Student VMH projects for 2020 are due Mid June!

Each year, I get quite excited about the VMH project because of the imminent arrival of student’s final prototypes for their VMH projects.

This is due to a number of reasons.

First, I’ve seen the ideas for many of the groups and know there are some really interesting new ideas for this year. Public art, food trucks, games for children to build climate responsibility. Ideas that have not been explored before.

Second, because we have a number of psychologists involved in the project and providing advice to student groups, I have not seen all the projects yet, so I get to be surprised when they land.

Third, design students are kinda like all students in that there is a flurry of work and productivity in the week leading up to submission, and I know from previous years that the prototypes improve markedly in this period. So, some of the ideas that are currently ‘great’ will become ‘awesome’.

I mentioned in a previous post that the students, lecturers and advising psychologists have all had to interact via Zoom, because of Coronavirus social distancing requirements.

This system has worked quite well. Sure, there were some sessions where it was clear that everyone had Zoom fatigue but the possibilities of digital communication (regular, shorter meetings, with digital assets easily shared) made for a compelling argument that such an approach should be used in a blended way with face-to-face meetings when those are allowed again.

And the digital possibilities don’t stop there either.

I met with the VMH organising group last week and we discussed the possibility of a digital exhibition this year as a complement to our standard exhibition at the Kerry Packer Gallery.

We like to innovate on at least 1 aspect of this project each year, and the idea of a digital exhibition looks like a real possibility as being our innovation for 2020. A fitting innovation I think, given how much the world had to go digital with COVID-19.

Anyway, enough from me. I’ll be back on here soon with some sneak peaks of the projects for 2020.