Winter School Indegeneity and Adaptation¶
Reflections¶
During the first week of Winter School from the 16th to 20th, I learned about the auto-ehthnographic in Design, Creative placemaking design and also Sensory Mapping. On the first day, Albert shared this lecture slide. It made me reflect about my position as a designer in relation to my surroundings.
Sensory Methods¶
During the lecture with Zsofia, we explored methods to design with the idea of place as a sensory experience in this lecture slide.
For more information and resources, check out the Padlet below:
One of the activity that we did was to execute a sensory walk around the city. Together as a cohort, we contributed to a collective Miro Board.
I have documented my personal experience, focusing on the sense of smell and sound during this project. Full PDF of the project can be found here.
During the presentation, we have discussed the notion of sound can be so powerful as it brings back us in time. It allows us to access our memories and feelings just from some chemical substances.
One feedback that I got is smell, like taste, is a very personal and intimate sensory experience - they both rely upon other means of communication to be shared.
They demand dialogue and interaction to move from individual to share, even though they are experienced by all, sometimes simultaneously. Like the wind, perhaps they are made visible by their ‘effects’? Unlike sense sound and vision that can be depicted easilty with our electronic device,the experience of smell and taste could not be transfered to the user electronically.
Another interesting conversation that raised during our discussion is to think of “place” as a transient space, as an event that comes and goes, that is defined more by time than space. Does this make our sensory interaction and engagement more important, and our recording of something that is ephemeral? Place as a vanishing phenomenon?
So, a place exists as part of our experience - but the experience of space is always changing and it is not going to be permanent.
Digital Postcard¶
We had multiple discussion on indegeneity. Also, we argue that indegeneity can be from a person but not the place. For example, if somebody is going to a foreign land, they could still bring a sense of indegeneity of their own culture to the new place.
In the assignment of creating a digital postcard, as a group, we discussed about the iconic Sagrada Familia. Ironically, it is built for the people of Barcelona, but most locals think that the church does not belong to them anymore as it was bombarded by tourists.
We created a platform for ourselves to share thoughts and ideas.
Group Board
Postcards from Everyone
Using Design as a Tool to Explore Place¶
During the second week, I am in group 6, collaborating with students from Germany, Scotland and Naryn. We decided to focus on topics related to equality, materials and craft and wellbeing. In the end, we choose human interaction as our topic.
We decided to have more flexibility in choosing our own action and see how we could connect each of our individual action based on our theme.
For my action, I have chosen to use my on going project here in Barcelona to study the relationship between my action with the interaction with children.
Context
I am executing a small workshop with primary school children in Barcelona. We will be facilitating the workshop where the children imagine future scenario on topic related to climate change and gender equity. They will be making a collage of the future scenario in different settings, for example: future for the park, for the school, sports, etc. based on the theme we selected.
Action
As a facilitator, our goal is to collect children’s idea of the future without influencing their creative process. I will be observing the difference between their interaction among their peers vs adult (facilitators and teachers) during this project. I will also observe how can we communicate with the children more efficiently using body language, expression and choice of words during the workshop. Outcome
Outcome
This action should leave me with a better understanding on how to collaborate and communicate with children better from an adult perspective. This would also help me to understand how does children think and act, and as an adult, how can we provide guidance without influencing their creativity. This would help me if I were to design a system or educational content relating to children in the future.
Conclusion¶
This Winter School has been a very enriching experience for me as it allows me to connect with other design school students and exchange ideas. Also, some of the talks, notably a Talk by John Thackara makes an lasting impact on me. He mentioned that nature and tech no longer is an ‘either-or’ notion, we as designers have to accept that this has come to a time where we need to figure out how both nature and tech can co-exist. I have been listening to too many people talking about how we should ‘go back to nature’ and demonising all tech related subjects, so this sharing session has made me feel assured and inspired me to be a designer that was able to see clarity in all of our perconceived bias on tech.