at a few progressive steps, we should include what's it's been like, what it is like, and what we think working in transdisiplinary teams is good, bad, why etc.
our own team reflections, to be filled-in: in regards to being in this class this quarterdata collection / analysis
we're collecting now...we'll fill-in soon, progressively.
New inspiration:
You can read more about Chief Seattle...wikipedia's got him. 'The speech attributed to Si’ahl, as re-written by others, has been widely cited as "powerful, bittersweet plea for respect of Native American rights and environmental values"[1].'
& I wasn't exaggerating; you need to check out Gabe's blog about food:
A story about one family's quest to fix their relationship with food.
"...I want them to see food as something that nurtures us, that makes us stronger, that has no power over us. I hope to instill in them that we can enjoy food in healthy ways that should never involve guilt. Hell I want that for myself. So that is my journey now, that is what I hope to document with this blog. "
RESEARCH METHOD: sandplay
what is sandplay?
sandplay's origins:
why sand?
who uses sandplay?
how do people analyze sandplay?
how is what we're doing different from how sandplay has been used traditionally?
we are not therapists. we are researchers using sandplay...
DATA COLLECTION: we had lots of people from lots of different disciplines sandplay about the future, in relation to food, innovation and sustainability. the prompt we gave all the people (both groups and individuals) a similar prompt: imagine the future, approximately 100 years from now...the year 2112. what's the world like? in relation to food, sustainability, and innovation. some creators wanted more constraints on the prompt, so some people, we asked them to think locally, in terms of Ohio, or Columbus in 100 years from now.
we documented each of the completed sandplay trays from a bird's-eye view, top down, using still digital photography. we video-recorded each person / group's explanations of their "worlds", so that we could have their audio information connected to their visualizations of their ideas. we could have been more thorough by documenting their building process. observing that information would have made our data more rich. however, this is what we pulled together in about two weeks...no time to document and analyze everything...but in a perfect world, there would be enough time...
ANALYSIS: we analyzed the info separately by watching the sandplayer's explanation video's on youtube. we all took notes, shared them, and got together and talked about our insights from the data collected, the research. Bob's taken still's from the videos and annotated them, which is a great strategy so we can get a glimpse into the 3D world of the sandplay.
here are images of my analysis of the videos
-bob
INSIGHTS:
we joined forces...Shay and Cory joined the team...Dave is exploring with another awesome team, & we will link to that team's further investigations.
and as always, we're thinking of new ideas and pointing to our inspirations:
I read this passage to the new group at one of our outdoor, Friday meetings. From this Ming Dynasty fairytale, called: "The Fairy's Rescue". It's worth reading in it's entirety...but here's the premise before the passage about farming. And farming, according to this tale, is the ideal form of human existence. When running a farm there is no time for "boredom or idle melancholy". The video will so down so you can read the passage.
The beginning of the story is about some old guy, in his 70s, who wants to marry a 17 yr-old girl. Long story short, he comes up with a bunch of "strings of cash" and the family allows marriage. The girl's brother returns from war very upset and instigates the old man to the point where the old man and his young wife dissapear the next day. The brother follows them into a world that is not mortal, and it turns out that the old man is some demi-god figure of "eternal joy", or something like that. The girl was also now a demi-god, and this was her desinity that she was vaguely aware of as a very, very young mortal. The brother was also destined to join the immortals, but because of his arrogance and rage, is sentenced to the mortal plane for forever. His one day in this immortal place equaled 20 mortal years. When the brother returned to the mortal plane, his parents were dead, and he is left alone to survey mortals in some sort of war like fashion, like a immortal, mortal soldier. that's the back story, but the part about farming is very applicaiple to our study of food, sustainability innovation. We're in search of a desired human experience that links these three topics into a solution for the future.
Diving into the world of hip music, that hip people know about:
This song's about harmful additives and colorings in foods and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
This entire album by MF Doom is about food. If you have a taste for high-level, intellectual lyrics and hip-hop, listen to this song. Listen to this album. Here are all the song titles off of the album:
"MM..Food?": by MF Doom and featured DJs and artists, samples from everything from Sesame Street to Fat Albert:
1. Beef Rapp 2. Hoe Cakes 3. Potholderz 4. One Beer 5. Deep Fried Frenz 6. Poo-Putt Platter 7. Fillet-O-Rapper 8. Gumbo 9. Fig Leaf Bi-Carbonate 10. Kon Karne 11. Guinnesses 12. Kon Queso 13. Rapp Snitch Knishes 14. Vomitspit 15. Kookies
So, we went to the farmer's market in Dublin, OH. Me, Cory (this Cory's a boy, not the girl, also Cory, a girl, in this group.) and Nick...Nick is also in Liz's class and is very cool. I will link to Nick's team's research soon... Anyways, both guys are senior Industrial Design students at OSU. Cory has been investigating sandplay for about 6 months now, and just made a very beautiful table that is made for a sandtray. It can be vertical, for adults, or more like a coffee table for children. I will link to Cory's work soon.
