Product Archives - Birmingham Design Festival

Introduction to puppet making

Daniel Alcorn — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 08:38:12 +0000

Learn how to make a puppet, exploring basic puppet making techniques with wire, wool, foam, and foam clay. You could make a mini you?! Then go to town embellishing your puppets using a variety of materials such as pipe cleaners, sequins, feathers, jewels, crepe paper, ribbons…let your imagination run wild!

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BSoAD Graduate Showcase

Daniel Alcorn — Wed, 29 May 2024 20:48:34 +0000

Please come join the Birmingham School of Architecture and Design for a special opportunity to get the first look at the new talent emerging from the school this year and see how their wide range of interesting and innovative projects have responded to the school’s vision of the urgent need for sustainable and inclusive futures across the scales, celebrating creativity through making, drawing, and bold ideas.

See a thrilling range of digital and crafted artefacts and meet some our talented 2024 graduates and staff. Gain insight into their curious perspectives on the future and explore how we tackle contemporary environmental and social challenges through design in the School.

Tours of our Graduate Showcase, on the 4th floor of the Parkside Building, will take place at 11:30, 13:00 & 15:30 on Saturday 8th of June, as drop in sessions.

A staff member from BSoAD will be at the table in Steamhouse just before each tour to help guide you over to exhibition on the 4th floor of Parkside.

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STEAMHouse Tour & Info Session

Daniel Alcorn — Sun, 19 May 2024 20:02:15 +0000

Come and join us for a tour of the STEAMhouse building, find out about our unique facilities, membership offers, and funded opportunities.

STEAMhouse is a place where designers, creatives and innovators all come together to do their best work.

We will guide you around our business incubator and co-working spaces, our artist studios and production space facility, as well as our creative digital labs. We will talk you through the different opportunities to get involved and you can chat to our friendly team about your needs.

Want to see what STEAMhouse is all about? Join us for a tour of the amazing STEAMhouse facilities and community, so we can help you innovate.

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Relief from Pressure

Daniel Alcorn — Sun, 19 May 2024 19:54:04 +0000

Come and experience a taste of what the STEAMhouse production space has to offer. Greg, our Senior Metal Technician, will facilitate a process driven making session, in which participants are invited to push paper against plastic, to produce ‘blind’ embossed Etegami (Japanese gift cards). We will also progress to doing the same with thin copper sheet. The activity is intended to occupy, engage and encourage people to consider the tactile and directly engage with stuff in a safe and non – judgmental making space.

Open to all capabilities, for 18 years+.

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Biophilic Space Design Workshop: Designing with Nature

Daniel Alcorn — Thu, 09 May 2024 21:30:42 +0000

Are you passionate about sustainable design and eager to craft climate-conscious spaces?

Then join us for an immersive workshop where we’ll delve into the intersection of sustainability and interior design, with a specific focus on biophilic design principles.

In this hands-on session, you will develop a physical biophilic interior design mood board, showcasing your creative vision while integrating sustainable principles.

The flow of the event:

An introduction to eco-friendly interior design
Crafting your biophilic mood board
Q&A session: Alicia will answer any climate design questions

About your hosts:

This workshop is Led by Alicia Storie, a multi-award-winning sustainable interior designer, the founder of AdesignStorie, and the UK chapter lead of Climate Designers. Alicia’s work focuses on harnessing the power of design in the climate crisis.

You will leave with a biophilic design mood board that can be used as a blueprint for your next conscious renovation project.

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The Importance of Process within Fine Art

Daniel Alcorn — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 21:20:37 +0000

A lover of craft, artist Imogen takes a craft-based material, thread, and plays with it in ways that means it can sit confidently within fine art spaces.

Imogen’s practice explores a lot of craft-based values. The process being one of them. It is important to her, that the final piece shows the viewer the craftmanship, time and process that has gone into the making of her work.

Imogen will talk about the importance of process within her art practice, and how it consistently features throughout her art.

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Hack-A-Bench: Fostering Community Collaboration in Public Space Design

Daniel Alcorn — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 08:43:20 +0000

In bustling cities worldwide, urban planners and designers continually strive to enhance public spaces, often with mixed results and underutilized resources.

Hack-A-Bench is an initiative aimed at redefining the approach to public facility design with a touch of humility and community spirit. Instead of imposing just top-down solutions, this project embraces the collective wisdom of citizens.

Hack-A-Bench invites communities to creatively modify existing benches, fostering a sense of ownership and empowerment. The result? A collection of 10 uniquely crafted, ergonomic benches, a testament to the power of community-driven design.

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Feed: Designing public breastfeeding

Daniel Alcorn — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 08:43:20 +0000

Curator Elaine Speight and graphic designer Vicky Carr will discuss the role of design in shaping attitudes towards breastfeeding in public. Describing the processes involved in creating a public, multimedia feeding chair (available to experience at Ikon gallery during the festival), as part of their project ‘Feed’, they will explore how breastfeeding debates connect to wider issues of visibility, (dis)comfort and whose bodies have the right to take up space.

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Designing distinctive brand experiences

Daniel Alcorn — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 08:43:20 +0000

In this talk, Margarita will guide us through the creative process involved in designing branded environments in retail, pop up activations, and office space. She will share valuable insights into each stage of the process, starting from the core creative concept and progressing through sketches, material selection, and the decision-making that shapes the final design. An in-depth look into building a distinct and memorable brand experiences.

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Emotional Intelligence

Daniel Alcorn — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 08:43:19 +0000

“Like the glass I have pushed my approach in how I work with glass and ceramics in both traditional and experimental methods, to create contemporary artworks that represent my passion for this part of our history. As a black glassblower, I am one of few and on a quest to find and inspire more. My main purpose, however, is to engage the audience on issues that are hard to confront on many levels, using art to help overcome some of the traumas that haunt our collective past.”

Combining materials used in both heating and electrical systems into his creations, Day finds he able to create the perfect marriage of his artistic path and technical knowledge, both of which rely on dexterity and high levels of skill and craftsmanship. He creates highly personal works in glass and mixed media and his intention is to discuss and investigate the treatment of black people in Britain & the USA, with much of his research focussing on the history of the slave trade in the Eighteenth Century and the events leading to up & during the Civil Rights Movement.

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