Conference: Design without Borders – Creating Change

Last thursday, I participated at the international design conference “Design without Borders – Creating Change”. It was part of an on-going exhibition about the work of “Design without borders” at DoGA, the center for Design and Architecture in Oslo. “Design without borders” is involved in different development projects around the world and the conference was giving attention to projects and designers that improve the quality of life of people instead of producing more “nice” consumer goods. I’m always happy when I have the opportunity to go to such events where I can listen to and meet people that are actively working on making this world a better place (just a week ago, I was quite sad about not having enough time to fully participate at another interesting conference called “Everything that is banned is desired”).

Allmost all the speakers mentioned the importance of involving people in the design process. Elizabeth Palmer, a consultant for the Danish Refugee Council, said that designers should not think that we are better just because we have a degree. Instead, we need to involve local people as expats – people who are more resourceful and pragmatic than us designers educated in western institutions. This also opened the question of aesthetics and of what is a good form. “Designtoimprovelife” measures design by form (design), impact (what’s improving?) and context (life).

I was especially impressed by a talk from Anna Kirah, a design anthropologist from the United States but based in Norway. Not only was the presentation itself engaging, personal and fun but she was also talking about human-centered design and co-creation. She mentioned how important it is, to understand the aspirations and motivations of people and that in order to be able to do this, we need empathy and active listening skills – we need to understand people from their own perspectives and not our own. This is an ability that from my personal experiences and observations, most people seem to miss and I wonder how we can include it in our learning. She finished her speech with “Leadership is to create a world where people want to belong to.” (Robert B. Dilts)

For the evening program, I gave a Pecha Kucha about how we as designers need to change in order to be able to create change. Quite scary infront of all the people! I will post my slides later…

Images from the exhibition at DoGA

MA conference

Last week we had to present our MA project to the MA1 students as well as to bachelor students from the third year and some of the professors and staff from the design faculty. It was quite intense but a great learning experience. I tried something different: in the format of the presentation itself and in how I involved the audience. I used a document camera for presenting my project and short messages as a feedback tool for the audience. I was impressed how much this changed: I felt much more comfortable in giving the presentation because it was “mine” – more than the usual slideshows where I press my information into a standard format. I got a lot of positive feedback from the audience which make me conclude that it was also more interesting and fun for them, even though I’m not sure of their positive replies concerned only the form of the presentation or if the “unusual” also helped to draw attention on the content.

Theodor Barth was kind enough to film this presentation – so have a look by yourself! You can also read through the conference paper conference_report_tglahs_web I wrote and please send me your comments and thoughts!

Höfn Documentation

Mads and me finally finished the documentation about our workshop in Iceland. Hurray! Here it is: documentation_höfn, with some minor mistakes still but nevertheless readible.

Broen Bakeri

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Last Sunday (19th of August 2012) Eva, Mads and me opened the first pop-up restaurant in Oslo that was part of the international restaurant day which started in Helsinki 2 years ago. During this day, everyone can open a pop-up restaurant – and we decided to turn the bridge at KHiO into an open café. We invited friends and passers-by to sit down with us, relax in the sunshine, enjoy our delicious cakes (all home-made) and have a chat with other people around the table. All the food and drinks were offered for donation and we were surprised that we even made a small profit (which will be used for the next event).

Designers always put pressure on themselves to create something “new” and “unique” – but there is so much out there that we can join and support. We do not have to re-invent the wheel… Initiatives like the open restaurant day are great – beyond other things, it gives power back to the people, brings life and diversity to urban spaces and creates relationships between citizens. Our intervention proved that people from different background and ages supported the idea – people asked if they can help us next time or wrote down the link for the website. The next open restaurant day will be on the 17th of November. Watch out!

