Week 10: Society and purpose
Weekly Learning Objectives
You will be working towards achieving the following learning outcomes detailed in the Assignments tab:
LO2: Contextualise – appraise the social, political and historical contexts in which design practice operates.
LO3: Analyse – evaluate research findings and use sound judgment informed by critical debate at the forefront of the academic discipline.
LO4: Distil – position a creative strategic insight that has been distilled and refined through an informed investigation.
LO6: Make – select and utilise relevant tools, skills and technologies in the delivery, iteration and sustainable production of an outcome.
LO7: Collaborate – demonstrate inclusive and empathetic strategies to plan and execute a project across distributed collaborative situations.
LO8: Design – realise a final solution that evidences its strategic journey and clear relationship between form and function.
Week 10: Lecture – Research and Reveal
The lecture video will:
Examine service design campaigns that have successfully instigated regional change and awareness.
Demonstrate how to identify and solve a problem that relates to your location.
Analyse how user experience can improve the way we live.
Joe Pochodzaj introduces how to Research and Reveal, Develop key findings, analysis and objectives and projects where designers specifically engage with the local community.
Heffen Jones, talks about his career in service design and working independently as a practitioner working in cultural and educational institutions such as Wales Millennium Centre, Victoria and Albert Museum, and Wellcome Centre for Neuroimaging, as part of collaborative research and design project.
Cosmic Colliery -
Engaged ex-mining communities in the Rhymney Valley with the possibility of the local abandoned Penallta Colliery becoming an underwater astronaut training centre. The proposal was to work with a group of people in the community of South Wales and engage with the surreal possibility that there could be a astronaut training centre in the Valleys. His proposal was to figure out how to acknowledge change in the area and to centre them around the youth in the areas ambitions and their ideas. Methods he used for engaging with this audience, was a combination in expressing an interest regularly at the youth centre to build trust and interact with them without being imposing.
By using this immersive approach in their own environment to understand the people, cultures, expertise, histories, material culture, and infrastructure. This knowledge is then reconfigured with the involved people through the creation of artifacts, performances, and films, which provide the means to speculate on new possibilities for that environment.
On reflection, this made me release how important is was to immerse myself within The Repair Cafe community, and how important is is to with my responsibility to reflect their voices and acknowledgement is so important within my own project. Joe also adds how important it is to observe and listen for our working methods.
How to apply the Research and Reveal techiques to my own project
After listening to the lecture material, I wondered how I could apply this technique of involving and engaging with the volunteer team at The Repair cafe to my own research methodologies. Although I had collected and interviewed a lot of material to use from previous ‘Repair cafes’, there was still plenty to learn. The only problem was that they meet only once a month, and the next one is a week before deadline.