BUILD ME! The PIER of TeamLabs.
BUILD ME is a collaborative work system, a compilation of co-design strategies, a rapid-response work-group to pursue a common purpose… but above all BUILD ME! is an attitude to take up the challenge of building collectively a unique and unrepeatable object, a singular process.
MAKER ATTITUDE
TeamLabs follows the Learning by Doing working philosophy, they’re based on the idea of creating collaborative and cooperative environments as a way to generate ecosystems for creative personal development. The hybridization of this attitude with maker methodologies, in order to self-construct an object, enhances an idea of designing processes linked to object making; it permits to experience both the frustration and the excitement generated when undertaking no matter what process of building using one’s own hands.
COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT
TeamLabs operates as a community manager at different scales. Similarly BUILD ME! is an experiment of putting together singular groups that are bound to design and build one part of a collective bench. This system would be a reflect of the Team Companies at TeamLabs, working together to conform a common object, a large piece of furniture that becomes the place to meet and interchange and that is located in one of the patios of the school.
ROTATION OF ROLES
Similarly to the way in which TeamLabs works with the idea of experts-amateurs and a continuous rotation of roles as the only way to achieve the long-awaited decentralized specialization; in BUILD ME! as in any other self-construction process, roles go from design to construction tasks and the other way round, a swinging process of “specific situations” that require continuous self-organization of the group based on the fuzzy capabilities of each of its members.
THE COMMONS AS A UNIQUE PLACE
TeamLabs philosophy unveils a quest for extraordinary projects lead by ordinary people. BUILD ME! on the other hand, functions as a sum of singularities based on common work systems in a quest for a common object that is built as an unique and unrepeatable place. Singularities that build common objects, places to share.
ETHICS IS AESTHETICS
TeamLabs doesn’t only work with cooperative values, within the inner structures of their Team Companies, but also with social, cultural and ecological values associated to the products and services that they offer. Ethics is Aesthetics. The great surprise in the workshop has been the appropriation made by this common object, according to co-design developed with leinners, of aesthetics which are not associated with self-construction; an inverted counterattack, an usurpation made by “formal” constructions of aesthetics associated to auto-construction processes trying to highlight their ethics but only as a varnish, an action devoid of reflections associated to design and construction process.
