For the second time this year, I’ve had the wonderful opportunity to work with Studio Messa to develop a project brief for Bachelor of Design students in the Integrated Project course. Previously run in the Summer Term 2-week intensive format, students in Term 2 approached this interdisciplinary brief over 11 weeks.
As an experiential design agency, Studio Messa is a great fit for Design students who have developed individual praxis and specialisation over the past 2 years or so in their degrees. The Integrated Project course is often the first chance they have to come together in teams, where a range of skills and interests is leveraged to create ambitious and interdisciplinary work.
Studio Messa Director, Peter Pengly and Creative Director, Kate Blank have been truly generous with their time and offered students some amazing insights into the realities of the industry. Peter and Kate gave students the following brief, with the timely challenge of also responding to Covid-19 limitations:
Establish a social or cultural issue that you would like to explore and create an immersive experience to convey key messages on that issue to at least 50 people. The experience should be brought to life through the lens of Studio Messa’s ‘A Curious Mind’ ethos, and enliven curiosity and discovery on your chosen theme with those who interact with it.
Studio Messa design brief ‘thematic’.
Students certainly ran wild with this brief. We saw educational installations to engage homeless populations with local communities; pop-up spaces to communicate the realities of coffee sustainability and farmer exploitation; guerrilla artworks to bring awareness to the impact of climate change; and large-scale celebrations of the history of Vietnamese diaspora in Australia.