Nick Weidinger's senior thesis is super interesting, check out his wiki. He's built a 6-pronged joint thingie and asked people to make "seats" from it. The top 30 projects will debut at OSU's Urban Art Space in about a week...Early June, 2010. His concept is amazing, generative, and collaborative, check out what people have created.
I made a pretend seat for one of my toys, you can check it out at my wikiseat page. One question: do you like transformers?
Oh, and the music in this video is my friend Michael Bridgeman, a student at CCAD, studying product & graphic design. They just did a project with Victoria's Secret...Anyways, I'll link to his MySpace music page soon...it's so much better w/bass. This video is very treble...my apologies. I wish I were an actual video editor instead of a screen capture user...wah-wah. I definitely listen to Michael's five tracks over and over again...and his AP stuff is pretty great too...links coming soon...
this is a separate, but related experiment from the maketools. goal: to provoke the ideas we'd been experiencing by studying food...provoke random people...just to make them think about food. we set up on the oval, a pedestrian, high-traffic area on OSU's campus. we set up two baskets hanging from a tree: one full of bananas, one full of potato chips. why hang food from trees? check out our week 3: ideas
it was a hilarious. enjoy!
Wow, this was a surprisingly fun experiment! We came into this with almost no idea of how people would act in the scenario. The research that we gathered was broad and very interpretable. We took photos from multiple angles and video taped simultaneously. This allowed us to spread out and witness a wider range of people involved. It also helped disguise us as being involved in the experiment. It was important to the provocation that the object was what the participants were involved with and not us.
-Bob
DATA:
we conducted a few experiments. three. all three of our workshop participants went through similar preparatory experiences, and made our topic come to life in a new way. each group were asked to express a food experience within their group. our three workshops were all conducted on Tuesday, April 27th, 2010
we made sure everyone was comfortable with us recording the sessions for our research, and had them sign a simple release form:
here are some samples of our "letter to" activity. we asked our participants to write a letter to food experience as "homework" before the workshops. we received everyone's letters just before the workshop sessions.
thank you Gabe, Kelly, Taurean and Ale for letting us share your creativity. these letters are the cream of the crop!
you must, positively must check out Gabe's blog, For the Love of Food, right now. click it. go. enjoy.
before our participants expressed themselves in our workshops with puppets, velcro, or enactment, they all watched the same short video to get everyone on the same page about food experiences. check it out!
our future "banana/potato chip tree" was partially provoked by the ideas of Scott Russell Sanders in the essay, Beneath the Smooth Skin of America in one of his books, Writing from the Center.
Big thanks to George, from Acorn Bookshop for recommending Sanders' book to me. If you're in Columbus, spend time in this bookshop, it's amazing.
Eating food that's wild...mulberries...here's a small excerpt i read aloud in one of our outside group meetings:
"I am writing these pages in June, the season hereabouts when
mulberries come ire and chimney swifts lace the sky with chatter and
honey suckle sweetens the air. On my walks lately I have been pausing
at mulberry trees to munch the fruit, dark purple berries the size of
thimbles. One day I was grazing on a tree close to the park, as
blissful as any bear among blueberries, my ips and fingers stained the
color of beets, when a man I know came walking by with his two young
daughters.
The girls stopped to gawk at me, and the older of them said, "You're
eating off a tree."
"I sure am," I answered between mouthfuls.
"What are you eating?" the girl asked.
"Mulberries." I held out a palmful of the plump fruits. "They're
delicious. Maybe your dad will let you try some."
The girls looked hopefully at their father, who seized each of them
by the hand and led them away, declaring, "Thank you very much, but we
never eat anything that grows wild. Never ever."
If you held by that rule, you will not get sick from eating poison
berries, but neither will you be nourished from eating sweet ones.
Why not learn to distinguish the one from the other? Why feed belly
and mind only from packages? Children who can identify a brand of
sneakers from fifty yards away can learn to identify trees and bushes,
flowers and mushrooms. Any child or adult who can learn to recognize
the songs of neighborhood birds. Anyone who can recite dialogue from
a hit movie or follow the plot of a soap opera should be able to grasp
the natural history of a bioregion."
