Design Studio 01 - Second Session
Course Details
Name: Design Studio 01 - Session Two
Dates: 21 October 2024
Faculty: Jana Tothill Calvo & Roger Guilemany
Personal Intervention
For my first design intervention, I wanted to examine my relationship with the clothes I own. I often claim that 'most' of my clothes are from thrift stores or homemade, but I have never looked closely at my closet to examine that claim. Also, I think of myself as a clothing minimalist. I traveled for nearly 4 months with only a 35L backpack full of clothes and while I got sick of the few clothing items I had with me, I managed to do it without much difficulty.
So, what do I actually own? How long have I owned what I have? How much of what I own was acquired new versus second hand? How many of my clothes have been altered or repaired versus what remains unchanged? What portion of my clothes were handmade by me or my mother?What portion of my clothes did I bring to Barcelona versus what I left behind? Why did I bring what I brought and leave what I left?
These were the kinds of questions I wanted to answer in my intervention to get to know my own real relationship with the clothing I own and wear (or don't wear). The idea of this intervention was to take a deep dive into my closet and to really analyze how I currently value the clothes I own.
I learned that more of my clothes I own were purchased new than acquired second hand. I learned that I only brought about 25% of my clothes to Barcelona. I learned that I left most of the oldest clothes I own - from when I was 16 or 17 years old - at home and that what I brought to Barcelona tend to be newer pieces of clothing. It was also very telling that for around 25% of my clothing I could not figure out what year I acquired it in. Some of the years were estimations based on which stage of my life I was in when I acquired them (high school, college, post-college).
Overall, I think this kind of analysis gave me good insight into the reality of what is in my closet and highlighted my relationship with fast fashion, which I still think is fairly minimal, but perhaps not as small as I had expected.
Class Activity
For the class activity, we talked in groups about prototypes we have made in the past. Then we took our partner's prototype experiences and reconfigured them into one of the other prototype roles and made a very quick mockup using random materials we had brought from home.
The 4 roles of prototyping that we discussed are:
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Role 1
A prototype as an experimental component to test a specific hypothesis
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Role 2
A prototype as a means of inquiry for open-ended exploration of phenomena
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Role 3
A prototype as an illustration or demonstration to to embody the research concept
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Role 4
Prototyping as a driver for the research direction where process is part of the prototype
My partner had been researching gig workers, specifically within the food delivery industry, and decided to sign up to deliver food for a day to learn what the process of signing up was and what a day in the life of a delivery driver would be like. This method could be fit into roles 2-4. For my prototype of another research method, I went with a more traditional method, prototyping the integration of a rating system into the delivery app itself, not only for the customers, but for the "executives" (the drivers) as well. The idea is that they could rate their most recent delivery and then the data could be compared to the customer's rating, the traffic in their geographical area, the weather at the time of the rating, and perhaps other factors as well.
Design Space Updates
Check out my Design Space
Reflection
Below is my audio reflection after the second session of Design Studio.