Design Domain Y2 – Part 1 – Interaction Design & Design for Performance and Interaction

10.30.2017 ~ 17.11.2017

– Part 1: Course Structure

It runs in Weeks 7, 8 and 9 of Semester 1, and Weeks 4, 5 and 6 of Semester 2.
Design Domain is research-led and practice-led. It helps you explore your design process by relating it to ideas and practice within your own design subject discipline and to ideas and practice beyond your own discipline in the wider ‘domain’ of design, including the crossdisciplinary cultural ideas and thinking that inform it. Design Domain asks you to push your practice and to develop your understanding of what you do, how you do it, and why.
Design Domain involves your own tutors, plus visiting speakers and practitioners. It kicks off with a large-scale crossdisciplinary Symposium on Monday October 30^th 2017. This involves a variety of invited speakers. This Symposium is not intended to have direct links to the specifics of your studio project brief; instead it’s designed to act as a provocative and critical launchpad for your thinking process.
During the Design Domain blocks, in-studio activities and self-led learning give you a space to explore your practice, and you build on your practice through research and thinking through making. Each studio frames its project briefs in relation to one or more of the core thematics (see below), and this year these thematics are deliberately designed to interrelate, given the importance of the issues.
At the end of each Design Domain block, you’ll be exhibiting your work in an Open Studios event, where all students and staff have the right to roam, to view, to discuss and to reflect. The assessed summative submission for Design Domain will be portfolio-based, and it will reflect your process of critical thinking and reflection as well as the making of an artefact or artefacts, according to your studio project brief.

This year I did one of different project than last year. Project called “Design Domain”. This project that students in the first, second, and third grades were working on the same theme with the characteristics of each department. This year’s theme was “Bodies, Identities, Engagement and Action”.

This project was a bit different from the one we had each time. This project have to choose 3 out of 12 lectures. we had to apply for a lecture according to your own work topic or interests.

At the same time, four subjects were taught simultaneously in different places, and a total of three different lectures could be selected. The last class lecture consisted of a common class that all had to be taken. The lecture progress was about an hour and a half for each presenter explaining one of the four themes above in relation to his or her work. I think it was interesting lectures.

The next day, our tutors present what is Design Domain and what we are going on. And they suggest way of Interaction Design students would be good to solve the idea in the direction of the diagram below.

Tutor present information that related diagram above. After that, we had a brief discussion as a group. This project did not have many workshops or lectures. There were only four tutorials. This project was a self-developed project that focused on self-determination of students throughout the project and developed their own ideas.

Below is what I thought about this project.

In the 2017/18 design domain, the subject of “Bodies, Action, Engagement, Identity” was given. The subjects above are related to our lives and are the connections necessary to understand the life. As a designer who thinks about ‘the world in which we live’ and ‘designing life in that world’, it gives us a lot of issues.

During the past two weeks, I have read books on the subject, browsed the Internet, and visited various exhibitions and workshops. But I have not found my answer yet. Many thoughts came and went, but it was difficult to get a clear answer. Everything I think seemed important.

But in the future, I will build up various experiences and knowledge as I live, and eventually I believe that it will help me find my own answers. So now I want to write down about what I feel in 2017.

Designers should be able to identify and read new values of objects with different visions and perspectives than ordinary people. And I think it is the basic role of designers to make human life richer and valuable with creative ideas. ‘Finding traces’ and ‘city reading’ is another way to understand the city we are always in contact with and to discover new value.

Traces do not exist at present, but they express things that existed in the past. The trace is a ‘niche existence’ between existence and non-existence, and is a medium that connects past and present. These traces scattered in the city are deeply correlated to ‘cultural memories’ and change space into place. Finding and interpreting these traces leads to city reading.

Traces doesn’t have purposes or intentions. They are ambiguous and uncertain, and are discovered and their meaning is created. Meeting with the unintentionally left traces, and memories and recollections that coincidentally work in this encounter is the beginning of reading the traces of urban space. Due to the nature of these traces, various interpretations are possible depending on the observer. After all, I think we can dismantle the existing discourse of the city and present new interpretations of the city.

