Critical Ana in Critical Design

Our common and final project was very interesting to make and explore. An EcoFeminist design inspired by Indigenous design and concepts.

Our prototype challenges how we perceive and experience time and our value in this world. We are surrounded and defined by numbers, our time is measured numerically, our age, our performance, and according to it, in the capitalistic society, our value.

We wake up and go to sleep, eat, led by the number on our wrist. We don't feel or listen to ourselves, our needs and personal cycles.

In order to challenge this, and be in tune with the nature we decided to make a watch-like product that would have two interfaces - outer circle represents the natures' cycles, inner one, our own. Everything is a cycle, the day itself, the month, our processes. In order to achieve our well being we should follow our needs and our cycles that are in tune with (our) nature. Horae, derived from ancient Greek language, helps us with it, through subtle vibrations, abstract indicators.

We decided to go with transparent, light, colors of nature, that resemble sustainable materials. We tried making something light, that relaxes the user just by looking at it, inspiring them to follow and be in tune with the nature.

Day cycles are represented, seasonal cycles as well as personal ones.

Inspiration and sketch:

What - an AI chat bot writes a movie script for students' assignment that turns out to describe the exact situation in which the students are, to the last detail. It is a tool to help people in their everyday or more serious tasks. People are usually using it as an inspiration for further work, or starting point about topics that they are interested in. In general AI is meant to help in e.g. medicine and give right predictions, diagnosis and therapy, but in many other fields as well. This plays a helping hand people's lives, but in a broader sense it does a lot of harm to the environment due to the computers that are needed to power such invention, causing a lot of pollution. So far it seems that it increases equal opportunities for all, but the time will tell how it will be used otherwise.

Who - AI students are writing a prompt asking an AI bot to produce them a movie script giving the topic of the movie which is a classic situation in students university life. It is intended for everyone and everyone uses it, from an office manager for writing emails and dealing with excel sheets to PhD students in their scientific work. It has positive and negative effects on everyone - from getting help in certain tasks, to making people lazy and leaving them without skills, forgetting how and why it is important for them to engage in their own work, contributing to the society. Some people oppose it, there is no specific group, except professors in schools, or some people who think it does more harm and good, but not a specific group of people per se.

Why - the AI produces the script which describes students asking AI for help in doing their assignments. It exists so it can help people in everyday tasks such as analyzing excel sheets, to comping up with stories and art. People use it through entering prompts on the internet and the AI gives them the result they need, usually in the form of some intellectual property.

Where - It is used in students homes, offices, but since the AI is on the internet, everywhere. It is produced from someone's basement or from a company, the precondition again, is the device that has the connection to the internet.

When - it is happening now, in the present and in every day life. For the students it is happening constantly, they are using it every day, multiple times per day, and we never know when will it break and how.

As my topic is abstract I decided to try and connect different types of symbols and materials as well as objects.

I chose glass and metals because they represent every technology object - from a lamp over camera to a computer.

Glass represents a screen which is a tangible interface for interacting with an AI, glass is also in camera, in the lens which is recording and analyzing us, but it also resembles how fragile our relationship with our personal work is, with the AI and how fragile the reality which we are basing on AI is. It reminds us why we shouldn't exclusively rely on AI.

Metal is also a building material of the lamp, camera, computer. It is a building material of screens often and it is materials of cables. Cables transfer information, resemble a network, such as AI, the neural network, cables connect things, building block of technology. If there is any material that I could choose that represents AI it is metal. Servers which store databases which AI uses are made of metal, the devices we use to have access to AI are metal. Cables are metal.

How an AI object could look like - box made of glass with metal circuits.

I participated in the previous class online due to cold, hence I can not give proper reflections as if I was there and with various materials.

Nevertheless I loved the class! It was really fun and interesting, a great way to open our minds and eyes to exploration and something new! I felt like such approach is useful in everyday life for boosting creativity, mood, inspiration.

Personally I chose two objects, a camera and a lamp, I will explain why.

These objects are the same as the objects I have in my room. The topic of my episode is a bit difficult to put in materials and objects since it is about AI predicting exact situations in students' life, but I tried connecting them with the camera, as the object through which someone life can be seen and recorded, analyzed, as well as because the students in my episode are asking the AI to write them a script for a movie assignment, as well as with the lamp as an idea, idea for the script, and idea for innovation such as AI. I chose this lamp because it is a retro looking lamp, as if it is going back through time, resembling the topic of my episode, how the time goes such as it does in a dream.

Materials I picked initially were glass and metal.

The song I chose to explore and make mood board to is the following:

The moment I heard 'mood board' I thought of this song. As I previously mentioned the dreams, the title of it is speaking for itself. The student thought he was dreaming about what happened, exactly what Alan Watts is saying 'If you awaken from this illusion,...' which is exactly what he thought it happened.

Additionally, as it happened to me in my real life, that AI predicted a part of my life when I asked for a movie script, it breaks the dimension, replying in German to my friend's prompt in English, the movie is based on the same plot - AI predicting the same situation. This perfectly builds upon Alan's speech from this song 'Lets suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream you wanted to dream, And you would naturally as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure, you see And after several nights you would say, "well that was pretty great." But now lets have a surprise, lets have a dream which isn't under control. Well something is going to happen to me that i don't know what it's gonna be. Then you would get more and more adventurous, And you would make further and further out gambles as to what you would dream, And finally you would dream where you are now.'

Statistically, the AI will provide at some point the scenario which you are living now.

