Whakatinana Lecture Reflection & Week 2 Workshops

Whakatinana Lecture Reflection:

In today’s lecture we were challenged to think about whether we could identify an overarching “theme” or “trend” underpinning all of the projects we have done throughout our time at Massey (or even also the projects we have done in our spare time). This was part of the talk we were given on the Maori concept of Whakatinana, which roughly means to manifest, bring about, realise, make real, show plainly. While my first thought was that I couldn’t identify anything similar between the projects I have completed, as I like to stick my hand in lots of different cookie jars and therefore these projects range from graphic design, video, web, user experience, to illustration and photography, I started to realise that I could in fact start to see common key ideas popping up if I looked at it less literally. By digging deeper into what the key concepts of these projects were rather than the actual “issue” or “topic” of the project I began to notice that I tend to develop projects that focus on ideas such as empathy and trying to connect to the viewer on an emotional level, sharing stories, revealing something to the viewer, creating something for people to connect to, persuasion, campaigning for an issue etc. When I look at this list it makes me happy - I DO like to do these things with design, they are very important to me, and I didn’t know that everything I have done could link back to these concepts before I was challenged to critically analyse what I make. It is interesting to then turn to my initial concept/ideas for my major project and realise that most of these ideas can all be found in my fumbling thoughts about what I want this project to achieve - and the ones that aren’t quite part of those thoughts yet I now know want to include.


Workshops:

This week we had to sign up and attend two workshops which were supposed to help us start collecting our thoughts into an actual project direction. I attended the Communications workshop first with Tristam and Patricia. We were given an example project to rapidly ideate (in teams) either visual or interactive/technical outcomes for and then share with another group. I found this task fun and it definitely threw us back in the deep end of trying to answer complex social issues with design, getting us back in the university frame of mind opposed to holiday mode, but I feel like I left the workshop not quite sure how it was supposed to help me solidify my ideas as in my opinion rapid ideation will be more appropriate when we actually have a project question we are trying to answer.

The second workshop I attended was Semiotics with Karl and Lee. This workshop taught us about looking at "things", "topics", "issues" etc through different lenses such as style, philosophy, cultural formation to help us understand every aspect of our idea and perhaps to reveal a new avenue to explore or a new angle to focus on. This was a bit more relevant to the stage we're at with our projects so I feel like this workshop was definitely more useful than the first one I attended, but I still feel like they could have expanded on these concepts more and perhaps walked us through more examples to make it clearer. At the end of the workshop Lee sat at our table and went around asking us about our project ideas. When it got to my turn I told him that I was looking at raising awareness of horse riders on the road - sort of a public safety campaign, he was initially confused about why horse riders need to be on the road in the first place and whether I was sure I wasn't the only person encountering this problem. I was shocked as to me, growing up rurally and being involved in horse riding since I was young, it seemed obvious that yes, horse riders do need to use the road, and yes, there is a huge issue of riding on the road being a big risk in New Zealand because of discourteous, uneducated drivers. So I guess this revealed to me that I will need to be prepared for these sort of questions as not everyone (in fact the vast majority it seems) of both teachers and other students at uni do not come from the same sort of background as me so have totally different worldviews on this issue. He then went on to tell me to remain open minded and started giving examples of more conceptual projects (such as "An ecosystem of a country road") that I could explore. I left the class feeling disheartened as I felt he entirely missed the point of my concept and was shooting down my idea, but upon further reflection I've decide he was just trying to show that you don't have to approach a more "issue" based idea as a huge society-changing campaign, but that issues can also be explored through more conceptual design means - which I did need to hear and has already started my mind off in a slightly new, exciting direction.