Contribute Collaborate Connect
Design for
Technical change
Year
2019-2020
The aim throughout this interrogation was to focus on the positive outcomes which could hypothetically come from the pandemic within communities, wanting all of the empathy and kind conduct to continue once crisis has passed. Undertaken for the Design Lab course on energy sources, the energy source for this study was initially ‘food’, and over time made a symbolic shift to community, where members can show care, kindness and conviviality towards their neighbors in the face of food and other challenges, thus providing community members a source of assistance and ultimately energy.
INSIGHT
Do you think this project can be scaled up?
Yes. If it weren’t for the pandemic, I would have carried out field research and would have been able to see how members of a community engage with one another and have the opportunity to trial some developmental ideas in real time.
What was your biggest learning from this project?
Learning how to take on a human-based project during a pandemic was definitely a steep learning curve. My biggest takeaway, although based on research and not practice, was that user adoption on small and large scales must be carefully thought through and is harder than it looks. Project-specifically, I learnt that all communities of people have different characteristics and different mixes of personalities and traits, meaning empathy and care may vary, making the design process even harder because this cannot be predicted without thorough field research (which could not be done during COVID-19 lockdown).
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