Design Process I: Workshop with Joseph Popper
How can audiovisual work become a tool for reflection? In this course led by designer and filmmaker Joseph Popper, students explored ways of presenting their design thinking on screen. Focusing on the video essay as a form of videographic research, the course invited participants to foreground their own voices—subjective, exploratory, and open-ended.
Through a series of hands-on exercises in montage, students developed personal vocabularies for combining image, sound, and text. This practice of “thinking through montage” became a method for articulating and communicating critical positions throughout the design process.
Each student produced a video or audiovisual essay exploring a place of personal or conceptual interest. These places—real, remembered, imagined, or impossible—became sites for investigation, framed relationally rather than geographically. With reference to theoretical inputs, students asked critical questions of their chosen places, exposing contradictions, assembling fragmented narratives, and building complexity through juxtaposition.
The final works, screened at the end of the course, reflected diverse and often poetic approaches to research through moving image—amplifying student voices in both content and form.