Design 302 Blog 3: Progress Update

Erin Jia
Sep 9, 2024
3 min read

Updated: Sep 10, 2024

This is the third blog entry, and I have some good news this time! First, I have fully recovered from the flu (yeah!). The second good news is...I won't say that in the intro; this will be revealed in the rest of the blog. Like the last blog, this blog will also use the What? So What? Now What? Model from The Reflection Toolkit.

What?

Things I did during the break:

I organized the field trip photos on the Miro board and added some notes on the photos as a reminder of what I learned, what I felt and what I thought back on the trip; as I said in my first blog, it provided me with a lot of inspiration and insights during this discovery phase of the project. After that, I developed an initial mood board to explore "what my final solution looks like/feels like", and there will be an updated mood board after the first project survey..

Now it's time for my personal good news!

So... during the break, I stumbled upon this book during my midterm break, and I'm just so grateful that I picked it out of hundreds of the books in the Unity store. When i saw the cover of this book I was like OMG I HAVE TO READ IT this is THE BOOK I'm looking for..I was struggling to find recent (by that, I mean after COVID-19) research/academic journals for my project, so I just bought without hesitation...not gonna lie; I almost cried out loud at the bookstore (My friends thought I was over-reacting but no, that was my honest reaction..that's how desperate I was before I knew this book existed)

Ok now, after this expression, my genuine feeling, believe it or not.. enough with that... here comes the reflection:

Feminist City by Leslie Kern is exactly what I need for the moment; in this book, Kern offers a comprehensive guide for readers like me to explore and reimagine a post-pandemic city.

I'm currently one-third through the whole book; it reveals the current problems women face living in a city that was not intended to be built for them.

Kern uses the intersectional framework to analyse and tackle the inequalities embedded in the city's infrastructure. She points out how unsustainable the city or society depends on the un/underpaid women workforce to patch the gaps. This is such an insightful book, and it will help me establish a more comprehensive solution at the end of this project.

So What?

Good questions. After the excitement of "finding something exactly what you need randomly without trying", it is time to calm down and think about how to use the info/resources I just found to develop the project further (Insert Persona 5 meme with no reason at all)

With the framework provided in the Feminist City, insights I got from the field trip and other research and case studies, I can start to plan the interview/survey; this activity also falls in the discovery phase, but after I get results from the survey I can finally move on to the ideation phase (Brainstorms..Rapid Prototyping).

And I've had a rough idea by now of what my final solution is consisted of. Now, I'm thinking about two different approaches:

One is a workshop or co-design session; if the solution leans to this side, then I need to run a mock-up workshop which I need to coordinate time well to make sure myself and other participants have free time to attend, prepare flyers and pamphlets and everything related to a workshop activity, and this will lack "concrete" outcome
The second approach is the implementation in the park, and this will come with a 3D model, maybe a digital prototype like an app, as a complementary solution to the model. Then, in that way, I need a poster, some sort of showcase of the 3D model, and if I have enough time and budget, I could make a physical model (print out the 3D model in the fab lab)

So again, since these two directions both need sufficient time resources, I have to delegate my time differently based on which part of the tasks I want to focus on. And this leads my blog to the last part.