Designing a Generation Gap

Image: Students with the finished stage design.

Students from the University of Brighton Faculty of Arts, Architecture and Interior Architecture courses have been involved in the stage design for the inspirational TEDx conference held in Brighton last week.

TEDx is an international, non-profit organisation devoted to sharing ideas by bringing together communities, organisations and individuals from the worlds of technology, entertainment and design, providing opportunities to stimulate dialogue at a local level.

Student group, the Brighton Interior Architecture and Architecture Society were given the amazing opportunity to design and construct the stage backdrop based on the TEDx theme of ‘Generation Gap’. The structure they came up with was cheap, recyclable and easy to build.

The students wanted to use their design to illustrate the physical gap between generations by using a neutral ageless object. The chairs has been in use for centuries in one form or another, so by splitting a number of them in half, they hoped it would visually illustrate the gap between generations.

There was no budget for the design so the project relied on donations from various members of the local community, with a total of 30 chairs collected. Over the next few weeks, the chairs were cut in half and a supporting structure was built to hold them in place.

The finishing touch was to paint all the elements in signature colours of TEDx and the final construction took place on the stage at the Brighton Dome the day before the event. In the limited time of three hours, the students successfully managed to put together the finished structure.

Feedback from speakers and attendees at TEDx was very positive and the event itself was extremely inspiring.

Watch a film showing the construction below: