‘Notions of The Notebook’ was the second workshop by Mikebrain.xyz. It was a space to share and exchange processes for keeping notebooks, sketchbooks, and journals. Every student has a unique process.
Throughout the rest of this post ‘notebook’ will be used as an all-encompassing term for notebooks, sketchbooks, journals, or anything with physical pages that you can write in.
In the workshop, students were asked to think about their ‘notion of the notebook’ in other words, what is a short and concise way you would describe how a notebook can be benefitial.
Three-part structure of the workshop:
Meet: Students take a survey that asks about their relationship with notebooks.
Learn: Brief presentation by two students and the introduction to the idea of the ‘notion.’
Share & Exchange: Students are given three rounds of discussion with their peers to discuss their unique processes.
Findings & Observations:
The Meet survey revealed that of the 17 participants 12 strongly agreed and 3 agreed with the statement that keeping a notebook had a positive impact on their personal wellbeing.
When asked whether keeping a notebook had proven benefitial to participants skill enhancement, of the 17 participants 10 strongly agreed and 5 agreed.
The Learn portion of the workshop introduced the idea of a ‘notion.’ This was defined in documents given out to participants as “concepts or skills that someone has developed as a result of keeping a notebook.”
Two presentations were given during this portion of the workshop. These presentations helped explain how participants could discover their own notions.
Architecture student Alex Barney as well as Interior and Enviornmental Design student Ana Burwell both gave a presentation where they shared their notebooks and process to the entire group.
Ana’s Notion: Notebooks as enrichment of the design process.
Alex’s Notion: No precious pages
For the Share & Exchange portion of the workshop students were given a document to reflect on three rounds of discussions they had with various peers at the workshop.
After combing through 17 reflection documents, 83 notes related to skill enhancement and 40 notes related to emotional well-being.
Conclusions:
After the workshop a feedback survey was sent out to participants.
Students had positive things to say. “The sharing aspect from each individual was important across all people. No individual’s ideas felt obsolete.” Other participants wrote about other benefitial aspects of the workshop such as the “discussions and the forced rotation” as well as “seeing other peoples work, and hearing different perspectives.”
In regards to what could be improved for future workshops, one participant wrote, “opening activity to get everyone on an equal playing field. Everyone should have something to show/share once we get to the discussion portion of the workshop. Even if you didn’t bring a notebook you should have had an opportunity in the beginning of the workshop to create something shareable.”
Front page of document given to participants:
In documentation you may notice that this event is listed as 1/3 and not 2/4, and this is because the first mending workshop was considered a pilot study and doesn’t follow the structure of the three workshops that follow.
Some responses from the reflections document:
Photo of Ana’s presentation. Notion: Notebooks as enrichment of the design process.