Exclusion and Diversity

The Writing Breakfast is a joint project of teachers and students. It provides a framework for creatively addressing current political and social issues and engaging in an exchange about them. We meet five times a semester via Zoom to discuss, try out, write, design, or ask questions. Exact dates to be announced.

Our doors are open and the offer is voluntary - not only for design students! Just drop in and stay if you like it. It is also possible to join us at a later date.

REVIEW WS 2020/21

The focus at the writing breakfast in the winter semester 2020/21 was on the topic of exclusion and diversity. This topic was chosen at the request of students who had participated in the previous semester.

Reflection & Input

As a stimulus for thematic discussion, the first breakfast included input in the form of various videos dealing with clichés and stereotypes of diversity. A subsequent joint reflection on the individual understanding of diversity and reasons for exclusion gave the participants personal reference to the content.

Writing Methods – Tiny Tales

The Tiny Tale Method – also known as beer coaster stories – boils the essence of a story down to 140 characters with a plot-twist at the very end. In our case it rather was napkin stories – short and crisp for breakfast. Keywords that we collected during the previous session were used as inspiration.

Collective Writing

What will our future look like? How will we be excluded and what role will diversity play? The students dealt with different future scenarios that can lead to experiences of exclusion, for example due to age, and then edited them collectively.

Visual Essay

The Visual Essay brings imagery and writing into a new context and allows the author to critically comment on the topic: increasing diversity in media, design and politics.

OUTLOOK

In the coming semester, the Writing Breakfast will continue to provide a space to engage with political and social issues through creative writing sessions and stimulating discussions. We will continue to address the issue of diversity and how democratic design is, can be, or should be.

Are participation, process design, and inclusion pathways to diversity in design? As opposed to product design or product placement? Are there past movements and currents we can learn from?

Referring specifically to our world of goods, we will ask: What is diversity in the world of goods? We will compare this to media, fashion, and film worlds and are excited to see what conclusions we can draw for our discipline.

The outcome of the course could be a journalistic report, a podcast, or a program booklet for the coming semester, because we want to further develop the Writing Breakfast program with you and use this course as a living project to learn from and teach each other - and to hopefully initiate a relevant discourse about people, the environment, and the surrounding world.