Norwegian Woods

I just came back from a trip to the forest which I helped to organize. My initial idea was to use this trip as a small test project for my MA research (and I also encouraged my other classmates to do so) – but I forgot about something very important: TIMING and TIME OFF. I realize that I start to see my whole life as “a project”. Work and life merge into one and it feels great because I can do what I love to do in the very moment.
But it is also important to remain aware of the difference between the both – the forest trip for instance was for life and not for work. After working on our research portfolios and after a long semester, no one of us felt like driving our projects forward. Instead we wanted to have some quality time together, share food, laughter and space. However, I’m sure that ideas are often born in life and then translated to work, thus life and work remain interrelated. A useful tool for this “translation” is documentation – taking pictures, writing diary, drawing etc. This is what I always enjoyed doing (and still do) and who knows what will grow out of it…

Something that Mads and me tried on our forest trip, was, to make a dinner with ingredients from the forest. In a global world we tend to lose sight of the local and a lot of local knowledge disappears. If we can have bananas and strawberries all year long, who cares about the edible plants from the forest next door? Don’t misunderstand me – I embrace global food and I’m happy that I can make sticky rice or pasta in Oslo and don’t have to eat only potatoes all year long. But I think we should combine this with local sourced food.
It was a challenge to gather the plants – Mads and me both don’t know a lot about them and were afraid of accidently poisoning everyone. (I realized that we always suspect nature trying to kill us, isn’t that weird?). We also wondered how our classmates would react to that kind of food – and were surprised by the positive feedback. Mads and Qi even made chopsticks by themselves and in the end our self-made fishing rod got two fish at the same time – but our “forest-food” couldn’t compete with the chocolate cake xue ting made for dessert. But as I said: it’s all about the right combination :-)

Local Holistic Sustainability in the Progress of Global Reality?

This friday, I’m off to Iceland to participate at two workshops organized by CIRRUS the nordic-baltic network of Art and Design Education. This is some information about one of the workshops (taken from their website) and it sounds quite promising:

An encounter with a locality that represents edge conditions. The Hornafjördur Community in Iceland includes a cross section of geography, cultural context and Nordic social conditions. It is a fundamental fish industry town. It reaches from the top of a glacier, a volcano, ample agriculture, tourism, a small local town and fisheries. Next stop in direction South is Anctartica. The institutes in the community have looked widely for method and inspiration, like the Canadian network Economuseum, where public dissemination, production and crafts go hand in hand, to food R&D and university ethnographic and economic research. Tourism has been a growing element in the region while it still embraces its traditions and climatic and geographical particulars.

Interest from the Cirrus institutions is how does a small close-knit locality deal with global progress. This is an especially interesting issue for design, a field that is transforming itself from “the actor of making cute things” to “humanizing technological progress”: Improving services, simplifying reality and addressing sustainability. These fundamental issues have to be introduced to designers and design students with more enthusiasm. This workshop is intended to support that in the local active industrial tourist, agricultural and fisheries institutions. Only one student will be invited from each institute and dissemination will go to all the institutes of Cirrus. A special webpage has been made to link together all the active partners.

The project will use the Triple Bottom Line (people, profit, planet) (UN Resolution 1987) as its benchmark for reaching sustainable existence for business, people and the environment that is thoroughly sensitive in this location.

soon more! (picture taken from http://cirrusnetwork.net/archives/6289)

Being Back

I haven’t updated this blog for quite a while – but I needed some time to arrive back and re-adapt in Oslo. The last weeks (almost 2 months!) were filled with spending time with wonderful people, meeting and getting to know my new classmates (and having great times with them), enjoying the feeling of having a home, cooking (and making sourdough bread) working on my research portfolio and continuing my studies, going out into the forest (and not being afraid of UXO, snakes or disgusting centipede etc.), enjoying a cultural life, reconfigure my brain to creative and abstract thinking and many other things and challenges.

People keep on asking me if i miss Laos – and yes, there are things that I miss. I miss the friends I met over there, the beautiful smiles of laotians, the “bai sai?” (“where are you going?”) you constantly hear when walking down the streets. I miss the experience of shopping in markets with mostly fresh and local ingredients. The simplicity of everything. The feeling of making sense and seeing a direct result of my actions – a result which makes sense and is not only benefitting myself. I miss the green color of freshly planted rice.

