Major Studio — Response for 5 in 5
I think design can definitely be a ritual. As a person who is transitioning from an engineering student to a design student, I feel that designing ritual can help me through this period. And this 5 in 5 event is a good example of how design can be a habit in my life and help me make a difference.
This exercise took place in a continuous five-day period, forcing me to repeat the process from conception to scrutiny to prototype to production every day in a continuous and intensive way. And in the constant repetition, I feel that this process is becoming more and more proficient, and gradually become an important part of my life.
I think there are a lot of things that are valuable to me in this project. One of them is that during the design of each day, the design work is based on aliens designed by others. That is to say, before this work is completed, I don’t know what my design work is about today, and I don’t know what challenges I will encounter. This experience is very novel to me and valuable. Because I don’t have a lot of design experiences before, and all the designs during Boot Camp were pre-designed fixed topics and directions. This time the challenge is an unknown design requirement, which also requires me to be able to change according to the actual situation, instead of following the ideas in my mind as I used to.
Another aspect that is very important to me is that through this exercise, I can understand how other people are used to designing ideas, which can be reflected in the aliens they design. Since I have always been accustomed to immersing myself in my own world, there is not much attention to anything other than my own ideas. But now I am a design student, which means that other people’s way of thinking has become an important part of my consideration.
I feel that after this exercise, I began to become a designer. I began to pay attention to the various details in my life and re-examine everything I saw in my life from a design perspective. But most importantly, I began to habitually repeat the process of conceiving, designing, making, and prototype in my mind. This process has gradually become a brand new part of my life, a ritual. It was because of this exercise that I began to notice the ideas that were generated in my mind, inspired by everyday life, and habitually began to consider what medium to achieve these ideas, how to achieve these inspirations and the inspiration of these inspirations. What the outcome will look like. I think this is the biggest change I have made through this exercise.
If I were to go through such an event again, I think I will further optimize the process in how to use the time. I feel that I always spend a lot of time on the determination of the original design ideas. However, in many cases, prototyping is performed directly according to the existing ideas, and then the modification according to the result of prototyping is often a faster way.

