conclusions about what this says about you as a designer
(required: text of approximately 2000 words including clear evidence of research as
necessary and your interpretation of it, citations for quoted material, images as required)
The artifact I’ve chosen is that of a project called “Foodapy” created for a Special Topics class, DART 498F, focusing on the topic of food during the Fall 2009 term. The project is a selection of prototype wooden plates that appear as ordinary plates but in fact have reduced space within them due to their obtrusive but elegant shapes. The aim for the project was allow for passive portion control that would then have positive ripple effect s on the user’s mental and physical health.
In order to better understand how this project represents best my ethics, interests and goals in terms of my work production, I’ve decided to choose the contextualization revisit and to do so with two other projects I previously did.
The first is a project done for DART 391 in the fall 2008 term; it is an activist toolkit called “Plarn” which was later rather defined as a craftivist toolkit done in collaboration with Marian Shaghoury. The basis of the assignment was to create a toolkit that would allow the user to behave as an activist; the rest was up to us. A year earlier I had decided to re-animate an interest in knitting by joining a CSU 101 course and had since been working on the skill and searching the internet for information concerning the craft projects. I eventually found that many crafters were re-using materials to sew and knit. One of the materials was plastic bags due to their great abundance and negative effects on the environment. The coined term for plastic bag yarn is Plarn, and it was very easy to find a tutorial on how to make some with my own plastic bags. This was the basis for the toolkit and it was developed into a triangular box that contained three different types of reusable yarn that came out from 3 different holes allowing for 3 people to knit at once.
The idea was that the user would choose a location and create a knitting group where they went, as they knit with Plarn, handspun newspaper or an old nightgown. This act would incite interest from people passing by and that would begin their role as a craftivist where they would explain the current problems with plastic bags and garbage that could have a new life in the form of knitting or crocheting. Along with the box, a zine was created to hand out during the random knitting group sessions which had information on plastic bags, a tutorial and links to project ideas, etc..
The second is a project done for DART 392 in collaboration with Aria Campbell-Kelly and Derek Broad. We had been assigned to create an object that could be used in an apartment for the urban nomad that can been easily transported, packed and moved. We choose to create an organizational/storage piece that also accommodated our own needs. Initially we went through various ideas of having boxes that stacked in order to hold various materials.
Our requirements were that we could store Aria’s precious stones, Derek’s bike repair materials and my crafting materials all in one place. At that point I personally began to be interested in felting and fought very hard to convince my teammates to consider the medium as an effective way to store each of our materials. Through discussions with the teacher and research, we discovered that it would end up being a historical component of our project as for some of the first nomads, namely the Mongolians, felt is at the center of their lives, it is what clothes them and houses them, wool is essential to them. Eventually we decided on a collapsible box that was covered in a large felted piece that could be removed and thus became a working space. Within it were smaller felted bowls of different sizes that could hold each of our materials.
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