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[designforsocialimpact]

22 - midterm week, 3d printing, and first draft thesis submissions

This week fast-forwards. It’s post Spring Break, it’s midterm week and it’s go time for thesis drafts!

Monday started it all off with our thesis writing class where everyone debriefed their difficulties. Lilian covered the requirements for the writing and the bibliography. We each had particular misgivings and questions but the overall attitude was just to get it done.

Tuesday Rica and I went to 3d printing class to see how the equipment in 303 worked and didn’t work…and then worked again. These 3d printers are quite fickle. It reminds me of when the internet was a thing and loading one page could take an entire day. After 3 hours Rica managed to print a mock-up of his final project. He was pretty chuffed! Later that night we had a makeup class on Ethic and Social Responsibility. Half of the lecture was wrapping up arguments about how capitalism takes the shine, drains the drive and can sometimes warp design. How does one work in legitimate projects without playing the fiddle to capitalism?  The other half of the lecture was an intro to Man vs. Nature with a William McDonough TedTalk about circular design. Oh cradle to cradle for the win! I wish we had started here since THIS is what tugs on my mind. Wednesday we had a visit with Sabine about our individual projects. [I do a skype call since Wednesdays are my workshop days and I’m normally testing prototypes at PCA.] By the end of the day messages on whatsapp slowed way down and keyboard tacking sped up. Tackity-tap-tap. We all worked to spiffy up our thesis drafts in time for the Thursday submission. Thursday the Sprout Workshop hosted the final lecture. Our group presented a future forecast of Ikea becoming IKEA-gro in the future scenario where we all live in solar punk communities and IKEA provides a nature consultant for in-house gardening and biomimicry products. Other teams present on Uber, IBM and even H&M. Who knew that we could all future forecast something beyond Black Mirror dystopias? [Hang tight for final presentations and posters at end-of-year show!] The future looks bright and green.

Thursday night the lecture series brought in a leader from the social business sector. Her name is Caroline Delboy and she is the Global Happy Team Leader for the social business accelerator MakeSense. Her lecture was mostly about her personal journey. She started in business background but new opportunities brought Disco Soup http://discosoupe.org, makers movement and finally into joining MakeSense community where she switched careers. She gave advice to all of the artists/photographers/social-impact-designers in the room to be true to your passions (what makes your heart break) and try to sync it with how you work best (when do you find yourself in the flow). Crossing my fingers we are all that lucky! After lecture there was an exhibit in the PCA gallery where our colleagues in Transdisciplinary New Media were presenting their work in a show called “Sound/Speech/Noise” with students from  ESAT (Escuela Superior de Arte y Tecnologia) in Valencia. So we got to walk through, talk with our friends, hear their ideas and see folded paper dresses, cubes for communication and gestural sound emotions.

Friday morning was another round of edits and visits with Lilian for the thesis drafts. It’s a safe space in a meeting with Lilian and she gives great advice for writer’s block. Afterwards the weekend finally drifted into view. I pounced on a real escape from non-stop studies, prototypes and work. It’s time to see an exhibit, take in a movie (Black Panther!), and take a walk outside - it’s almost springtime!

[designforsocialimpact]

18 - now we are serious because we have a tea kettle, citizen participation, ethics and other design lessons

This week Master of Design for Social Impact students explore power relations in urban planning, run prototype workshops, develop future speculation analysis, and start questioning ethics in design. Oh yea, and we finally got an electric tea kettle.

Thanks to Amy we finally have a kettle in our classroom. It was such a sweet communal gesture that it inspired a little sprucing up. Painted a corner shelf, got a lamp, folded some paper cubbies, cleaned with tea tree oil and voila! Come on in to our classroom in room 102 of the Paris College of Art. The space looks warm, friendly and downright hygge. Just in time too - no sooner said than bam! We're in Week 3 of the spring semester and thick into our studies.

We have this brilliant class Mondays and Fridays called Social and Urban Governance. In class we talking about power relations in urban actions and discuss Shelly Arnstein's A Ladder of Citizen Participation. I think back on a college internship on Capitol Hill with Congressman Serrano (NY-D, Bronx). I remember the work I did as a diplomat abroad. I think about governance theory and the fragmented ways in which government systems actually work. In all, I find myself thinking cynically (because I'm old enough to know better) but hoping fervently (because I'm also young enough to believe in change). I hope this class helps me dream about what design can impact in the urban/government sector.

