Living with your own ideas¶
Assignment:¶
- What did you make? And why did it matter?
- What happens when you involve yourself?
- What happens when you use yourself as an instrument?
- Did anything change about your way of working?
- What does it mean for your future work?
- After seeing the videos of your design space collective, how does it change your understanding of it, present new opportunities or inspire new possibilities for collaboration?
1 - What did you make? And why did it matter?¶
In the initial assignment to make a companion, I made a machine that could help me control time, with the hope that it would give me a relief and let go of FOMO (fear of missing out). But it didn’t. I started thinking too much about time, and when to use my companion. The moments when used it started to become too precious, when it wasn’t.
Then in the second one part of the seminar, where we needed to come up with a personal intervention, I did an uto-ethnographic data collection on how I use technology. Technology is an anchor topic for what I’d like to work on in this master, so I wanted to study my relationship with it before coming up for interventions for others using it. I logged how I feel using technology while working, then while being outside in the city and finally decided to take it to the extreme and try cutting out all distractions and digital addictions.
2 - What happens when you involve yourself?¶
Involving myself in these interventions as an end-user of my ideas, or the protagonist of my intervention lead to some insights I wouldn’t be able to predict. Very quickly after testing my prototypes, I recognised that the way things really work is very different to how we imagine they’d work. Unexpected things happen. You recognise how you perceive these unexpected things. This results in either a self-realisation, or a new angle to look at your design - both of which are very useful.
I reflected on the fact that when designing for others, this happens as well and things we don’t imagine happening naturally emerge. Involving myself allowed me to understand this fact in an embodied way.
3 - What happens when you use yourself as an instrument?¶
I started interacting with my ideas - continued seeing them as design artifacts that are still in the making, when they were actually complete for the given task. The design activity continued due to the fact that the design and the designer were still there. And within this interaction, something unexpected happened, the design started to change designer as well.
My experience with my companion was so different to how I assumed it to be, so I started reflecting and questioning my relationship with time, which in turn made me decide to alter my relationship with time. The companion didn’t do the job itself, which it was supposed to do, but it did actually do the job in an alternative way within the interaction it had with me.
4 & 5 - Did anything change about your way of working?What does it mean for your future work?¶
In my profession, we tend to focus on designing for others, and to do that responsibly, I work hard to take myself out of the equation when I design. As if our personal involvement is something to be ashamed of, something unprofessional… During the seminar, I recognised that taking yourself completely out of the equation is not possible; the designer is always there with their values, their way of seeing life, and how they understand the problem at hand.
The seminar gave me the courage to acknowledge this fact, and make use of it rather than trying to avoid it. As a matter of fact, I think in my past projects, I did a better job as a designer when I’m personally more involved with the problem we were designing for. I’ll try 1PP design and utilising the results of it where possible in my professional work. I’m sure it’ll at least allow me to communicate better with the target audience, after having embodied the problem.
6 - After seeing the videos of your design space collective, how does it change your understanding of it, present new opportunities or inspire new possibilities for collaboration?¶
Works like this help us connect to each other in many layers; not only in terms of the interest areas of others, but also in a human level. With this extended understanding, ideas on paper become more clear, they get some more colour and it becomes easier to spot the opportunities to collaborate.
