Lecture Summary

Designing with People—Applying Julia Cassim’s Methodology To My Work

I would like to share my experiences in working with people and what I learned from Professor Julia Cassim’s pioneering inclusive design, co-design and design activism methodologies. In 2008, Professor Cassim, Josip Lovrenović and I ran All Inclusive Sarajevo, a workshop that put disabled craftspeople working in sheltered workshops together with designers to come up with products that were marketable. At the time, the sheltered workshops in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina had lost their income from projects guaranteed by the state as well as state subsidies. They were on the brink of bankruptcy because they were not ready to compete on the market and we saw design as a way to explore what could be changed for the better.

The Sarajevo Workshop was based on the methodology of the Challenge Workshops Professor Cassim came up with while at the Royal College of Art Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design. It showed that design and co-design were powerful tools for sheltered workshops to become empowered, gain knowledge and skills and to participate in their community and the market more effectively. The Sarajevo Workshop became a model that was transferred to sheltered workshops all in other countries of the Former Yugoslavia and affected hundreds of craftspeople with disabilities, designers, design students and academics in the region.

Upon finishing the workshop, I set up my design practice, Studio Nataša Perković. When I finished my studies, I explicitly did not want to design chairs because I thought the world did not need another chair. However, I ended up setting my practice to design furniture. Working with Professor Cassim helped me to see opportunities in furniture design as an emerging field and furniture industry as a leading industry in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was an opportunity to design products for individual wellbeing and social cohesion. It was an opportunity to use design as a tool for achieving social and environmental sustainability.

I continued to use these methods of working with people I learned from Professor Cassim. I no longer worked in inclusive design research, but it’s human-centered, co-design and co-creative approach benefited my work in fields of product and furniture design as well as in academic work. It has helped me to work with people from other disciplines, other countries and to come up with award-winning products that people love to use, and that people use for a long time.

Professor Julia Cassim has worked with hundreds of designers during her four-decade long career and many of us are continuing to use the methods she has taught us in various ways. It is very important for me to have the chance to talk about what I learned from Julia Cassim, how I used it in my own context, to continue her legacy by working with people, and to explore the futures of her legacy by talking to you.

photo©Haris Adžem

Nataša Perković is a product designer from Sarajevo. She holds a graduate and a postgraduate degree from the Department of Product Design at the Academy of Fine Arts, University of Sarajevo, where she is an Assistant Professor.

She took her first professional steps at The Partners in London and at Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto in Italy. She has collaborated extensively with Professor Julia Cassim and the Royal College of Art Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design in London. She worked as a design associate under Professor Cassim at Kyoto Institute of Technology D-Lab.

Through her design practice, Studio Nataša Perković, she collaborates with manufacturers from Bosnia and Herzegovina and the region. She is currently in charge of developing the creative aspects of the emerging furniture brand GoEs. Her work has been shown extensively and globally.

Among awards Nataša’s products have received are Red Dot Design Award, D&AD Best New Blood, Imm Cologne ICONIC Interior Innovation Award, German Design Award Special Mention, Grand Prix Collegium Artisticum, Belgrade Furniture Fair Golden Key, BIG SEE Grand Prix for Product Design, as well as the Balkan Architectural Biennale Grand Prix for Furniture Design.

She aims to develop products of high aesthetic value and to produce them in an innovative and sustainable way. She nurtures a restrained aesthetic that is not subject to changing trends, in the hope that people will enjoy her products for many years.