DG413

ANTI DOGMATIC

DESIGN

MANUEL SUAREZ

S118705

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

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DOGMA DECISION

DOGMA SELECTION

DOGMA DEVELOPMENT

INDIVIDUAL

REFLECTION

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DOGMA DECISION

As a group of four, I was with Emilija Marinkovic, Huub Offermans, Sebastiaan Krijnen. We did not decide to choose one single dogma, so we decided to go for 4 different dogmas:

Death and mourning: everything surround-ing death has to be sad and we all have to feel empathy with the one that had the loss. In each culture there always is a spe-cific ritual.

Economy/value. Everything has a price. There has to be a currency instead of ex-changing favours for example.

Respect: we all should respect older peo-ple and from higher status.

Rural vs. urban life. Urban life is much more advanced and better, and the people richer and happier.

We all liked these dogmas and did not have a favourite choice at the beginning, but once we started working deeper with them we decided to go on the direction of the third dogma (RESPECT-STATUS) since we though it had many more design possi-bilities and we found more interesting.

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In the second presentation we set a com-mon definition of the dogma:

“The idea that people have a lower or higher status and therefore a correlat-ing degree of power or value in society based on a variety of features e.g. their abilities, weath and in case of prejudice: gender, race, sexual orientation etc.”

Status is very close related with power. It is something not very tangible but you know it when you see the people. In our society we all assume that someone with a higher status has more power and therefore move value. The taboo that came with it is the rudeness. We tend to treat better the people with higher status

and treat worse the people with lower status, nobody wants to talk about that but we all know its there.

What we aim for this dogma is to break the dogma with two options, one is to break it by making it disappear, making everybody have the same status and that way everybody will treat the same to each other. The other option is to make it disappear by making it present and mak-ing the people conscious of the differ-ence of status and by creating awareness we can create empathy and get respect especially from the higher class to lower class society.

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DOGMA SELECTION

In the next week, he had to go into group of two. I worked with Huub for the next two weeks. We focused the dogma on the part of making the dogma present and try to create empathy with the two main high-low class in society. We looked at things in common have the homeless people of the streets with a rich person. We found out three main things; they both needed mon-ey to get food, or some king of good. They both need to sleep and they both need to eat.

We had a couple of design solutions to make this happen:The first idea is about the currency we use here, more specifically in Europe. We designed to turn around the concept of bills and coins. We made small coins with the size of 5c coins, we gave the value of 500 to those coins. This way the rich peo-ple will fell like the homeless people, full of small coins in her pockets. We designed the opposite concept for the euro bills. We made a 5c euro bill with the shape and appearance of a 500€ bill, this way the homeless people will have a stack of big purple bills.

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The second design concept we had is the sleeping concept. We plan to make lux-urious the benches where the homeless people sleep on the streets. In the images you can see what we thought of, but the concept is make it look like he is sleeping comfortably in a nice bed with nice sur-rounding, that way he can feel better. The opposite again with the high society class. We though of making a patter with shapes of newspaper in the sheets rich people sleep with, maybe that way make them feel how poor people feel very night when going to bed.

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The third idea we had was about food. Our proposal consisted on placing fridges with shapes of trashcans in normal rich houses, and designing trashcans with shapes of fridges for the streets. What we wanted to point out was the big problem of everyday life about throwing useful trash, especially food. There are millions of tons of food wasted in the trash everyday all around the word. We want-ed to contrast the thing that what for us is trash; for the homeless person is their dinner they will have tonight

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After presenting this to our class, we decided to go for the last concept about the food and trash since it had some more user testing possibilities.

We did three user tests to confirm the dog-ma and strengthen it. We placed normal and tasty food inside a grey trashcan in a specific place in the TUE faculty where people usual-ly pass by. We made a hidden camera video for 20 minutes and only two people had a try at our nice food. In the videos attached in this DVD you can see more closely the de-tails and the reactions of the people.

After that, one day after we place a blue trashcan with the food inside as well. This time, in the 20 minutes nobody dared to try the food! We asked the people why they did not do anything, and most of them said that a food that is in the trash, they don’t trust the source and it may be risky for them try-ing something that can harm their stomach. Well, it is clear that the homeless people have a stronger stomach that the rich people then.

Now, with the results of the two previous videos, we decided to try the same but this time place the food in a normal table with normal plates. Maybe this time people would take the risk!Certainly, we were right, in those 20 min of recording many people tried the food and even came back to have some more since they liked the food a lot.

With these three videos we wanted to show that with the same food, just changing the presentation and making it look a bit low class food people from higher class will

DOGMA DEVELOPMENT

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reject it. But what they forget is that it is still food and food is something very valuable in life and not many people have the luxury to have it in the fridges every day!

We presented these three videos to the class and now we had one week left, we had to try something out in the streets. We decided to try the opposite way, we placed a small mini bar fridge outside a grocery store with a sign of “place your reusable food here”.

Our main goal with this experiment was to connect the two high-low class peo-

ple by helping them. This way we can create a chain, the rich people feel they are helping someone more needed and the poor can feel closer to them since they feel that people care about them. This fridge would work in a way that for example someone does not want his sandwich anymore, he leaves it there and since it’s refrigerated it can still be in good composition by night and the homeless people can have a nice dinner.

Unfortunately we did not get much use-ful footage in a video where we placed the device outside in the streets.

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INDIVIDUAL

My individual contribution to this assignment is a product design of the fridge-trashcan. I believe that the form giving of the device is something crucial at this stage. My proposal is to design a normal trashcan, that look a bit like a trashcan but at the same time it can clearly be identified by a special trashcan. Nowadays, almost no trashcans have clean colours, when I mean clean I mean white. Since we are talking about fridges as well, a regu-lar fridge colour is white as well. My idea is to design a white trashcan that can be related to “reusable food for the poor”. We identify blue trashcans as paper trash, we identify green as plastics or in some cases glass. My goal is to design it in a way that in the same way we identify this objects, we can do the same with white trash as the reusable concept. This way create respect between the two main status classes.

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REFLECTION

This is an assignment that I had my goal quite foggy. I really did not know what I could benefit from this learning activity. Human beings are always attracted to uncertain things, at least myself. I found the assignment de-scription a bit mysterious and that is why I chose this assignment. Through-out this whole 6 weeks I enjoyed a lot this assignment, especially because it’s something like I never done before in this faculty. I find that this assign-ment has a lot of potential especially in innovation. A design that can be “dogma-proof” can change a whole system and break barriers.

Concerning my group mates, I had very good experience working with them and the work was very nice and easy going.

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