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DESIGN GO WEST Design West is an international su
mmer design school located in the beautiful village of Letterfrack in Connemara. Conor Clarke, Founder and Course Leader of Design West and a Director of Design Factory, explains the origins and realisation of the concept. words Richard Seabrooke – Where did the idea for Design West come from? The idea for an international design summer school started forming during my time as Acting Head of Visual Communication at NCAD. I was always interested in taking design education beyond the college walls and connecting with the wider community. We did a lot of design gigs and workshops around the city during those years with people like Hamish Muir, Max Kisman, Russell Mills, and I always enjoyed that mix of students, educators and professional designers meeting to discuss work and have a bit of fun, usually continuing on to the pub for more banter and refreshments. One of my colleagues at NCAD, Kate Brangan, suggested I read The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College, which I duly did. It was a gripping story – in 1933, Black Mountain College, an unaccredited art and design school, based in the small town of Black Mountain, North Carolina, USA, became a vital hub of cultural innovation. Practically every major artistic figure of the mid-20th century taught there: Josef and Anni Albers, Walter Gropius, John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, Alan Ginsberg… the list goes on. The Black Mountain College concept fascinated me, and I got hooked on the idea of getting a group of critically acclaimed international designers and students together in a remote Irish location. After a lot of searching, and a series of happy coincidences, I ended up in the village of Letterfrack in Connemara, a beautiful, remote location, that just happened to have a brilliant studio and workshop facilities. Perfect. It even had its own mountain, Diamond Hill, overlooking the stunning GMIT campus, which is the National Centre of Excellence for Furniture Design and Wood Technology, designed by O’Donnell + Tuomey Architects. – How long did it take from that initial thought to actually opening the doors? It took two years, initially collaborating closely with Dermot O’Donovan, Head of Department at GMIT Letterfrack. – What was your guiding vision for the school? A number of things inspired the vision. Last year I was invited by artist Martin Wright to create a visual identity for ‘Building 98’ in Marfa, a project of the International Woman’s Foundation, which has operated an artist-inresidency programme since 2002. Marfa is a small desert city in west Texas, USA which is known as an arts hub. Again, it is an example of a vibrant creative community in a remote location. The Chinati Foundation, founded by artist Donald Judd (1928-94), displays his huge indoor and outdoor installations there. It’s a very cool place and it’s very remote. They have a saying: ‘Marfa. Tough to get there. Tougher to explain. But once you get there, you get it.’ I feel the same way about the Connemara landscape where we are holding the Design West Summer School. You’ve got to go there to really understand what an amazing landscape it is. During the same period, I read The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald which got me interested in the idea of ‘walking as research’. It deals with themes that interest me – time, memory, identity – and was a big influence on the concepts and ideas behind Design West. And, of course, the Black Mountain College experiment was definitely an inspiration – education in a remote communal setting, where traditional hierarchies between faculty and students were blurred. The school had no grades and no tests, with the emphasis on creativity and experimentation. Our guiding vision at Design West is to create an environment where we can get back to the reasons we became designers in the first place, experimentation and play – away from the pressures of deadlines and 24-hour connectivity – and have ‘time to make’. – If you had to write three rules you would like people to live and work by during the school what would they be? We don’t have any rules, but our guiding principles would be ‘Work, Learn & Play’. We encourage participants to step out of their 16