Last month we were invited by MA Graphic Design Communication at Chelsea College of Arts to run a two day exploratory workshop with the aim to push the students out of their creative comfort zones.

The workshop was loosely based on an earlier speculative project that explored the idea of Aleatoric Design and the tools we created to aid an Aleatoric Design process.

Aleatoricism describes incorporation of random elements or chance into the creative process to arrive at outcomes previously inconceivable.

The design equivalent of the music of Jon Cage or David Bowie’s / William S Burroughs' cut up techniques.

Using this project as a jumping off point, we built a new random brief generating tool to force an element of chance into a student’s project.

During the workshop, students were asked to write a statement that summed up an aspect of their current coursework project before pressing the ‘randomise!’ button.

A brief is then generated based around their original statement and a set of randomly selected rules which the students must explore within a certain time period. It is up to the student to interpret the brief how they like — deciding on how an outcome that they believe will best satisfy the brief. Each outcome, however, must take into consideration all of the rules set out by the brief generator — none can be ignored.