Research and Methodology class in the afternoon turns into another writing workshops so we can develop our thesis outline. This week my research buddy Rica and I scribble all over our outlines. We are trying to make everything clean and easily understood. Our session dissolves into back-o-the-class laughter. Inevitable. I'm lucky to have Rica as my partner because he cracks up all the time. And for someone like me who takes things WAY too seriously it's one of the best reminders to chill out and enjoy the littles of life. 

I bustle home in the metro rush hour to skype John Shneider,  the cofounder of a company called 3DFuel. They make biodegradable filament for 3d printing from all kinds of bio-waste including beer, coffee, trash and hemp. https://www.3dfuel.com He's classic hipster in a Fargo warehouse. Kind, quick, eager. I'm nervous and I ask too many questions. He links me to a project where the brown coffee filament they make is actually helping to create prosthetic limbs in matching skin tones for kids. I check out the website. There's a lot of good in this world, eh? http://enablingthefuture.org/lend-a-hand/

Tuesday morning I wake up early with my partner's alarm clock. He's off to work. I'm off to the gym. I pump on the stationary bike, catch up on political comedy skits and see all the hype about the upcoming State of the Union speech back in the U.S.A. Political positions fascinate me as a beautiful and inevitable part of identity and culture. I cannot help wanting to know more - especially since I have so many colleagues and friends who continue to work the political/diplomatic ring.

Home again I set up a series of recipes that I'm testing for my edible packaging concept. I'm extrapolating lessons from raw food cuisine dehydrating to design sealable edible food packaging concepts. Some of my designs are downright wacky (check out this lattice weave of a banana peel plate). But that's part of the experimentation phase. I'm hoping to develop a catalogue of my different designs. But I'm certainly no chemist! Let's just see what happens. 

By Tuesday afternoon I am back in 3D Lab class practicing new tricks on Rhino. This semester we have three new classmates from the interior design degree and they are wizard-fast with the software. I feel silly with my rudimentary skills in comparison (last semester I barely worked out how to make a box print properly, see Week 14) but the goal is to just keep learning. Alessandro, who teaches the class (and just agreed to be my thesis advisor!) is hella patient. He reminds me that I can only get better.

Tuesday evening I create a photo shoot in my office/spare room and hang paper craft bits for a scene promoting my prototype creations. I spend a happy couple of hours cutting, glueing, arranging and testing the scene ready for the prototype. (It's still baking in the dehydrator.) I need to make a presentation that appeals to both adults and to children, so I decided that paper craft images could be an easy way to entice people into a whole new colorful and playful world. Plus, I can't help myself. It's so cute! Here’s how it turned out in post-edit. Ooh, and check out the facebook event for my upcoming artist residency at Living Lab: http://bit.ly/2DZhjxW

Wednesday morning I open up the dehydrator and pull out the newest prototypes that have been setting and dehydrating for 24 hours. They look good and I pack them into a box carefully and cross the city of Paris via metro to MakeSense headquarters. Once there Solene gives us an update presentation on the ways in which MakeSense is changing due in part from our class experience with their massive open online course (MOOC). They have fortified their programs for each volunteer level of participation. 

More interestingly they are trying to reconcile their blursing (blessing/curse) of being a vague international entity. "MakeSense is....tools? a playground? a social thing? a movement?" They've been able to survive on a whole range of descriptions precisely because MakeSense can be different things for different people. But now they are heading into a rebranding to simplify how they present themselves. Good luck, and go make sense of those things.

"Have you eaten yet?.....Would you like to have lunch with me?"    Its time for my mid-week, mid-day workshop testing my prototypes in the PCA gallery (aka student union space.) My workshops do triple duty: 1 - test how the packaging holds food  2 - test how the package gets handled by users 3 - compensate my workshop participants (students love free food) And since very few people know what I'm up to - it's a wonderfully confirming moment to watch their shock and surprise when they open the bag and pull out my packaging. Ta-da! It's confirming for me that there is a place for edible, compostable, biodegradable takeaway packaging in lieu of plastic.

