Final Design Studio IV Bitacora Entry

As this semester and course comes to a close, I’ve chosen reflect on the course and my learnings as a whole unlike past entries which I have typically reflected on the past week (or few).

Contrasting the beginning vs the end of the course

At the beginning of the course, as I explained in my first entry, I know what I want to do after graduation clearly. I still need to define the term properly but I know I want to be ‘The Reverse Starchitect’ - a industrial designer who explores and works a bit in architecture.

After over a dozen weeks of this course of exploring and practicing strategic design, my view of how I view my career and life in the future has not changed drastically. But, I feel like I have learnt quite a lot.

My Key Learnings

A key, not as insightful learning but important, is an overall understanding of what strategic design is. Strategic design is a discipline of design that is not as straightforward to understand compared to others such as graphic design, product design, interior design, branding, etc. Before this course, I assumed it would be very similar to a business strategy course where you strategize a plan for the direct benefit of a business. This answer can fall into strategic design (but not the best assumption) but it does not make up the entirety of strategic design. I’ve learnt that strategic design is the application of many different design tools, some that we have learnt in previous classes and some new material, to help solve complex or systemic problems. These problems can range from an organizational problem to a much larger scale problem within a community, group, and/or place.

Another learning for me was much more personal. I’ve explained in previous entries that for my specific project, I have more distanced connection to it compared to my peers due to never really feeling the need to consume to make myself feel valuable or to fill a void. My peers don’t have the same mindset as myself and feel more of an urge to consume. Due to this, I have left my peers talk more to get their ideas out since they have more insights. As the semester has gone along, I have realized the importance of contrasting opinions/views no matter the circumstance. I would like to emphasize ‘no matter the circumstance’. Because prior to this class, I would have likely said that some scenarios likely do not need as much of a opposing view due to it being objectively correct. When it comes to tackling consumption, to me, I did not see it as a issue of correct or incorrect. I saw it as a ‘over-consumption and advertising is a problem - I see the problem but I may not be as much of a player in this problem’. So I had viewed that a view of not being affected by adveritsing manipulation to over-consume was useless because the issue of overconsumption and advertising is a real issue and it is the problem we are facing. But after this, I feel that in these types of scenarios where I believe that there is a true answer, it is still important to view the issue from other perspectives.

Finally, I feel like I still have much to learn about it but I have learnt a lot about why people have the need to consume. People have insecurities. Most people do and I have/had insecurities. People have a variety of different insecurities and they deal with them in different ways. My personal insecurities and the way I face them don’t make me want/”need” to consume. I just live with them. But others try to tackle them head on but do not have the correct tools. They try to fit into or look a certain way by trying to solve them. These solutions include, but limited to, buying a specific piece of clothing/brand, buying specific perfumes/colognes, or buying makeup. I have also learnt about advertising. I had known about advertising prior to this course but never really thought about it as much until now. Based on conversations I have had recently, I have paid more attention to some ads and tried to connect them to what I have discussed. And, ideas of trying to fit in, being like ‘x’ person/stereotype, or attacking insecurities have really sunk into my brain now compared to prior to this class.

What I will take away from this course

I think that the main aspect from this class that I will be taking away and applying to my future was from my group’s ethnographic research. My group went to Calle de Fuencarrell to both interview and view people who were shopping and walking on the street. We had found some interesting insights from this time. What I will take away from this is how people interact with places, how people interact with others, and how people act in general. In the future, I want to design Pavilions. As I am not an architecture student and not done much work in the field, I am no expert in architecture as of now. I understand that people interact with spaces and how places have an main purpose. But, the experiment in specific helped me think about how people act both consciously and subconsciously. One guy we interviewed, who is in a queue outside of Emestudios store, told us that he was queued because other people are queued. This taught me that people will do things because other people do things. And when it comes to spaces, people will follow people. I had been doing stuff like it myself without even realizing. When I travel and see people taking photos from a certain place, I will also go and check it out because they are also there. As a result, I feel like it is important to understand and see how people with a place to see if people will follow others based on their actions.

Another thing I feel like I will take away it the idea of someone who teaches vs. the teacher. It had clarified to me that I want to be someone who teaches but is not a teacher. I often find myself teaching my peers about certain topics for courses including Rhino 3D, 3D printing, product design ideation, and more. I would like to do this in my future on a peer-to-peer level similar to how my professors and many of my peers have over the last several years. But unlike my professors, I do not want to be teaching in the situation of a university or school. The location and hierarchy is how I define the difference between someone who just teaches vs a teacher/professor.

Thoughts on the Bitacora

I am not a big fan of this specific bitacora. I understand the rough idea to show your learnings and takeaways from the course. But, I find it difficult to express myself in a bitacora-styled way. For my thesis, I want to have a component that is relatively similar but not identical to it. For it, I am making an open-source platform for industrial design and craft. Despite in being in a different format that this bitacora, the goal is for users to upload steps, blueprints, and findings from their own persoanl designs and crafts. And I want an emphasis of the writing to be about their experience in using a specific material or technique and what they learnt from it with a goal of sharing to others about how they should/could approach making their own design.

Looking specifically for this course and the bitacora, I don’t think it was the best thing for me. I understand that I am at a university and I am here to learn. I usually feel that the final outcome is what deserves the highest value for a grade and that outcome typically represents/shows the learnings the student(s) have made along the way. And I feel that typically, from discussions and/or attitudes, those learnings can be shown throughout the semester.