Designerly Ways of Seeing

São Paulo, Brazil

MDes C4 partnered with Instituto Acaia, an arts-based K through 6th grade school to develop and implement an 8-day workshop series with their 5th and 6th-grade students and teachers. We used these workshops as a vehicle to help us learn about Acaia’s teaching philosophy and school culture alongside the students themselves. The series of activities were used as tools to facilitate observation and discovery of their everyday environments through different perspectives; we captured top-down views through drone cameras attached to kites and ground-up views by placing the same cameras on their feet, and then documented all of these activities through a series of videos we made with the students. The activities were also means for all of us to get to know one another and to share the different methods and tools designers may use to observe and make sense of the world around them.