Hanna reminds me later that food waste is also a problem that I exacerbate with my designs. And maybe my design is not circular at all since it doesn't become renewable material. She's absolutely right - I'll have to acknowledge that my packaging wastes food. I'll also have to figure out how to explain that it's not circular design, but it does have a circular mentality. I have to be smarter about my designs and keep trying to do better. Maybe there’s a way to use more food scraps in the design of my prototypes? Hmm...back to the drawing board. In the afternoon I head to the pool at Neuilly-Sur-Seine for a lengthy swim to clear my head. The water is heated and laps in the pool feel effortless. I find in France no matter the pool I go to and no matter the lanes I pick (and they have plaques reading from slow to fast), the entire pool is filled with leisure swimmers paddling around. Fascinating but frustrating. I try to leave a gap for the swimmer ahead of me, forget the workout and just enjoy the swim.

In our second SPROUT workshop session with Maurizio and Laureano Thursday afternoon we test our observant eye for signals. "Look at the next image for 10 seconds, no writing and then tell me what you see." And we learn to pay attention to visual information and to categorize and title each with a concept. We’re not trend-hunting here. We’re future forecasting. It goes beyond the "cool" and into future realities with a subjective point of view. One of the 20 slides shows a 3d printed ear floating in a glass cup of pink liquid. Another shows metallic medical tattoos printed on wrists. Yet another features cars that drive you according to your mental state and not your destination. Each slide makes me wonder what I know about the future. Toto, we're not in Kansas anymore.

In Professional Practices later that night we meet Mathieu Merlet Briand, an artist who frames his work around the digital and technological perception of reality. He shows us his portfolio with marbelized glass created by algorithms of digital material [iceberg] to integrated iron sculptures on the loom [Google Dark Matter]. His generic advice "You will find a solution" sounds vague yet true. Sometimes all those questions we have cannot be answered, you just have to trust yourself to overcome that difficulty when it arises. At home again I watch a documentary called Urbanized (2011) as homework while munching dinner. It showcases the plight of urban planners, politicians, residents, city-dwellers, etc. The documentary highlights 12 different cities and the social impact created or ignored based on planning. I think about all the places I've lived in city-wide project launches. Luanda's marginal construction, London's empty olympic city, Buenos Aires 9 de Julio bus. Design is integral to social impact in city planning. It feels more grounded to finally study practical applications that affect people’s day to day lives in an architectural way.  Friday afternoon we skype Thomas Watkin for Social and Urban governance class - this time about "What is public?" We compare our insights on the readings/documentaries and then talk about how to make a project public. How do you design a public space that allows people access? Allows them to be an audience? Allows an environment that fosters sharing? Its part of understanding the conditions laid out by Kevin Lynch in building Image of the City. We look at fun graphs showing walking spaces, architectural spaces, and public transportation studies. I leave just a little bit early for a private meeting in the gallery hallway of PCA's entrance. Her name is Emilie Prattico and she clips her words with a slight British accent but has a very down-to-earth conversational speech style. She's our professor for Designer's Social and Ethical Responsibilities. I pose a question to her about how to design without using necessarily Human Centered Design (HCD). To me, HCD doesn't seem to be proactively supporting environmental needs. She pivots my question and asks why not include environment when considering an optimal human experience? I'm intrigued but not convinced I understand. I see so much displacement of nature in pursuit of human interests that I struggle to make sense of what is ok and what is not. And how do we know that we are doing ok when only hindsight is 20/20? More questions, less answers....sigh.

We climb the stairs and enter the classroom. A quick shuffle of papers (we have about 5 minutes between one class and the next in the evenings.) We spend the first rounds of conversation talking about our program, what we're doing and what were are studying. Emilie works full time and she teaches on the side. She confirms that she is passionate - Friday night/Saturday all-day classes means that all of us will have to be committed too. Considering my question earlier, I feel grateful that we’re finally talking about the ethical issues. When class lets out early Rica invites everyone out to eat at a tiny Italian place around the corner from his place. Pizza? Yes. The music bips in the background, sourdough bread wafting, and we wait impatiently for our orders. We scarf down dinner while talking about Palermo, Italy (Hanna has a new job there potentially), New Zealand (Vaila is considering doing some back-packing), and Berlin, Germany (Rica is intending on going straight back to his company who he desperately misses.) I'll be in Paris for the foreseeable future. But you never know where a project might take you, eh? Saturday morning I head to the gym with my partner. I love lifting weights and he's a great gym partner. Doesn't yell, doesn't compete. Just does his bit and helps me when I ask for it. I love working out together. I shower at the gym and then head right back to PCA where we have a second lecture in Designer's Social and Ethical Responsibility. We go through a slide deck, watch a documentary, talk about theory, watch conference lectures on Youtube, talk some more, and of course, have some tea. Here's the quotes I pulled from our conversation in our ethic class: "theory can be a bummer" "your experience of your values is NOT the same thing as your values" "if you blindly accept then you give up your rights" "now you have tools to analyze very complex problems that arrive" "what you do with the lenses is to focus on different parts of the situation" "we generate reason from rational discourse with each other. Doesn't come from on high, doesn't come from a book. Everyone generates it through dialogue that is honest, equal, respectful..."