This a song I mentally and often times in reality explore and imagine, here is my mood board:

Insane

A group of students decides to ask an Artificial Intelligence for help with the script for their video project. As the AI writes a response which scarily resembles the daily lives of the three students, the student who wrote the prompt is getting more and more paranoid, until they wake up and realize all which transpired was just a dream. However, in the last scene, they receive a call from another team member saying that they have a new script, but the AI is shown to have predicted this turn of events too.

A very interesting exhibition with many fun props to engage with for the experience and explore further the line of the topic. Personally I decided to draw an EcoFeminist, write messages and leave them for others to read as well as to watch a couple of short movies.

Here are some exhibits that caught my attention:

Moving to commenting and thoughts on the topic and the exhibited. The topic was predominantly indigenous futurism, which it seemed that it couldn't escape the frame of the colonialism itself. Whether that be a critique or an empowerment it all seemed to me that it didn't step outside of the imposed frame, which is the frame of the colonizers, not of the colonized. Why do I think that?

A lot of the exhibits, especially in the first part of the exhibition(but not exclusively), tried to tell their stories through mass culture, the topic being futurism. There were refrences to Star Wars, we even got reminded of Avatar. I would like to go further into the example of Avatar. Even though none of the exhibits showed or referenced Avatar itself, they referenced pop culture, from the position of the colonized, but we got reminded of Avatar since it uses very similar tools and ways to tell a story from the colonizers' point of view. Even when Avatar tries to tell the story of the colonized, it is so stereotypical that the creators are proving that they are not capable of looking beyond their biased lenses, but neither are the colonized. We are both, all, fed with the same content, made through one lens, that even if we wanted we couldn't break out of it. Some exhibits even tried mocking the colonizers, but it all ended up being the same(Star Wars figures with native clothing holding a Western sport's dress).

It is possible, however, that it is all mockery, which would make a stronger case for the colonized being able to rebel and use the colonizer's tools to mock them and send a message, but an example of the mediaeval capital of an African country projected into the future and made out of Lego gives me more of a sad dream. A dream which is far away, collecting, working for and buying the colonizer's bricks - the very expensive Lego, every child's dream(although also possible that the message is that the author will use the colonizer's most precious and use it for his own dream).

If that is not the case I would suggest a nice sum up video of Slavoj Zizek's critique of ideology and how he sees ideology:

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iMF4OVv36g)

Clothes

First concept I am going to explore will be clothes. I will name three examples and I will try to be relevant for EcoFeminisim, thus I will talk about the three following examples: pockets, heels and pants.

Guerilla Design

grafitti, stickers, billboards/public transport stickers

We explored how EcoFeminism can be tied to ecological and indigenous design.

We asked ourselves what are some of the feminist designs that we know already? E.g. bikes differ for men and women. If they were made of a recycled or biodegradable materials we would have an EcoFeminist design. Then we asked ourselves where else could we implement such design, what would be an EcoFeminist design product? Perhaps a lather that we can use in homes to reach high points and grab what we need that are made of biodegradable or recycled, light material. We asked ourselves to look further.

There are some matrirachal societies present today. We don't think that the roles should be switched, but rather argue that it could be useful to take a look into their lives and practices and explore how they look like, see something that we are not able to see since we are unaware of it. Perhaps certain objects, interior design, clothing.

Here is a link with some of the matrirachal societies today:

And here is a documentary on one of them:

Where else could we look for EcoFeminist design? In fashion we can look for indigenous designs that have characteristics of feminism and learn what materials are used in it's production. Regarding fashion design we can explore how it changed over history, and why did men wear heels during Napoleon and why do only women wear them today? What do heels symbolize? Furthermore, we can notice that women do not have practical pockets as men do. Why do women wear bras or carry handbags? What is antifeminist or feminist in those designs?

We can also pay attention to label design in food industry(e.g. alcoholic drinks - whiskey, gin, beer are men's drinks), or even hygiene industry. What colors or symbols are usually used for women and why is there any difference among genders?

We also explored names for women's brands such as Women's secret, or Victoria's secret, what it insinuates. Besides brand names we analyzed beauty industry and noticed that it is mostly targeted for women, and how would an EcoFeminist beauty brand look like. We also tried thinking if one already exists.

Today I have invested my time to learn about indigenous and ecological design. Even though when picking the topic in class I didn't feel like the two are necessarily connected, once I started reading about them I realised that they are strongly interconnected, building upon each other.

In this finding the following paper https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-90-481-2501-2_6#:~:text=Ecological%20design%20can%20be%20defined,flows%2C%20cycles%2C%20and%20patterns. Ecological Design And Retrieving The Environmental Meaning by Hande Gültekın, helped me tremendously.

In ecological design practices we rely on indigenous design, going back in time, understanding our environment and ways of nature. Furthermore, learning how 'we' used to do it, connecting with the environment and ourselves, giving the ode to the ancestors, or ancestors of other cultures, respecting their heritage and listening in on what they have to say.

Here are some examples that embrace both design directions:

This maybe would be a more personal touch to my blog's VI instead of a logo.

This is a drawing from the series of my digital drawings, being very practical to do at any place and any time, with very low resources(no paper waste, color, water, and again when making a mistake). It may not be ecological design, but it seems ecological(ly sustainable).

Comments on my visual identity are appreciated. It seems as a basic-bitch VI, but it's clean so I might like it. Schade that Tumblr doesn't have a voting system, it might've been better to use IG.

Comment:

<3 - like

:p - dislike

What they thought how wearables would look like in the 90's - MIT

Check it out, it may be interesting or useful

'Go ahead, put anything' - Tumblr

It's something I will follow.

I will be using this blog for the purpose of the Critical Design course on TU Wien. I liked this form better than e.g. Twitter or my existing portfolio since it has more options and freedom, hence I hope this format will allow me to express and contribute to keeping the record of the course in a free, honest and creative way.