Questions left in project one:
First, WHY?
Second, How?
Thirdly, What?
What makes my project innovative and interesting?
where should design sit in the contemporary background? In the past 100 years, social changes will not be as big as they are now. Now 50 years of changes have been earth-shaking. The development of human civilization is accelerating, and the design industry has played a big role in it. The driving effect also has an impact on people’s psychology. In the past, few people had psychological problems such as depression. The broadening of modern cognition has led to an upgrade of people’s way of thinking and changed people’s attitudes towards life.
Keeping pets is an adaptive behaviour of animals in the process of modern socialization. In the same way, planting is also the adaptability of plants to changes in the environment. The difference between humans and animals and plants is that we have always Change the environment while adapting to it. So, in the future, how will we get along with this world?
As those questions I left for myself in the first project, I started thinking about my own life. I believe a designer should understand themselves first, then we can start designing. Based on the previous action which monitors some daily routines of my moving track, I would like to continue to keep an eye on my personal behaviours.
In the first week, I am experiencing a very bad emotional period, the efficiency of working time has dramatically dropped, I refused to do works, resist to talk and communicate unless it is necessary. My emotions are easily affected and remain unstable at the time, so I am trying to observe those postures animals normally do to see if the movement of different postures would help alleviate the bad emotions.
Thinking in different perspectives will affect the way how we live and view. By coping the postures of my dog and my friend’s cat, it inspired me to follow the perspectives how they are looking at the environment we are sharing.
Other ways to help me live in the moment would be lighting. The moment while I was concentrating at the time and reflecting on myself would called a slow living lifestyle. To me, it is lighting at this point.
https://raaf.org/pdfs/Slow_Design_Principles.pdf
What is slow design?
To me, it is about ritual and tight up with the moment of being ourselves.
- Longer design processes with more time for research, contemplation, real life impact tests, and fine tuning.
- Design for manufacturing with local or regional materials and technologies or design that supports local industries, workshops, and craftspeople.
- Design that takes into account local or regional culture both as a source of inspiration and as an important consideration for the design outcome.
- Design that studies the concept of natural time cycles and incorporates them into design and manufacturing processes.
- Design that looks at longer cycles of human behaviour and sustainability.
- Design that takes into account deeper well being and the findings of positive psychology
As I was staring at the flames, I found myself have the moment highly concentrated, the body isn’t moving, however, the mind starts travelling. Then I started collecting those elements where lights came from. Most of the artificial light sources are quite limited, but the natural light source isn’t. Starting from here, my targets shift from the inside environment to the outside.
I am also curious about how other people think about the slow living lifestyle and how they normally do a ritual to live in the moment. 55.55% of people would say they feel distracted or anxious from around 8 pm to midnight and 33.33% of them found it hard to sleep during that time. 33.33% of them feel anxious in the morning. In order to take a slow step and reflect on themselves, most of them would prefer a quiet space and stay alone. This is the context I was trying to find, and limit my research to a more specific time period. Time at night, especially before bed would be the most “creative” boost. I highly resonate with this idea, I found that the time lied down on the bed, my brain starts telling me some design ideas and many tips for the next day. I am a contradictory person, I always found it hard to decide if I should get up and write them down or just falling into sleep.
As I grow up, I have more and more roles adding to my personality, I am a student at ECU, a daughter of my parents, a girlfriend of my partner, an instructor at work, a friend of my friends, etc. There are so many faces I have to adjust to based on different occasions. However, I found the part of myself shrinks through time, I got less time to be on my own, and less opportunity to be alone and get my life organized.
Stepping into nature actually helps me calms down and try to concentrate at the moment which released all of the burdens I have, at this time, I am representing myself. Everyone has to play diverse roles in their lives. Some may be a mom but also a daughter, they may have several jobs and have different masks on different occasions.
One day, I took a trip to the white rock beach, and I started picking up the rocks on the beach. I felt the time froze on the beach. Time flys when I was concentrating on the stone picking process. The action of picking up stones is the ritual for this day. Each stone has its uniqueness, it records the time and materials of how it was formed in different ways.
The action of collection is building a bridge between the real personality and the nature of itself. Each stones has their own representations, either with its special patterns or with its colors and shapes.
When you concentrates, the five sense of human will be magnified. At this moment, I want to combine the sources I collected to visualize the process in design prototypes.
Based on the special colours and patterns they have on the stone, I would like to incorporate light into this process. This is a disk note collector specially designed for a collective experience. It has two main parts which top is a transparent container for the stones to be collected; the bottom area would be a lighting system with scrolled notes wrapped around a container. People can use stones as a diary of each day, and write some hints and collect it in the bottom container, when the jar is full, it can be replaced with other containers and the action of matching the notes and the stones would be an interesting experience to look back and reflect on it.
I understand a master degree isn’t about redesign something out, it is about addding values based on specific designer’s background, and take that as the new research.
Through this action, I have narrowed from the broad idea of home design to a more ritual-based slow design and slow living concept. The purpose would be how can I give temperature to home design and how the 5 senses are incorporate in this situation. Also using slow design principles as a method to design towards a slow lifestyle. In the next action, I would keep it more specific, and try to get the idea described in a more solid way.