Conditional Design is a design method formulated by the graphic designers Luna Maurer, Jonathan Puckey, Roel Wouters and Edo Paulus, in which conditions and rules of the play are drawn up that encourage cooperation of mostly 4 persons within a regulated process towards an unpredictable design or result. Conditional Design plays with chance, human interaction, frameworks and generative systems and is a ‘play’ method that provides possibilities for every creative person.

The focus of Conditional Design is not on its results or products, but rather on processes: Things that adapt to their environment, emphasize change and underline difference. The designers use logic as their tool, and input from nature, society and its human interaction as their material.

Thanks to the four graphic designers mentioned above, a Conditional Design workbook has been published to empower readers to actively recreate the workshops represented in the book on their own or even invent new ones. The writing contains a step-by-step instruction of every workshop. Conditional Design owes its success to the simplicity of its concept and to its surprising outcomes.


















In class, we worked in groups of 4 as the instruction told us to and tried 4 different assignements. The first one was to try and draw the perfect circle. Every team member had one colour and one minute time to make the circle bigger and more round. This went on for 20 minutes and at the end looked like this:







































The second assignement was called 'Hatching', meaning every colour (every team member) had to draw lines in a certain angle. In other words, one person could only draw line in an angle of 0° to 45°, the other one only in an angle from 45° to 90° and so on. The person who closed a surface with his line had to fill it out with parallel lines. To illustrate this exercise, take a look at the following pictures:










































Our third assignement had the title 'Beach'. Again, every player had a different colour and should mark a dot on the space that looked the most empty. It was important to take turns and not do it simultaneously. At the end, it really looked like a beach of sand.











































The fourth and last assignement of our workshop called 'Fluxfold'. As the name already reveals, it is about folding the paper according to a set of rules and drawing lines along the folds one participant after the other. We had to try this assignement several times as it seemed more complicated than the ones before.
















At the end of every assignement, every group hung their work up to see the different outcomes of every team. Indeed, every result had its personal touch. It was interesting to see, how every result was different from another, although we all followed the same set of rules. This illustrates that every group works in a different way and has its own way of proceeding.










































After the workshop at the university, I repeated the same procedure at home with my family. I explained the rules of every assignement to them and again - different results as in class!