Living with your own ideas¶
Make a companion¶
Inside out is a tool that helps people recognize the different emotions they felt during the day. Every emotion is a cone and it has a support network like friends, family, boyfriend/girlfriend associates behind, as a way to remind yourself that you are not alone and that you can activate them. If you are feeling more than one emotion, you can only put cones together!
How will they live together? For a day I will have Inside out with me and every hour I will record my emotions
What were you thinking? Many times we are closed in our emotions and we don’t know what we are feeling. How can we change/solve/learn about something if we are not able to recognize it? On the other hand, if you are happy or scared, you can share it with your friends/family/pets, you are not alone.
Why does that matter? Human emotions are reflected in interpersonal relationships, if you cultivate these networks you will be building solid relationships with others, that way you can feel accompanied regardless of what you are feeling.
Experience¶
My fight is to connect different point of views and design new ways of understanding problems and solutions, as a strategy to build strong societies and better “common worlds”.
My personal work experience and the reality of my country have guided my motivation. I would like to change the way I recognized and measured the impacts of industry on environment and the lives of communities near such business.
Change is not easy, because many times we must change our habits, and our quality of life, because we have to get out of our comfort zone.
What is the cost of changing our habits? How do I feel when I have to change my routine because it would be better for the community, but maybe worse for me, because it is not my preference?
When I arrived in BCN, I wanted to lead a more active life. I said to myself “I’m going to go to the university by bike” or “I’m going to walk all the time”, but the reality is very different. Actually when I have to go to the university or to another neighborhood I always use public transport, I have rarely walked, for me using public transport is more comfortable and it is my preference.
• What did you make? Why did it matter?
With all of this thing on mind I challenged me walking each time I should to go to any place. It’s my way to be more close to “my new me” and a way to analyze how I feeling when I should changing my routine and take a different decision that is better for me. My goal was registered my feelings after a long walk, my time travel and distance, and then compare this with my previous situation.
• What happens when you involve yourself?
When I started the challenge, not only did it change the way I moved from one place to another, but also part of my day: my lunch schedule, my available time to relax, my time to meet with friends. All of that influenced my mood, for example when I wanted to get home as fast as possible, I could not take the most efficient route because I could only walking. This allowed me to realize that decisions can actually influence a lot other dimensions, so you have to be as aware as possible of the consequences that a decision (like just walking) can have.
• What happens when you use yourself as an instrument?
I started to become aware of things that I didn’t realize before when I was walking. Two important elements I became aware of is how my feeling of security varied depending on the time of day and the neighborhood I was in. Similarly, one day when I went jogging in my neighborhood I noticed the low female presence and questioned how it could be a different experience to do sports in public for a woman than for a man, and the need to design with a gender perspective, especially in Latin American countries. This kind of things has probably always happened, but I had not even seen it.
• Did anything change about your way of working?
The biggest change was associated with being constantly critical about what I am doing. Many times I just execute tasks and try to fulfill the expected objectives, but I do a very basic exercise of assimilation of learning. Many times learning is not merely theoretical, but has to do with sensitivities, emotional experiences, urban experiences, among others. Recording and monitoring is a relevant element to recognize opportunities and spaces for action or changes.
• What does it mean for your future work?
For my future work the creation process is also a learning process, so it is relevant not only to pay attention to the final product, but also to everything that was involved, including my personal experience, which can be an input for future improvements. On the other hand, I realized through the exercise the need to consider profiles different from mine in order to have a correct appreciation of the problem, because my experience walking around of Barcelona can be very different from a woman’s or a child’s, so testing is a very important part of the process.
• After seeing the videos of your design space collective, how does it change your understanding of it, present new opportunities or inspire new possibilities for collaboration?
The work of my classmates was inspiring mainly because they all connected it with a personal motivation, which helps me to nourish myself with respect to different ideas and concepts to which I did not have access before. Mainly the challenges associated with the recording of feelings I found extremely important and revealing, and they also used instruments that were unknown to me until now, which expanded my tools to develop my master’s project. On the other hand, some of them were extremely innovative in their recordings, both in what they measured and how they did it. This was inspiring, because it was a departure from the measurements traditionally made in my discipline, such as those I made of travel time and distance traveled.
Video https://drive.google.com/file/d/1enCoNOVYWmEytMF2LO4ZY5YBcFyrA1ns/view?usp=sharing
