Workshop “TO SAVE OR NOT TO SAVE? A practical guide to the designer archive”

As a designer, you constantly explore ways to generate innovative ideas or to enhance the quality of your designs. But the design process does not only result in a finished project. The process as a whole produces different kinds of output like sketches, drawings, mock-ups, prototypes and less arty material: correspondence with clients and manufacturers, product specifications, contracts etc.

Probably you'll want to keep all these things. (Or maybe not?) Perhaps you hold on to the material just to keep it, or maybe you have very explicit reasons to keep an archive of your design practice. You can maintain an archive as inspiration for new projects, or to make use of it in references, publications or exhibitions about your work. An archive is also very useful to prove your intellectual property on a design.

A professional archive clearly has many advantages, but also presents some challenges: Do you still find all the documents you need in the archive? Are you running out of space, perhaps? Do you have a clear idea about what to save and what not? Is your material stored in a way that it will survive the test of time? And did you think about archiving in the digital age and the danger of digital obsoletion?

In this workshop presented by the Flanders Architecture Institute, you'll learn some practical approaches to organize an analogue and digital archive for your design practice. We'll show you how you can safely package and store your material, methods to make your archive searchable and the basic concepts that will help you to keep the growth of your archive under control.