onizou idea nomads - bishkek workshop - gerhard seizer & klara sibeck — 'IDEA NOMADS in Kyrgyzstan' by Alexey Lysogorov

2009/JUN/27-28 BISHKEK WORKSHOP

KYRGYZOU

Bishkek took us by surprise. Nowhere else have we found such a cool crowd of creative people. Just one problem: they all complain there’s nowhere to learn HOW to design. As most of them are freelancers, they work alone and might not have a strict design process. Ok, we had a mission: bring design process to Bishkek. Talking won’t get us far – let’s actually DO the design process. In 24 hours. Crazy, you say? Well, take a look at the results and think again!

Alright, there was some talking too. Lots of it, actually. We started with showing some examples of our design process and how our past projects were carried out. Then, we finally got to business.

We needed a task – a broad, non-commercial task with Kyrgyz characteristics, and a task which everyone could work on no matter what their design discipline is. The group came up with a perfect one: promote lake Issyk-Kul, the pride of Kyrgyzstan. Never heard of the place? Yeah, we know – that’s why it needs to be promoted. Issyk-Kul is the second largest high-altitude lake in the world. The largest one is slightly more famous; you might have heard of Titicaca… but who needs Titicaca when you have Issyk-Kul. It is blue, clear, clean, and surrounded by 4000 meter high snowy mountains. Altogether a blessed place – believe us, we’ve been there.

The work started. What is special about Issyk-Kul? Who are the tourists we want to attract? Everyone worked together and came up with 5 concepts on how to focus the promotion. After discussion, we selected two of the themes: Lake Issyk-Kul as the source of all oceans (yep, it’s salty) and as the center of the center of Central Asia (because that’s just where it is!). Time for design. In less than an hour, the designers came up with three ideas of their own on how to communicate these concepts to their audience. And the most energetic people in the crowd (great job guys!) spend some of their precious time executing their concepts before our next session. That’s the work you see on the bottom of this page. "It’s not serious. You can’t do design in one day", said someone when presenting his work. Maybe not, but we still think it was an exciting opportunity for the younger designers to join the more experienced ones working in a creative process. And judging from the feedback we got, everyone thought it was great meeting other designers. Sometimes it takes an outsider to bring people together… but maybe this can be the start of more meetings? Kyrgyzstan, we’ll be back! Until then – keep up the good spirit in Bishkek.