Design for Survival is a workshop that Thomas Mann developed to answer a growing need in the American craft field for access to individual business skills and expertise. It is the generally held perception, by professional show promoters and gallery owners and buyers, that fewer artists are entering the art/craft field today than ten years ago. There are many reasons for this change. One of the major reasons is the perception held by potential entrants that an art/craft career choice is plagued with many obstacles. They realize that in order to be successful in today's market the larger number of artists must also be entrepreneurs and small business people. While our art institutions of higher learning attend well to the artistic preparations of their students, few of these institutions are attending to the necessities of business skills preparation. Design for Survival is an attempt to bridge this gap through workshops tailored to the educational situation in which it is presented.
The WorkshopsIt is possible for the workshop to be a one day, two day, one week or two week event. The amount of information covered and the attention to each individual participant is obviously dependent on the size and duration of the encounter.
The One-Day Workshop as basically structured like a lecture in which Mann makes presentations on a broad range of topics affecting Craft Artists today--"Developing a Distinct Design Vocabulary," "Pricing : the Fulcrum for Success" and "How to be PR Pro-Active" just to name a few. It is also possible that a One Day Workshop may not be media specific, meaning that many of the topics presented are applicable to all craft-artists regardless of media.
The first day of the Two-Day Workshop is similar to that of the One-Day Class; the second day of the class the students themselves will be making presentations of their work for critique by Mann and the class as a whole. Critique will focus on all aspects of their work from the design aspects to the marketing.
The One or Two Week Workshops provide students with all the tools they need to survive including an introduction to computers and how they can improve all areas of their business, from pricing methods to PR materials.
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