This morning's class began with a lecture down in The Pit where the lecturers were clarifying the visual brief deliverables, and also defining what they meant by 'blogs' and 'reflective diaries'.
In all honesty, it was pretty obvious how to go about the reflective diary right from the start, as we've had to do it for literally every class we've had for the last couple of years, so I was surprised at how many people still couldn't wrap their heads around a 'reflective diary'.
Once we headed on up to the Studio, we continued trying to define our standpoint for the brief, and trying to break it down further and become more specific through the use of journey maps. The journey map was an effective way to find all the smaller aspects of a reasonably large timeline, and then focus in on the most important parts.
At the end of class, we went along to the first EXCHANGE session. This was quite interesting as it gave me an opportunity to find out how other disciplines are reacting to the brief around well-being. It was quite cool seeing how their research differs from ours, and what sorts of stances they were taking on the matter.
During the EXCHANGE session I shared how I had been looking at the '5 Ways of Wellbeing' and the students from the other disciplines found it really interesting and said they hadn't actually used that model during their research, and it gave them another path to research and look into to further their understanding.
At the beginning of class we had a lecture in The Pit, where we found out about a few different methods such as the S.L.I.P method, as well as the Empathy Map method. These are more effective means of critical thinking and diving deeper into the project.
Once returning up to the Studio, we began working on the empathy map method first, which we used 'Sean Morris' as our person we were investigating. I had interviewed him over the weekend and found out a lot of useful information. Sean is a footballer who currently plays for Wellington Olympic AFC, although has previously moved country to country to play in Holland, Armenia, as well as travelling from the USA to New Zealand. He was a perfect example to use as he had moved both city to city and country to country, and had described some differences to me, as well as saying how each country's culture had a huge impact on whether or not it was an enjoyable experience.
We then moved onto creating S.L.I.P technique, where we sorted all of the different aspects into lists, integrated them into less but larger groups, and then prioritised each group.
Both of these techniques helped us view it from a whole different angle, and we came up with a few ideas along the way. When moving to play for a football team, you're already given a chance to get along with minimum 20 players from your team who share at least one major common interest, so it is an easy way to avoid awkward situations. This could be an interesting idea to look at for the project, trying to find some sort of way for people moving cities or countries (not necessarily for sport) to be put in some sort of group when they arrive where it saves them physically going out of their way to try and meet people.
I have attached some photos below from our processes.
By Friday, we will continue to brainstorm around this topic and see what else we can come up with. We will look to further use these critical thinking methods to explore the idea further.
Over the course of the weekend, I got in touch with a bunch of footballers from my team, and some I previously knew from back in Taupo, who I know have all moved cities or countries to pursue a footballing career.
They were all more than happy to sit down and chat with me about why they moved, and then the difficulties of moving etc, and from my end it was helpful for the project, and interesting to hear about in general, which helped the conversation flow and stay very genuine. I called each one of them on the phone, and for most of the conversations we were chatting for a good 20 to 30 minutes, and got some really valuable information.
I interviewed 6 players for a starter, a range of ages, distances, and reasons for moving, although I have plenty more that had offered to give me some information if I need more. I will print off the notes from the interviews and I'll place them in my physical workbook.
On Tuesday, I will share the information with Georgia and we will see where we can go from here.
Class today began in one of the lecture theatres in Block 4. We had Tim, Tristam and Karl all speak to us about areas of design, and how design is developing as more and more technology becomes available. I found these lectures extremely interesting as it helps us view design from a whole different perspective, and really see just how fast it is progressing.
Afterwards, we went back to our studios, had a quick debrief of the lectures, and then got into pairs. I am paired up with Georgia Bailey-Murdoch for this first part of the assignment, so we began brainstorming ideas. We had both read over and analysed the reading about moving cities, so we decided to do that.
Georgia was really keen to look from the angle of moving cities when in a relationship, where as I was more interested in looking at it from a sporting angle, about specifically for football (soccer).
Towards the end of the class we spoke to Phoebe and she seemed more intrigued by the sporting idea, saying it offered more potential and was a bit more exciting.
By next week, we are required to interview a few people about our topic and gather some research. A lot of the footballers in my team have moved down to Wellington specifically for football, so I'm looking using them as sources of information. It will also be really interesting to find out more detail about why they actually moved and how they coped, stuff that we don't usually talk about at football. I'm excited to see how it differs from moving country to country for sport, to just moving to another city.
Today's class was our introduction to the paper, in which is a 12 week paper worth 100% of the grade. We began in The Pit for an overview of the semester, and we were informed about how the whole semester is going to pan out, in terms of collaboration, working in teams, and the EXCHANGE between disciplines.The whole semester sounds quite interesting the way it is structured out in comparison to previous 6 week projects.
We then went up to the studio for a bit and we began discussing what we had done in our last holidays, looking at the difference between practice, habitual, and ritual things we had done.
We finished by having a read of one of the three readings, and then regrouping to discuss and summarize each of the three to get a clear idea.
By Friday's class, we have been asked to read the readings, and then choose one which we are most interested in and would like to work with.
