Sam Jacob Studio | Desktop Design Academy

What is the Desktop Design Academy?

This, like so much else of the present moment, is an experiment. It’s an experiment in how we can have conversations about the designed world. And how we can have those conversations through acts of design.

Who is the Desktop Design Academy?

Anyone can participate! You might be a family, a child, a teenager, a design student or not a design student, a professional, someone who always fancied a go at it. You might even be a famous designer wanting to experiment and have some fun. Design is for everyone and can be by anyone too. Everyone is welcome!

How does the Desktop Design Academy work?

It’s very simple! Every week on a Monday we’ll send out – via email and social media – a short brief. This will set out the week’s exercise, and then on Friday at around 4pm GMT, we’ll get together on Zoom to share and talk about all the different things we’ve done. We’ll invite some people along to help us have a discussion, and hopefully we can learn, entertain and support each other.

We’ll try and make it so that you can show your work, or just watch if you’d prefer and hopefully record it in some way. We’ll have more details in the brief for the first exercise!

What Do you Need To Do?

These are exercises, they don’t rely on amazing skills, deep experience, or difficult techniques. They can be quick, rough ideas, made easily with whatever you might have to hand – sketches on scraps of paper, models on your dining table, whatever is to hand! There is no right or wrong, everything is ok and allowed! You might spend 5 minutes, 5 hours, 5 days – whatever you want to do! 

Why is the Desktop Design Academy?

For now, at least, the studio, the office, the academy have all decamped to the home. The professional world is now mixed up with bath time and bedtime stories. Can we take advantage of this moment? After all, the traditional distinctions between work and play, between colleagues and family, public and private were only ever arbitrary ideological ideas. If design is about the creation of the worlds we inhabit, then maybe our current unusual context is a good place to think about certain kinds of things?