MANUALCAD
Sofia RUIZ, Irene LANDA, Sophie RAZAIRE, Emilie CHARRIER, Léo GODEBOUT, Lambert DRAPEAU
Our action plan
By using the collective mapping and the tool board, some questions emerged and became our departure point of our design process. This two issues are :
How experimentations, realistic tests and investigations can be a way to understand the space with our senses?
How can we represent or communicate a space beyond a visual representation?
To answer to this questions through a physical toolkit we tried to reuse the sensory explorations we did during the first part of the semester. According to that, we define this explorations as a base for our toolkit as a way to make people aware of other senses than visual, by touching, listening, smelling, feeling. This toolkit allows to engage the dialogue between a blind architect and their clients by a common language.
To do it, we had the idea to create a board which is the base of the tool. This board will be composed of a grid of wood sticks which can be seen as a reference to give a scale to the project we will design with. This sticks will be a support to fix ropes and like this a blind architect can draw a plan easily and express his ideas. According to our sensory explorations we thought that we could include them in our toolkit as for example samples of smells, records, samples of material,... By this way, we can add more informations and more possibilities of means of expression.
To start to think about our toolkit and the design process for this one, we read the article : Erling Bjögvinsson, Pelle Ehn, and Per-Anders Hillgren (2012) Design Things and Design Thinking: Contemporary Participatory Design Challenges. Design Issues 28: 3, 101-116. which presents a new position of the designers in a design process. It shows us how a design process could be a way to think on a method with the participation and the involvement of the participants.
This new way of thinking is completely different of the usual definition of the design which consist of designing a solution to a specific problem (objects…).
Usually, the designers produce a close down solution, anticipating the use of it without giving the possibility of reflexion and modification.
With the second proposal, the goal is to produce an open-ended process. In this case, the design is not necessarily finish after the first design process, but can perfectly be altered, transformed or developed afterwards by the same designer or other actors. This gives a specific design the ability of developing itself through time. A design does not have now a static special-temporal perception, but an extension through a timeline. This conception of the design as an open design to new uses and understandings is called “design after design”. It gives the users the possibility to participate into the contention but also to appropriate and to adapt the object through their needs and desires.
This idea is connected to the notion of the « infrastructuring strategy » which
deliberately design indeterminacy and incompleteness into leaving unoccupied slots and spaces free for unanticipated events and performances yet to be. We could implement the idea of infrastructuring in our design process as a new ways of thinking, being ready for unexpected use or modifying the space of interactions and peformances.
Planning
It was necessary for our design process to think of the planning and the organization of our time. Our first aim was to take one week to create the first prototype to have the time to test it by ourselves and also with guests during a workshop time. This workshop is a key moment in our process because it will allow us to get feedback and to improve the future version of our toolkit.