But even though I sometimes feel more like an alien than I felt before, I’m very glad to be back and know that this is the part of the world where I belong to. My brain feels inspired and active, the relationships with people are somehow deeper (probably since our “common cultural language” is closely related), I’m closer to the people I love and care about and continuing my studies (and not knowing where I will end) makes me feel excited.

Last 2 weeks in Phongsaly

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I spent my last 2 weeks in Laos with working on a small tea exhibition for Ban Komean in Phongsaly Province. Ban Komean is (and will become) famous for its’ 400 year old tea trees. Even though the village is only accessible during a few months per year (due to extremely muddy roads in rainy season), there are already visitors going. The Provincial Tourism Office built a “Sala” for tea tasting – a good example for bad design. The place has a wonderful view – only that the toilet and kitchen building mostly prevent us from seeing it. There is even a flushing toilet – but no water pipes, so it cannot be used. The room which is supposed to be the kitchen has no window or chimney, so there is no way that the smoke and steam from cooking can “escape”. There is no electricity – but boiling the water on a fireplace influences the taste of tea badly. Not to mention that there is no one in the village who manages the building yet (but there is supposed to be some training soon). Let’s say it simple: at the moment, the only function of the building is that of a dust trap…

In order to give some more life to the place (and also to offer information / site interpretation which is always hard to find in Laos), Carine had the idea to make an exhibition about tea inside the “Sala”. And that’s what we did the last weeks! We kept in mind, that the room will be used for tea tasting at some point – so we mainly focused on the walls and the centre, thus leaving enough space for future tea tasting gatherings.

So far, the content and design for the exhibition has been developed by Carine and myself. Normally, we both have a quite similar approach: involving as much as possible different stakeholders in the process and encouraging them to become active, give inputs and take ownership (something which is especially important in development work). Due to a tight schedule this was not as much possible as we wanted – but this lead to interesting discussions and thoughts (more about this in my reflections which will follow within the next months)

Lessons learnt

> cultural: when I made a model of the room and showed it to my lao colleagues, they asked: “Oh, is this for the spirits?” usually, models like this are used for spirit offerings / ceremonies (especially in northern Laos)…
> interdisciplinary: finding a balance between “academic, informational” and “experience and design oriented” (is it a contradiction? or a design challenge?)
> the limits of a participatory approach: sometimes, people really don’t want to get involved and are not interested at all (don’t force them!)
> and many, many things about tea! In the course of the last weeks, I turned into a passionate tea-trinker (which is not too difficult in Phongsaly since they only have  terrible Nescafé)
> working with only a few hours of electricity a day makes you more efficient and not loosing too much time in front of the computer (should we have electricity short cuts everywhere?)

… to be continued…

(pictures taken during some field visits to Ban Komean; some of the images thanks to Carine & Florian)

Saying Goodbye

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Before we left Phonsavan, Katti and me organized a small event at the QLA Centre. It was great to explore the space in a complete different way – the outside sitting area is a perfect place for hanging around. I’m already dreaming about collaborating with the ice-cream shop next door (and learning how to make the best ice-cream in the world from Paolo). And maybe this dream is not too far away – the Lonely Buffalo Foundation is thinking about supporting the owner to have a “real” café there (run by students and with the focus on english learning). But also the inside is quite flexible. I absolutely love the big table – usually visitors sit down, start to talk to each other or reading the various books lying around. The QLA uses the table for meetings, discussions or just working downstairs instead of inside the office. And during our “event” it became a free-style pingpong table!
But now it’s time to say goodbye and let the QLA take complete ownership – and who knows what kind of ideas they come up with during the next year?

QLA Centre: Evolving / More impressions

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My work with the QLA Centre has finished for the moment (even though there is no end). Until my last day (and even during the last weeks when I have already been away) the centre is still developing, the exhibition is growing, the producer groups find their space in the souvenir shop, pictures are on the walls etc. etc. Since everyone is working on many different projects at the same time, everything takes much longer – which often is for the good because we also have time to re-think first ideas or adapt to new developments…