This year we took Tiny House Design online!
We still have a few spots open in the December Tiny House Design Online course. If you’d like to join us, you can get more info and register on the Yestermorrow website.
In early 2020 I traveled to Yestermorrow to teach the 3-day Tiny House Design at Yestermorrow (Feb 2020) course with my friend and colleague Erin Maile O’Keefe. We all had a great time exploring design concepts at full scale with a design taped out on the studio floor, going on tours of local tiny homes, and spending a lot of time huddled around each student’s desk offering up “what if…?” and “have you considered…?”
It seems strange to think back on that now, how that was the way we always taught design classes, in real life and in close proximity. There were conversations and follow up questions over lunch in the dining room or sitting by the river or around the fire. On the plane ride home I noticed there were a lot of people wearing masks and I started getting suspicious that this COVID-19 thing people were talking about might be a bigger deal than I realized. But it was still another month until Oregon’s Stay Home Stay Safe ordinance went into effect.
Amidst the global pandemic, we pivoted and by June we were able to offer a Tiny House Design (Online) course. It immediately filled and a waiting list was started. We met twice a week for a couple of hours, providing content and having discussions. We shifted what was once “desk crits” (providing one-to-one feedback at a student’s drafting table) to a series of 20 minute 1:1 zoom sessions that alternated between Erin and me, so everyone would have personalized attention each week from one of us. We shifted from teaching hand drafting to pointing to Sketch Up tutorials. We had a little coaching to do on how to use screen sharing and the chat. Collectively we figured it out.
When our students presented their final designs we were impressed. Apparently Tiny House Design was not only possible but quite successful in this format. We loved that people from all across the country were able to participate even if they wouldn’t have been able to travel to Vermont to take the course in person. So we did it again in October, this time pre-recording some of the content so students could review it on their own timeline.
The Tiny House Design course was scheduled to run again in person in December this year, but with COVID cases skyrocketing across the country that’s a no-go. So Tiny House Design is going online again. Since it was scheduled for a long weekend we’re going to switch up the format again, this time offering it for a couple of hours once a day for five days. I’m curious to see how this format goes. We still have a few spots open in the December Tiny House Design Online course. If you’d like to join us, you can get more info and register on the Yestermorrow website. And if this upcoming session won’t work but you’d like to join us in the future, stay tuned. We’ll likely run the course again in 2021 so stay tuned for more opportunities!