Dylan & I are collaborating with Christa & Nin from Cafe Weekend on a new "arm" of JOIN design Seattle. It will provide a series of spontaneous and fun design events made to stimulate, inspire, and unite the Seattle design community. We're calling it Brite Collective.
Our first event, a charrette where small teams will create lamp designs from existing objects, will take place this coming Saturday at the Hiawatha Lofts in Seattle.

Here's a little preview from a trial run we did together couple Saturdays ago. The trial run was to help us go through the process in order to figure out the details when we host the actual event...it was a TRIAL....it's not us cheating! WE PROMISE YOU!
The challenge:
Design a lamp shade with pre-existing object as a team. Shop at Goodwill thrift store together and spend no more than $15 total for materials. Incorporate the color yellow.
Make a lamp in 3 hours.
The process: Went to Goodwill to scavenger hunt. Got some inspiration for forms and materials.We gathered everything and had it out on a table to narrow down our choice. In the mist of all this, random people were looking over our shoulders, and some people actually picked up the things we had and was going to take it! I had to tell them to back off! See that lady on the left?...yeah..can't trust her. She was probably thinking of taking some stuff when we weren't looking! :P Beware...people at Goodwill are very aggressive...I guess its survival of the fittest..or something like that. After spending 1.5 hours at the Goodwill and discussing what we liked and what we can do with each object, we ended up with these items that came to a total of $11.70. Roll of yellow stickers, 2 bags yellow basket stuffing, yellow jar beater, manila dividers, wire basket, and a tennis frame protector. We all liked the tennis frame since we all thought it looked like a 2D lamp shape. But somehow we convinced ourselves to make a paper mache lamp shade that would mold around the form of a light bulb...big mistake. We started doing that and by that point we were already at 3 hours! At that point, we weren't even close to being done....so we FAILED....We didn't make it in the time line we made for ourselves...But we decided to just continue on, re-think, simplify, and finished the lamp despite our failure! We picked up the manila dividers and thought to just make that a lamp shade and clamp it in between the tennis frame. We played around folding and cutting the paper in various shapes.
So after two more hours of iterating....Voila! We made a simple light sconce made with only the tennis frame and one sheet of manila divider.
In conclusion: It was fun brainstorming and designing together, since we were able to inspire each other and explore new directions that we wouldn't do normally. And it was good that we did the trial run since when we do the REAL event, we won't want to keep everyone hostage for that long. :P

If you're interested in subjecting yourself to this kind of fun challenge email info@cafeweekend.com by Wednesday May 13th for more details on attending.