So I enlisted her family and friends to help me build an Ayse Super Hero.
> Hi!
- I have one story about my mom when she was a kid.
- One day on her way to her grandma’s house she came upon a butterfly. She started to follow the butterfly instead of continuing her way to her grandma’s. In the end though, she went back on her way. It’s a very simple and short story but it is her favorite story about herself when she was younger. She feels that it shows her true character.
> > I know that she had a hard time at school because her teachers didn’t like how creative and different she was so they tried to stop her from flourishing.
Hmm, her book is about designing a long life, so somehow that should be a key theme. How long of a life could she mean? What would it be like if she lived a really long life? The sketching and exploration of family origin stories, her own backstory as a designer and creative rockstar, and playing with some of the classic elements of any great super hero began.
It stands to reason that she’d still be exploring and teaching how to live a long life a thousand years from now, so what sort of venue would still be around? I know what you’re thinking, she could be teaching her workshop deep in a mountain on the stage of the 10,000 year clock built way back in the 21st century by the Long Now Foundation.
Naturally in a thousand years we’d likely have all sorts of beings that we consider people who might want to learn how to design their long life. I knew that I’d likely be there in the crowd, though by then I intended to be a colony of bacteria or maybe spend time as an archaea. Other friends we know decided they’d spend some time as Baobab trees. At least a few of our cephalopod friends, who had finally gotten past their 3-5 year lifespan with a bit of help from their local synbio community, would attend as well.
Things were starting to come together.
Family members suggested elements of her origin story and close friends shared personal stories of how Ayse had changed their lives.
Not surprisingly a thousand years from now Ayse Birsel 03023 has all sorts of new super powers like programmable tattoos and Unobtanium powered flying slippers.
She is now a part of the pantheon of super heroes!
The super hero was finished with a few minutes to spare and became our special gift to Ayse during her book launch.
Ok, back to the SVA class.
Ayse was an inaugural professor a decade ago when the SVA first created their products of design masters program. Given her evolving insights and the research she did for her new book and inspired by the super hero she just received she thought it would be a good idea to reboot class. She sent me a quick sketch with her initial idea and we bounced approaches back and forth to map out how we could co-teach the class.
It was really important to make sure the students had a portfolio worthy outcome and work together in class to inspire and help each other. Over the seven weeks of the course I tuned in remotely to teach, share ideas and get them ready for the journey. We decided we’d create two double classes that would be hands-on workshop/studios and a chance to share their outcomes with a special collection of guests.
Each student had to spend time exploring their superpowers, their origin story, their kryptonite, the villain or challenge they woke up each day to take on, and the sorts of team mates they’d need to fill in their blindspots to succeed.
They also had to pick three people in their lives that could share fun, honest, stories, pictures, and anecdotes about what made them a superhero and what got in their way. The students learned about how to conduct a good design research interview and each one took on interviewing someone else’s top three picks so they could help each other on their missions.
And of course they started to build their action figure. Each student learned how to 3D scan and print out their own head, found an appropriate initial barbie or ken or other action figure to use as a base and during our hands-on workshop we all begin the build.
I brought in some past examples (below are Bonin Bough’s from 2011 and Paul Benny’s from 2018) to give the students a chance to be detectives and look for hidden easter eggs and tricks that I and my fellow super hero creators have come up with over the last decade or two.
As the students worked they created a community library of parts that others could use, and began shaping their final product (in some cases adding in other student superheroes to their origin stories or to offset their kryptonite or just to have a bit of fun.)
As the clock counted down students who had finished early jumped in to help the other ones who had taken on more than they could handle. Finally as our guests began to arrive, each student prepared to tell their story.
It’s rare that you are given a chance to explore what makes you, you. To be assigned a project that lets you focus on your own potential and challenges in a playful way. As the students presented their origin stories there were times that it was hard to hold back tears, hard not to laugh out loud at some playful observation they made about themselves and their journey.
Ayse’s methods of deconstructing ourselves, reimagining how are parts and pieces all fit back together again, and then reconstructing ourselves to design the life we love gave each of the students (and the two of us as well) a new set of tools to embrace what comes next.