Week 1 Reflection
Week 1
Current Project Status: Whakariterite Phase (Preparation of Crew)
This week I felt overwhelmed by the vastness of the project ahead, but excited for the challenge and journey. As a designer and community member of the problem space I am exploring, I really care about the issue and creating something that is genuinely impactful. My HMW statement that I decided on last semester is: How might we use placemaking and bioregional design to strengthen the connection between urban residential communities and their local blue-green networks?
This is a topic that really resonates with me as a student studying sustainable development. Cities are a place where a lot of pollution is created, but has a lot of room for sustainable innovation and improvement. I believe in building communities capacities to affect their own change while encouraging top-down approaches at the same time. Grassroots action can only get us so far, but policy without people to bring it to effect is not useful either. I hope that my design can help bridge the gap and facilitate lasting change.
I will be using the What? So what? Now what? reflection model to help me look back on think about my experiences, what they imply and how the future may look. I hope that this will allow me to learn about myself as a designer and grow from each experience.
[Figure 2: Rolfe et al’s (2001) reflective model What? So what? Now what?]
What?
This week I was excited to be kicking off the last part of the capstone journey. I didn’t get any feedback on my proposal from Design 300 last semester, which had me feeling a bit stuck for which direction to move in. Chatting with Xin (Design 301 Sustainability stream tutor) I was inspired to look at my chosen issue of blue-green networks from a more abstract perspective. She encouraged me to select a stream close to the university so that I could use my fellow students as research participants. This idea helped me see a more achievable project and I felt relieved to have discovered a new sense of direction.
Hearing my classmates talk about their ideas and how inspired they are left me feeling like I have already fallen behind. I wanted to have a clear picture of my end goal that I could work towards, but my chosen design methodology, Hautu Waka, calls for a more subtle approach, encouraging embracing not knowing the direction in the beginning. This will allow me to be open to ideas as they present themselves and find my way to a well thought through solution. To help keep me on track, I mapped out when I want to have completed each of the Hautu Waka steps. Organising my ideas like this helped me see the bigger picture and feel comfortable with the challenge ahead.
The first step of creating a timeline to keep myself on track left me feeling super aware of just how limited our time is. We had Charlotte from Resilio Studios come and talk with us and she ran through a number of her projects. This was really inspirational to me, since there was one specifically on creating interlinking networks of natural habitat. This is what I am interested in exploring for my project, but hearing the amount of time and resources required for her project I realised that I really need to scale back my ideas. I felt pretty lost at this point because there are so many problems that I wish I could solve but there just isn’t time for that.
So What?
My experience tells me that I need to embrace the Hautu Waka framework and trust the process. My feelings of constantly running to catch up are not helpful, because everyone is working at different paces and following different design methodologies. This tells me that I need to consciously stop myself from comparing my project to others and instead focus on my own timeline and goals.
Now what?
I now understand that I need to follow the Whakariterite preparation phase of the methodology to help me assess the challenge ahead and place myself firmly in my intentions. I am still in the process of identifying the specific area I will work with, but having a deeper understanding of the place will help me move forwards. I think it will be helpful for me to go and view the area next week to aid my brainstorming process. I will endeavour to set manageable goals on my to do list each week that keep me moving at the pace I need to explore the design process and finish with a solution I am proud of.
What? so what? now what? (2020) The University of Edinburgh. Available at: https://www.ed.ac.uk/reflection/reflectors-toolkit/reflecting-on-experience/what-so-what-now-what.