DIY Kyoto worksop @ D&AD

While temperatures reached a scorching 75°f in London on Saturday, a group of students chose to stay indoors to take part in DIY Kyoto's workshop at the D&AD Newblood festival.

The afternoon workshop was held in the Wieden & Kennedy studio and presented by Greta Corke, one third of the innovative DIY Kyoto collective.

DIY Kyoto create beautifully designed products which help people understand and control their personal impact on the environment. Their Wattson energy monitor is a sleek, revolutionary piece of home equipment which calculates your energy consumption and how much it will cost in a year.

Specialising in interactive non-verbal communication, Greta guided the group of students through an afternoon designed to develop their capacity to build on an idea. Usually accustomed to presenting in front of blue-chip clients, Greta took the time to facilitate the workshop which aimed to answer the question: does being a designer mean being a marketer?

Encouraged to be as literal or imaginative as they like, the participants picked an 'everyday problem' out of a hat before breaking off into groups to interpret the problem and develop as many solutions as possible.

With problems including 'how can I ride faster on my bike?' 'How can I produce less waste?' and 'I love to travel but am afraid of being far away from home' the group were able to imagine a range of rather off-the-wall services and products as solutions.

Following several brainstorming sessions, presentations and group discussions, each team or individual had to develop where, how and why you would use the product, identify the client and where they would be made aware of the idea.

Final presentations afforded a variety of brilliant and original ideas including: a bicycle which changes colour depending on your speed, a device which converts wasted emotions into energy and bottled scents of home for the homesick traveller.

So what did the participants think of the experience?

"Greta's approach gave us the chance to use our initiative and work on our promotional skills," says University of Westminster MA Design for Communication student Asli Özpehlivan. "The challenges she set for us were fun and were a great way to exercise our problem solving skills. The workshop also offered the opportunity to meet with new people from similar fields and different backgrounds."

The real highlight of the workshop came from witnessing the participants being liberated into identifying and conveying their own personal motivation behind an idea - without which those all important 'lightbulb moments' would remain as nothing more.