MEDS / Meeting of Design Students
Overview:
Towards the end of my bachelors, I was overhearing about international workshops in Europe for design students. After some research and talking to a course mate who had attended one of these events, I discovered a student led charity organisation called MEDS (Meeting of Design Students). I applied the following year in 2016 and my first workshop was hosted in Bucharest, Romania. MEDS was originally dominated by architectural workshops but has increasingly diversified their projects each year, to encourage more students from different disciplines. Each participant ranks the projects they are most interested in at the start of the workshop, and I have always had the highest interest in the most ambitious projects. Ranging from building benches and swings made from 30km of string, to a large self-sustaining, floating island. I have thoroughly enjoyed my time at these workshops for the past three consecutive years, and filmed my experience through my GoPro. I wanted to be able to document the life of a participant at MEDS, and gift the video to be shared with new and potential participants of future workshops. These workshops allowed me to meet, collaborate and socialise with other students from all over the world and make long lasting relationships. To be able to work with so many different cultures and a huge range of design backgrounds, I found this to be an invaluable and rare experience.
Following my third MEDS workshop, I wanted to further the network and give a positive contribution to their infrastructure and identity. I attended my first MENC (Meeting of National Contacts) in Galway, Ireland 2018. These interim meetings allowed participants to contribute and be involved voluntarily with the five departments of MEDS and their long list of tasks. It was also an opportunity to evaluate the previous MEDS and MENCs and use these conversations for the upcoming workshops and initiatives. With my strong desire to get involved with brand design, I voiced my opinion on how we needed to create a more professional and streamlined appearance for MEDS. We needed a stronger identity amongst other workshops and clarity with the increasing number of initiatives MEDS is creating. This included our online presence, how we use social media for marketing and the range of documents we produce for each event. Branding then became a task people could help with and soon there was a team interested, who also decided to nominate me as the ‘Chief of Branding’ for the MEDS Network. Since the end of MENC, we have been finalising the pictorial mark of MEDS and the next workshop in Greece. We have had several video calls due to our locations and also with the Greek team and media department.
YouTube Channel: Alejandro_Edits
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