Documenting your MEDS project during the workshop

From MEDS Wiki

Documenting your beautiful MEDS workshop projects

It’s extremely important to document your project concisely not only for you and your teams benefit but also for the benefit of MEDS. As designers and architects, documenting our work is a very important part of our work and should be promoted as a positive task alongside the workshop! We’ve seen from past MEDS that documenting your work can really pay off and result in your project being published in reputable articles and journals.


BE SELECTIVE IN WHAT YOU CHOOSE, QUALITY OVER QUANTITY.

A project can be better explained in 20-30 photos than 80+ photographs.


What to include: As you will see in the google drive there are a range of files that you should fill with your content. They include the following files:


1) Team photo – It’s important to credit the people involved, team photos also are a great opportunity for your team to have some fun together and also allow the great world of MEDS to see how many people were involved in the project. One suggestion would be to take a photo on the first day and the last day with the finished project. Alongside the team photo, remember to include the names of all the participants and their countries.


2) Text- Text will usually come from the presentation that the tutors have given for their project, but it can also develop alongside the project. Having a written description of the project can help the team remember the concept and aim of the project. The text is a vital part of the social media posts as they explain in a short amount of sentences what the project is.

Within text there are two categories: Social media, abstract and article.Social media refers to short snappy sentences that capture the essence of your project, they should be between 25-35 words. Abstract refers to shorts pieces of text that are between 200-250 words, and article refers to pieces of text that are between 500-800 words, but preferably stay closer to 500!


3) Process photos- without process photos we won’t understand how the project was made, and after all, all the projects are made by people with a wide set of skill sets, all using a variety of tools. The process photos are also broken into a range of files. The range of files will differ from project to project, it is up to the tutors and the team to decide what aspects of their projects process they feel is important. Here are some examples:

Group discussions

Rough work

Mood boards

Sketches the participants have done

Project progress

Construction: in workshop space and on site


4) Technical documents- Tutors often produce renders, conceptual diagrams, technical drawings and videos of their projects. Particularly in publications and media posts it’s nice to have a break from photographs, these form of documents also allow for a more round understanding of the project.


5) Final project photos- The ones you love for your own personal Instagram and the ones you show your parents, the final, completed project photos! Sadly we can’t bring our projects home with us, so these photos are important to remember what we achieved in 2 weeks. Capture the angles you feel best explain your project, get overviews of the project in its context and get up close and personal with the details that hold it all together.


To reiterate, documenting is an important part of your project and should be an enjoyable task for the whole team to in some way get involved in. Remember, quality over quantity!

Below is a link to a Google Drive template

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1YUsutlgObgNePGNl8cw0XzHYkCHeJHV1