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Design Studio 03 - First Session

Course Details

Name: Design Studio 03 - First Session

Dates: 28 April 2025

Faculty: Roger Guilemany

Design Space Evolution

To see the current state of my Design Space, check out the link below

Design Space

Ways of Drifting Reflection

Ways of Drifting are a series of five experimentation methods that can be used to frame research through design as proposed by Peter Gall Krogh, Thomas Markussen, Anne Louise Bang.

The Five Ways of Drifting Methods

  1. Accumulative: Focusing on specific aspects, allowing for a deep understanding of a topic
  2. Comparative: Looking at different perspectives on the same topic, allowing for exploration of different contexts
  3. Serial: Investigating informed by previous investigations which happen in a particular order
  4. Probing: Exploiting opportunities as they emerge within a clear area of interest and with personal motivations clear
  5. Expansive: Investigating new areas of interest through design interventions without following a clear order

Reflecting upon my MDEF journey and the ways I have developed my investigations and process, I think I have followed both the Probing and Expansive methods of research.

Looking back at my interventions throughout the terms shows some deviation from very specific areas of interest, but a general trend in a single area but without following any clear order or logic to the path I have taken.

Reflecting on my Interventions

Term 1 Interventions:

  1. Am I actually a clothing minimalist?
  2. How can I prolong my phone's life and battery?
  3. What objects do people value and why?

Term 2 Interventions:

  1. Can we infect someone's digital content suggestion algorithm?
  2. How can I bring my passion for folk dance into my design practice?
  3. What does bringing electronics and textile mending together look like?
  4. How can I gamify conversations about repair?

Term 3 Intervention (so far):

  1. How can I celebrate Mend-in-Public Day with a community in Barcelona?

Most of these follow the thread of care for objects, our own habits, and people around us. All of them are deeply rooted in who I am personally, each of these investigations encompasses a piece of me, my practice, my beliefs, my habits, and how I like to exist in the world even when I challenge myself to push past anxiety or discomfort.

Before the start of the program, I was interested in fiber arts/craft and electronics integration. From there I started thinking about repair in clothing and electronics specifically. I wandered over into 'repair' of our relationship with information and what knowledge and biases we have because of technology. Then, I found myself heading back into the place I had been before, the idea of integrating textile mending and embellishment techniques with electronics as a means of speaking about repair. These wanderings were mostly centered around the concepts of care and craft, of connecting more deeply with our objects, our world, ourselves. These expansive investigations which grew and changed over the course of the year so far let me play in different spaces, but also to start probing the concepts as different opportunities arose.

Return to Atlas of Weak Signals

At the beginning of this adventure, I identified certain cards within the Atlas of Weak Signal (AoWS) that felt relevant to my early investigations:

  • Longtermism
  • Rurual Futures
  • Imagining futures that are non-Western centric
  • Making Universal Basic Income work
  • Imagining new jobs

I also identified general areas of interest along the way:

  • Minimalism
  • Solar Punk
  • Degrowth
  • Surveillance

Some of these have remained the same, some have shifted. While I still am interested in many of these topics, my project investigations have wandered around within these contexts, briefly adding the AoWS cards "Dismantling Filter Bubbles", "Attention Protection", and adding some of my own that I have not really put into clear words yet.

So, throughout these two and a half terms, I have certainly drifted, trying to stay true to my goals and interests, while allowing myself to explore and trying to learn what I can, dig into areas that are both familiar and unfamiliar and ultimately mostly found myself back where I started but on a higher level of the spiral that is knowledge gathering and research investigation.

Alternative Present Statement

Present Continuity

Textile repairers, such as myself, typically repair clothing in functional, practical ways that either highlight the problems or seek to hide and diminish the fixes themselves. Modern electronics repairers, such as myself, typically repair devices in technical, yet surface level ways, that can only go to far to functionally fix the item because of limitations from manufacturers like not publishing documentation, hiding behind software and firmware, and generally making fixing a more complicated problem than it needs to be. These two types of repairers are typically different people. Stereotypically and historically textile/clothing repair is performed by women who may not have received formal training in sewing or repair and often repair without pay, while electronics repair is often done by men who may have an engineering education and are often paid for their work. Both of these types of repair include skill and practice and are performed by people who have similar values about care of objects, longevity of items, perhaps value thrift, and generally have diagnosis and craft skills.

Alternative Present

Textile repairers, such as myself, repair clothing in ways that either highlight the problems with parts of broken electronics that go beyond a functional fix, bypassing limitations imposed by manufacturers by redefining an object’s functionality through the practice of craft and opening the black box of mass manufacturing. A textile and electronics repairer can be a single person who understands how to do both. Gender stereotypes do not apply since anyone can do both cloth and electrical repair with whatever level of formal education suits them and are compensated according to their skill, either through monetary compensation or alternative forms of compensation that chip away at the economic assumptions. A single repairer practicing both skills has values about care of objects, longevity of items, perhaps value thrift, and generally have diagnosis and craft skills learned through community initiatives, personal exploration, or even formal education as they personally are able to engage with.

Reflection

Below is my audio reflection at the start of the third term of MDEF.