08 January — Day 3
Day 3 was dedicated to do a recap with one of our tutors, Dr. Joëlle Bitton. As we did the previous exercises alone, without getting feedback, it was time to receive comments on what we have done. During this round turned out that most of us — including myself — missed the mark. Instead of trying to characterise the project, we should have list possible solutions to the problem we are dealing with. Oops. Anyway, Joëlle gave all of us feedback of how she sees our initial steps. In my case she commented that my topic field is pretty rich, I have a lot of reference to work with, however I need to find the borders of my playground.
Exercise 3
The next exercise we got was to find 3 key aspects of our bachelor project and populate upon those our design space with 50 sketches of concrete ideas. Something like small elevator pitches. Was not easy again. I was not sure about my 3 aspects still. I am quite confident using design fiction as a method, it got a post-it right away. I am also tend to picture my final artefact as a tangible physical object. I know that there are tons of body extensions and alteration that is either on of off or one can reach out to a final look with phases (small tattoo on a finger, then a bigger on the arm and within time the full body is tattooed). So my idea was to introduce a dynamically changing body extension. The third aspect I put on a post-it but I left a bit of freedom for myself. It was about the individual’s attitude towards body alteration: one either expressing his ideal self and looks for a community he fits in, or he adopts to group norms and alternates his body accordingly.
And then the production of post-its have started. I was really surprised how crazy seeming ideas poped up. I felt quite under pressure generating 50 ideas and going for quantity over quantity. After 10–15 post-its I realised that I am stepping out of my space defined with the 3 mentioned cornerstones. Not only to get closer to 50, but also because the ideas coming one after the other made me realise how rich is actually the topic and the 3 key aspects are might not guiding but limiting me.
No surprise the feedback for my idea connection was that there are too much core ideas to work with. It went way beyond and to create a successful project on time, I need to be more strict finding the main scope of mine.
So this exercise was on one hand successful: I did not limit myself putting up crazy seeming, non-feasible seeming ideas which I normally don’t do, but on the other hand I did not take a step further. My next task for tomorrow’s mentoring is roll back my process a bit, revise my exercises and find possible smaller chunks of my topic to work with. Up for it.
