Gianluca Monaco esc

Intro

In 2020, the pandemic drove schools and universities online, prompting Abadir to invite me and two fellow designers to develop workshops introducing high school students to the world of design.
Rather than focusing on ideating single activities, we felt the urge to propose a system that would allow Abadir to create an unlimited number of activities. To pursue our goal, we developed an infrastructure, a method and two workshops.

• Infrastructure: A virtual environment built around Discord, chosen for its flexibility in roles, channels, and bots, making it ideal for managing online activities.

• Method: A guide for designing workshops that considers participant numbers, tools, and materials, minimizing friction while systematically archiving activities for future use.

• Workshops: Two prototypes, including The Internet of Gestures, which I developed to challenge preconceptions about design.

Workshop

This workshop, called The Internet of Gestures, breaks design stereotypes by focusing on accessible tools: the human body, internet culture, and online challenges. Over 4–5 days, students tackle daily prompts inspired by digital life (e.g., slow Wi-Fi), translating them into gestures captured in short videos—without using audio, text, or effects.
By emphasizing simple, relatable tasks, the workshop redefines design as a creative process open to everyone, not just those with traditional artistic skills.

Lessons Learned

• Evaluation
  If you give the right motivation, there’s no need to threaten the students with marks. Quantitative evaluation could reveal inequality and cause anxiety. I was happy to see that the participants tended naturally to a collective form of evaluation, by observing and comparing their work with the other participants.

• Progression
  Running an online activity presents a high risk of leaving someone behind. To avoid ending up with two participants on day 3, start with easy tasks and increase complexity gradually. Videogames are the best example of this approach.

• Fragmentation
  Split one big task into smaller ones, check quickly and more often. Fragmentation works very well with the concept of progression. Distributing the activity in more days, with a lighter daily workload, lets the students to better rationalize what they’re doing and why they’re doing so.