Design Study Abroad in London
Studied abroad in London with the University of Arts London.
Role Experience Designer/Researcher
Duration 3 weeks
Team Akshay Rawat and Jarel Mitchell; Undergrad and grad students at the University of Washington
Overview
This past summer, I participated in a study abroad trip to London through the HCDE department at UW. Drs. Brock Craft and Tyler Fox headed the program and partnered with Dr. John Fass of the University of Arts: London. This program was a three week intensive design course that focused on exploratory speculations on how London's infrastructures influence how it is experienced, resulting in physical forms that built on our research and time there.
There were about 20 students that were accepted and able to attend this study abroad, with the majority of the students being graduate students at the Human Centered Design & Engineering masters program at the University of Washington. I was paired up with Akshay Rawat (graduate student) and Jarel Mitchell (undergrad student) for my project.
"Design and make a digital/physical tool that extends your physical, cultural, or social reach -- exploring, exploding, exploiting process, criticality and interaction in relation to user experience design."
"This brief requires you to widen your understanding of what a tool is to include social tools (pubs and wedding rings) and cultural tools (spiritual beliefs and songs).
Something that was also central to this program was abductive reasoning: the logic of what might be. Our professors wanted us to embrace the unknown and design towards it. "Problematics are a knotted, complex emergent set of relations; they do not lend themselves to solving, for they often elicit multiple problems at various scales. Solution is not the point.”
Research
Along with the brief, we were also given a specific theme (poetic, social, spiritual, political, etc) that provided a guide to make the tool. Our vector was political, which we took to mean the dynamics between power and status.
Our sprints consisted of two rounds of 10 minute, 5 minute, 2 minute, and 1 minute ideations of representations of our vector. For our first sprint, we had to keep it 2-D, and for our second sprint, we had to make 3-D representations. These sprints were very valuable because they took us out of the mindset that everything that we produced had to be linear or predictable. We were encouraged to do performances and truly connect to the experiences we had around London.
In addition to in-studio sprints, we also did field work all around London. For our group, we were very interested in bridging the gap between tourists and locals in London, as it is such an international place. It was all of our first times in London, and we explored seeing how places and environments influence the people in them. Some of our ideas for field work included asking strangers to:
- draw something
- give some words to describe London
- suggest a place for our group to explore next
- give us a song
With this, our main theme was reflexivity -- the awareness of the self within the frame of reference and analysis. We wanted to be our own datapoints and recognize that each of our group members were bringing in our own perspectives and contexts. We decided to create something through a political lens, to see what has dominance over someone's experience. We went all over London, including Greenwich, Southwark, Kensington, Westminster, and more.
During one of our outings, we set out to talk to strangers and ask them their story. This experience was quite interesting for me, as I am not usually one to approach a stranger, but my team and I connected over how refreshing and deeply impactful connecting with another person was and how much fun even a short conversation could be.
At this point, we had to narrow down our scope and start designing our final prototype. We didn't have much direction, but we had some through lines:
reflexivity, community, connection
After some reflection, we decided to make things fun for us again. One of my team's shared hobbies was photography -- capturing a moment in time with its context. We played with the idea of using a camera to describe connection.
From Conceptualization to Manifestation
After many rounds of critique and revision, we designed an experience meant to shift political behaviors from discourse to collaboration.
Step 1
We decided on making three pinhole cameras to
capture connection and conversation because
of the time constraint that is inherent in the
development of the photo for a pinhole camera.
Step 2
We set up each of the three pinhole cameras with
different "time limits" in front of each participant
and gave them a prompt for conversation:
How do you feel about being photographed?
Step 3
Finally, we would take them into the darkroom we
made out of a bathroom in the studio, complete with
a red light. In the darkroom, we would have them work
together to develop the photos.
Final Photos
At the end of the experience, participants could walk away with a photograph that captured their essence -- their feelings, reactions, emotions, and more -- during the conversation. Here are some examples:
Reflection
This whole experience of both the study abroad and crafting this experience changed my perspective in many ways. It was my first time studying for an extended period of time in another country and I loved the experience of living in another place and immersing myself in another culture. I truly enjoyed traveling and hope to incorporate travel into my future as often as possible. Working in a more diverse team was such a fantastic learning experience and it made me more confident in my abilities as a leader and as a designer as we had multiple critiques and constant conversations with professors throughout our time together. I was initially very nervous yet excited for an opportunity like this, but very quickly made friends and am so proud of the final product that we produced.
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