– Scott Russell Sanders, Writing from the Center; Beneath the Smooth
Skin of America
Dear Scott Russell Sanders,
You should write me @ emstrouse@gmail.com . Why? Because I'm Midwestern. I throughly enjoy your essays. Keep it up. & Let's talk.
Reflections from the team:
Design 797 Spring 2010 - Transdisiplinary class, Dr. Liz Sanders
we started to explore possible topics of study...we were allowed to chose anything. we posted our ideas on a class Google doc. Professor Sanders, Liz, split our class into three teams w/three different topics.
here are some of the posts that led my group to study "food":
Hi all,
I like the anthropology approach mentioned by Paul.
Here are my ideas, so far:
POSSIBLE enactment/telling workshops:
1. Digital experience: from the time one wakes-up - sleep vs. desired
digital experience
purpose: observe current experience and uses achieved via digital
media vs. desired digital daily experience, observe preferred
experience
2. fast food experience vs. gourmet food experience
purpose: observe and analyze factors and mannerisms of convenient vs.
aesthetic experiences; factors
3. tell + enact "overload" = stress of being a graduate student
purpose: to discover root-causes/factors that contribute to "burn-
out". Experience possible coping methods
I think this one would lend itself well to our participant pool, Prof.
Gill's design class...but
Possible IRB problems with #3?
My basic objective for this course is how to conduct a successful/
insightful enactment workshop. I've been ruminating on possible
interesting topics for enactment workshops...I'd be interested as to
how to incorporate the above three topics, or other topics, with the
anthropology approach as mentioned by Paul. I dunno!
More about problem #2...
talking about:
social aspect of eating
compare eating to memories and to other people,
good taste only exists because of other experiences, in relation to
those memories
class: lower class vs. upper-class, place taste into a social
framework
taste is dependent on social income. potatoes vs. frog legs: what is
delicious?
dependent on memory = the past
luxury of desire vs. serving a need
because "it" = the need, doesn't have an end in itself
need is to feel full vs. just to feel pleasure
obesity: it's more important to be thin; relating to Rousseau. Eating
becomes not as much about supplying your body, but more for the
pleasure. A drug/addiction? Eating is more mental than physical;
therefore, is done to excess at times (stress? problem #3)
– notes are based-off an essay by Roland Barthes, a french guy who wrote about semantics. this essay great. it talks about food a lot. pleasure, etc...
More ideas:
One method I would be interested in experimenting with is derived from
a project being worked on by a classmate in studio. His research
describes Sandplay Therapy, a technique whereby a child has access to
a sandtray, water, and miniatures (essentially a collection of small
toys, mostly consisting of figurines). The child builds, without any
guidance or structure, a miniature world. Within this sand world, the
participant uses the miniatures to play out (enact) various
scenarios. (More information is available via the links below.)My thought is that perhaps the ideas behind sandplay therapy may be
adapted to our class. The participants could first employ "seeing"
methodology to lay a foundation for "doing." In other words, the
group would first act as a stage crew of sorts, creating, selecting,
and coming to agreement upon props as representations of environmental
elements that they will use to perform an enactment. The aim would be
for the participants to build their world, calling out elements of
significance or familiarity, then live out scenarios within it. If
this is viable, I could see the benefits of such an integration of
techniques in the fact that the seeing element of the process would
help to establish the environment/atmosphere while the enacting could
be used to portray more dynamic elements of the scenario, such as the
human element.I'm not entirely sure that this methodology would really fit into the
"thinking first, seeing first, doing first" framework as it blurs
certain distinctions between them, but if it does fit, it might be
productive to explore.If you would like more in-depth information about sandplay therapy,
these links may be helpful:
http://www.sandplay.org/sandplay_with_children.htm
http://www.isst-society.com/homeng.php
http://www.sandplay.org/about_sandplay.htm
(download)
Anth-approach: compare and contrast, let other groups observe the
others eventually. Observe groups observing.
3 sessions- 3 different "groups"
1. Faculty
2. Students
3. Faculty + students
Theme ideas:
-Listening enactment workshop. Maybe silent? Just movement and
expression...
-You, as yourself, but the opposite sex. How would you act if you
were yourself, but a male or female in your area of study/profession?
How would people treat you and your ideas? Enact w the group...
-Write letters to "the future" in regard to one's career. Get themes
from those. Give back to co-creators when workshops are complete.
Just ideas...
Emily
