Week 7 Reflection

I have a confusing experience about the last to weeks of the class. Since the beginning of the semester, we have been rising through the years of futures research/thinking and understanding how it can help us be better designers while factoring in the methods we have learnt in the class. However, the last two weeks were getting kind of confusing. Several weeks ago we did the family assignment and started applying something similar to our future and critiquing that as we went through the last several classes. This is my question? I do not think of myself as a practical future study and I think that rather than figuring out what our future holds for us and what we understand from that, what if we just focused on simpler, more ordinary lives? What I am trying to say is that I believe that we are getting too specific when studying ourselves, and through the futures classes I thought I learnt that was something not useful when trying to understand patterns that could emerge in the future and so on.

But except this critique, I think we learnt a lot of interesting things on last Wednesday in class. I was amazed by the breakdown of CLA and thought it was really smart to unpack it this way. I just think that the layer of litany was in comparison to the other layers, really large. I think that breaking it down to several layers that could explain better why the media exaggerate the reality that is right outside of our doorsteps.

I think that this week could apply well into the design project we just finished in the sense that it is a great way to unpack information. For Paint the Pavement, we could see the litany layer as the advertisements we made, and the lower layers as what the society actually sees it as.

For my design studies and understanding, I think that CLA is a great tool that could be of use to understand how a product is unpackaged (mentally) by the users and figure out how the knowledge within that product is distributed through the layers of CLA.