In addition, ‘finding the trace’ is an effort to understand the object, and is a self-reflection of the life that is routinely given. And it is also the expression of ‘love’ about the world where I live ‘life’ now.

Through this trace reading, I looked at the city as follows. 1. Where mutual understanding, interaction, social participation or interaction occurs simultaneously = Engagement, 2. Physical Space = Bodies, 3. where various actions occur and they are gathered together and experienced = Action, 4. Urban identity from attitude and motivation = Identity.

Let’s look at the inside of the city in more detail

paths, the streets, sidewalks, trails, and other channels in which people travel;
edges, perceived boundaries such as walls, buildings, and shorelines;
districts, relatively large sections of the city distinguished by some identity or character;
nodes, focal points, intersections or loci;
landmarks, readily identifiable objects which serve as external reference points.

Five things above are sees as ‘The Image of the City (KevIn Lynch)’, based on these basic structures, the city has become a richer complex by gathering various regions with diverse characteristics. Values, beliefs, behaviors, and traces that occur in it have been accumulated for centuries, creating a places of the present. These connected places are called ‘landscapes’, and landscapes are a part of the culture created by human beings and embedded in human will.

A city is a place and landscape where many people, including designers, base their lives, and is an organism that changes and progresses. How much do we know and understand about the city we live in 2017?

I think I hardly know the city where I live. Usual things I meet every day are just passing by. I was not looking at everything. It is very difficult to realize what I missed on myself. This is why it is necessary to actively explore cities as designers.

I think that designers should pay more attention to everyday urban spaces than to philosophical and theoretical urban spaces that are a little bit distant from our lives. Everydayness is easy to be ignored because they are small and trivial traces. However, cities without everyday life are not colorful and empty. Therefore, it is very important to read everyday traces in a city, which is a public space, and this also leads to interest in their daily life.

There are also ‘historical traces’ in the city. Therefore, the urban space can relate to the individual and collective traces and memories There are several devices in the urban space to protect them. For example, monuments that intentionally preserve memories often give the city an identity. Through them we recall and remember the past. A city with various traces can be described as a kind of “memory store”.

To better understand these everyday attributes and historical attributes, I suggest “city reading”. The data of numerous events that occur and disappear every day in the city leave traces. In this process some things are not found, and some are successfully recorded as data.

These are gathered to become traces, spaces, and places that have forms, behaviors, and meanings. In accordance with the characteristics of Interaction Design, I try to do data visualization work from the viewpoint of the designer to explore the city as if reading a book.

The approach to urban space begins with exploration, which starts with ‘walking’. Walking is a kind of meditation accompanied by physical experience. Therefore, urban space should be able to guarantee walking. Designers should be able to contributes to the process of finding traces(data) accumulated in the city through walking and experiencing new discovery and these lead to the development of the city and the improvement of the life of the public.

It is important to present new ideas, but it is also important to visualize new data, media, and materials in a way that people can easily understand. That is, accessibility and communication. If the public feels distant, it becomes no longer a daily routine. Designers should be with the daily routine of the public.

In the present that the artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and augmented reality are beginning to become popular, and the rapid development of technology can be experienced, these ‘Finding traces’ and ‘city reading’ lead us to rethink where we come from, where we are, where we go. These give a direction on how the designer should handle the place.

Designers must read and interpret the city by walking themselves along the traces. In the process, fierce consideration about human, human life, and design are needed. I think that the preparation for the future starts from the understanding of past and present. And in the city, there is the human past and the present.

Let me briefly talk about my work direction, this semester, I will use photographs and videos to explain the overall outline of the work and make a simple plan. In addition, I will also produce a random photo collection and upload the video to YouTube using the QR code.

In the design domain 2 of the second half semester, I want to visualize the abstract concept of ‘finding traces’ and ‘city reading’ using virtual reality (VR) equipment and tools such as Tilt Brush and look at everyday urban space from various angles by using drone. I will also experiment with how these works can give me or others new experiences.

My work is not about criticizing something and suggesting entirely new ideas. It is just a work to make every day urban space more interesting than ever before.