Afterwards, I walk into drizzles of rain towards the canals of St. Martin. I'm meeting my partner for noodles at Tien Hiangs. This place is always hopping, but class ended early and we're able to make it before the rush comes through at 20h. A vegan bowl of pho, a gorgeous basket of dumplings and my darling partner to share it with! What more can a girl ask for? 

Sunday is studying, reading, writing, etc. I jump through 17 new articles related to composting, recycling, packaging, plastic, etc. I'm drowning in sources but I still cannot get enough to capture all the information I'll need. I'm sending in today my first draft of the thesis. I know it will go through many revisions, but I want it to be as close to finished as possible. This whole month of February is going to squeeze us like a sausage factory. Both Social and Urban Governance and Designer's Social and Ethical Responsibility are front-loaded so that we finish the course requirements March-ish. This would give us time to create our thesis and individual projects afterwards, except that due dates are also front-loaded so that our thesis are due in early April. So right now it feels rushed and hectic, but it will slow down as the weather gets better and as the semester winds down.    Just gotta keep on track...which reminds me I feel like going for a run. It would be a nice way to rinse out my mind this Sunday afternoon.  A long run always feels good. So I head to the neighborhood athletic track with my partner. We bounce on the rubber path and fall into rhythm of step. Just gotta keep on track and moving forward. 

SMarti out.

[designforsocialimpact]

21.5 - Spring break living lab

Last week was spring break for PCA...and taste-testing for SMarti thesis on edible packaging at Carrefour Numerique² at Cite de Science et de l’Industrie.

My small exhibit space at their event "Au Fil du Plastique" let me share my project with around 200 people. I did roughly 80 presentations and 42 separate workshop tests which accelerated my edible packaging concept into a stronger and more appealing design.

Just a quick background - Carrefour Numerique² is in Cité des sciences et de l’industrie and they host many different events and exhibits throughout the year. They have an open Fab Lab space with 3d printers, laser cutters and  they host maker talks and science exhibits. Luck was on my side this year because they were hosting an event relating to plastic. I got in touch last semester thanks to PCA Associate Dean Klaus Fruchtnis who suggested reaching out. I emailed them a blurb about my anti-plastic packaging thesis project. A couple email exchanges later, a formal presentation (see Week 14) got me a small part in their planned event called "Au Fil du Plastique." The project revolved around plastic - my thesis on plastic packaging and eco-alternatives packaging design fit in nicely. Win for them because it's an interactive experience for museum-goers to taste-test prototypes. Win for me because I needed lots of opinions to guide me in developing a better prototype.

The whole event was a three tiered process. A) I made a stand out of boxes, tubes, cardboard, and alligator clips, entertaining for children (belly-button down) and information dense for adults (head space up). B) Opening event presentation (all in french - woot!) to share my work with other like-minded makers. Then C) in the days that followed I did mini-presentations with all kinds of families visiting and did taste-testing workshops with volunteers. Results? Overall, over 72% of respondents enjoyed the edible sample, 60% understood the edible packaging concept, although over 68% had traditional hesitations about it (e.g. hygiene, sanitation, purpose.) Only 10% of respondents could point to edible packaging concepts existing in France (ice cream cones.) While everyone had different taste, a smooth flax-meal blend with carrot food scrap use ranking highest. The best part was hearing from the younger participants who wild and fun encouragement to give me about making packaging out of chocolate, rice, savory flavors, and even designing dishes with walking legs, etc. 

My advice to future student/artists wanting to do a residency at Living Lab:1) have a project that needs public testing, 2) make your visuals big and durable and have physical things to lure them in (I used spoons molded from sugarcane and potato to pass around and then physically walked people into my exhibit space), 3) set your schedule early for workshop days, 4) brush up your french (intermediate level at the least) 5) prep a volunteer release form for permission for photos/videos/workshop participation. Thank you to all who came and volunteered to taste-test my crazy idea. And a big shout out to Carrefour Numerique² for giving me a chance!