The second edition of Reading Design, the annual summer school at Grymsdyke Farm in Buckinghamshire, took place over four weeks during the summer.
Reading Design is a hands-on design workshop and residency that brings together students, designers, and educators to explore the relationship between making, material, and place through process-led experimentation. That year, the learning programme was complemented by a series of talks from eminent thinkers and practitioners, and the scope of practice expanded to include art, poetry, and performance.
Reading Design takes place in the rural setting of Grymsdyke Farm, a working research and fabrication space. Participants work with invited tutors, each specialising in different materials and techniques, to develop site-specific design responses. These are shaped by the local context and by direct engagement with tools, materials, and processes. Rather than being set assignments with fixed outcomes, students are given prompts as starting points for open-ended experimentation.
The summer school ran over four weeks, with students rotating between tutors and projects. The outcomes — often experimental furniture, objects, or installations — were exhibited in the autumn, highlighting the programme’s commitment to collaborative, process-driven design.
Farm Party was a celebration of Reading Design, and an opportunity for students, architects, patrons, and visitors to come together in the grounds of the farm for food, music, and dancing.
The theme for the 2025 summer school was Falling, inspired by the action poems and instruction-based practice of Mieko Shiomi. Falling was a condition that was both physical and conceptual, sudden and gradual. In Spatial Poem No.3, Shiomi invited participants to record an intentional effort to make something fall.
Reading Design invited participants to consider the effects of a loss of control, a shift in balance, and the possibility of reorientation. It explored how falling could trigger spatial, material, and performative responses, and what could be noticed in the act of falling itself.
Students were asked to create a series of human body-sized objects using materials sourced from Grymsdyke Farm, particularly offcuts and remnants from earlier projects. The emphasis was on working with what already existed: the leftover, the unstable, and the in-between.
Daily activities included hands-on making, lectures and talks, discussions around the dinner table, reading and research in the library, guided walks, and tutor-led workshops.
Participants worked with all four tutor groups in turn, developing an evolving response to a shared set of instructions. Each week was led by a different design team, exploring the theme of falling through site-specific processes, materials, and dialogue.
Falling was explored with:
-Maurizio Altieri
-Marco Campardo
-FOS
-Laura Houseley
-Leonard Koren
-Guan Lee
-Luca Lo Pinto
-Yeoryia Manolopoulou
-Rujiana Rebernjak
-Vicky Richardson
-Soft Baroque
-Lorenzo Vitturi