Digging deeper into my consciousness about the things buried deep down, the things I feared to start with and share with the world throughout the first week brought me immense joy and a new reality I found myself in.
I can pursue my dreams in this playground called MDEF.
This week, I started designing my design space with all kinds of intricacies and things of interest that revolve around my identity. Seeing hundreds of cards of random triggers for the new reality of anthropocene were the best thing that happened. Having the literal definitions for the concepts that weren’t solidified in my mind before has proven really useful for understanding myself even better.
By getting more acquainted with these ideas I started seeing different groups and interactions between these subjects. I’ve identified four major areas of interests, being:
- Regenerative Practices (i)
- Non-Western Futures (i)
- Virtual Self (ii)
- Body Configuration (ii)
I’ve always been immersed in the upcoming of the Virtual Reality and its possibilities to allow for non-limited expressions, complete inclusion of all identities and organisms, and potential to enhance the learning environments. With this in mind, the second group of triggers (ii) was an easy choice. Building the virtual world for inclusion will soon be apt for a physical version, thus working with neuro tech, cognitive therapy and body transformations.
Whilst the first choices were easy to make, I’ve also been experiencing the changes in my values towards a less tech-focused world where the tech positivism has driven people into passive habits and high reliability on central systems and organisations. Having previously completed a Permaculture Design Certificate, I was able to securely redraw my value system with regenerative practices as one of the major driving forces for any decision-making.
An unexpected discovery was the newly found connection to rediscovering ancestral, cultural and inter-species knowledge as the way forward to a more conscious, happy, and activist world. “Looking” into minds of the mages from the past and learning from old practices presented itself as an opportunity to step away from the mental consumerist mindset and centralised systems with western attitudes so heavily engraved in our mindsets. An interesting addition to such a venture was finding knowledge of different species and getting heavily inspired by biomimicry.
Another important point for the development journey has been getting closer with the community and local geographies. To step away from the unrealistic 3rd person perspective and preaching attitudes, I got a chance to narrow down the possible futures and actions to smaller scale environments such as city, neighbourhood, home and myself.
Walking through the woods of Collserola Park I got into a meditative state at one point of the journey. Although not being able to ideate much on the actions, I felt more connected with nature and felt its power and tranquility. The environment around me gave me many clues and inspirations as to how art can be expressed in a multitude of ways.
What’s more, throughout the hike we had to concentrate on a specific weak signal and map it out in a situational analysis which you can see below.
I wanted to narrow down a bit more on the topic of non-western futures and this exercise has been a perfect brainstorming session. For some reason I keep attaching the meaning of this weak signal to the possibility to solve many societal problems we are experiencing, looking from the point of view of somebody living a privileged life in Barcelona.
Although every single one of them seemed extremely interesting, I felt particularly attracted to the last one. In a team of 5 we later had a short ideation session to find out each other’s ideas and potential points of collaboration and symbiosis. The results can be observed in a following image which was taken from our Design Space. (link to other students?)
Another tool which was streamlined from Elisava's research is the 'Design Attitudes'. Out of the four groups, those being:
- the Conscious,
- the Engaged,
- the Resilient,
- the Rebel,
I felt particularly attracted by the rebel attitudes, it was a love from first sight. Proposing alternative ways of manufacturing and consuming, using design as a tool to raise social and cultural awareness and rejecting the glossy perfection portrayed by social media are all the things I've been spinning my head around and pushing people to think about. Provotyping new cultural values is something that felt very natural to combine with the triggers explored beforehand.
