reflection
At the beginning of the first term, I did the exercise to describe my vision and identity:
“More than trying to make people change their habits, I believe in the creation of resilient and autonomous environments, places at a smaller local scale and their capacity to expand and inspire others. I would like to help these models to replicate and provide the tools to more people to try them.
For these reasons, I would like to learn more about fabrication and agrology skills to lean towards autonomy, develop skills of storytelling via different mediums and develop open source approaches for all projects to help them expand.”
This is still true today and has now taken shape with the design interventions of the two first terms.
During this second term, with the Future Talks, we had the opportunity to meet with guests sharing their different perspectives on design:
- Audrey Desjardins - Autobiographical Design
- Laura Forlano - Auto-ethnography
- Sergio Urueña - Responsible Innovation
- Saúl Baeza - Radical experimentation in design research
- Ron Wakkary - Biographies and constituencies
Some inspirations and learnings from their presentations:
Auto-ethnography
Both Audrey Desjardins & Laura Forlano described their first person perspective, or auto-ethnographic approaches. They reminded us that just as we cannot ignore a researcher's influence on research, it is the same for design. They advocate for the fact that everyday life is a way of making theory. We had already started with the first person perspective approach since the first term so it was interesting to have the occasion here to see it in practice in different contexts, and have examples of designers doing research based on their personal experience.
Documenting
I like documenting interventions and collecting data but I am always wondering what would be the best way to present it, to share it with others. The references shared by Audrey Desjardins and Laura Forlano about documentation were inspiring for me, one of my favorites was the example of Giorgia Lupi.
I appreciated that it was an important part of their work and they encouraged us to commit to documentation, choose a format we enjoy.
Laura Forlano was sharing the idea that collecting data on her own life gave her ownership of her own life, and made her feel agency.
Responsibility
The topic of responsibility was mainly addressed by Sergio Urueña. He argues that neither technological determinism nor social constructivism reflect reality. In that case, the sociotechnical approach (meaning that both technology and society make each other) makes more sense. They make realities together. Sergio was inviting us to pay attention to the meaning that the objects carry. He also shared a framework of questions that we could use and apply to our project for a “responsible innovation” to help us define to what extent we feel responsible. I was used in previous jobs to create canvases to help clients assess the impact of new products or services on the environment and society and I think it would be useful for me to do it also for myself, and without necessarily using all the guiding questions proposed by Sergio, I would like to create my own set of questions which could of course evolve depending on the projects.
Narratives for future explorations
In the first term, among my desired future “skills, knowledge and attitude”, I had mentioned that I wanted a playful approach to my projects as well as developing storytelling skills.
As Saúl Baeza shared his work with us, it was inspiring for me to see examples of designers using humor and creativity as a powerful tool to address social and private issues raised by technology and the way it is used today.