Excersises

Cosmopolitan localism = "the theory and practice of inter-regional and planet-wide net-working between place-based communities who share knowledge, technology, and re-sources"

Distributed agency = "the situation where the actions or operations of a range of different individuals often with different motivations, interests and in different places combine to create an outcome they all wanted"

Buen Vivir = "belief that true well-being (“the good life”) is only possible as part of a community. The good of the community is placed above that of the individual."

A heuristic device = "a form of preliminary analysis. Such devices have proved especially useful in studies of social change, by defining bench-marks, around which variation and differences can then be situated."

Slow Food = "a global, grassroots organisation, founded in 1989 to prevent the disappearance of local food cultures and traditions, counteract the rise of fast life and combat people’s dwindling interest in the food they eat, where it comes from and how our food choices affect the world around us."

Dialogic collaborations = "loosely structured projects which accept and often encourage members to shift roles, and often value the process of working toward the project’s goals as highly as actually attaining them."

Pluriversal (Pluralism) = "a state of society in which members of diverse ethnic, racial, religious, or social groups maintain and develop their traditional culture or special interest within the confines of a common civilisation"

Ontology = "the philosophical study of being. More broadly, it studies concepts that directly relate to being, in particular becoming, existence, reality, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations."

Heterogeneity = "the quality or state of being diverse in character or content."

Metavision = "a combination of supervision, coaching and leadership, applying a holistic paradigm to working with people in a range of settings."

Retrofitting = "the act of providing a machine with a part, or a place with equipment, that the machine or place did not have when it was built"

Ecozoic era = "the geologic era that Earth is entering – when humans live in a mutually enhancing relationship with Earth and the Earth community."

This text lays out some very interesting ideas about the future of the structure of our society and how it may be. This social concept I find intriguing - about how we can restructure society using design in ways which we may never have seen before.
His reference texts also contain ideas which show a great new perspective on our world. The description of the 'Ecozoic era' I found very compelling - how we are entering a new era where we learn how to live WITH the earth not live off it.
I also took great interest in his ideas of community and social cooperation - which at this time becomes in a sense ironic. However, it has been shown at this difficult time in history that we are bonding together as communities and looking after each other which I reflected on after reading the text.

Where were you when lockdown first started? (Town/city/country)
Italy Rome
What were your thoughts and emotions on the first week of lockdown?
I had anxiety attacks which seemed similar to coronavirus symptoms
What were your thoughts and emotions after a longer period of time in lockdown?
No mobility at all no source for money.
What did ‘lockdown’ mean for you? (e.g. what the laws were for everyone and what it meant for you and your life) What was your living situation during this time?
I was living at my hosts family house before renting my own place on the same day they announce the lockdown
What did you do to keep yourself busy?
3d modelling. Films.
Where are you now and why?
UK Liverpool beach I am staying in Telford county in a secluded village called Howle at my sisters since I have no place to reside at.
What is different between where you are now and where you were? (e.g. what the laws are for everyone and what it means for you and your life)
A lot more freedom can socialise with people but only in small talk can't wait to see my friends
How are your feelings looking forward to the next few months (and the next couple of years)?
Hopefully my anxiety will disappear from lack of communication because I like to stay alone sometimes but not for this long though.
What do you think is needed for life to go back to ‘normal’?
Eeehhh... government but I think it’s going to be alright anyways
Do you think life will ever return to how it was before?
Yes of course, maybe few changes to how we perceive work ethics and workspace makes sense???

While working on this project I experienced something often suffered by designers and artists - something I like to call design block.

Lockdown has been difficult for a number of reasons including social limitations, mental health and demotivation,. I was struggling to find motivation to throw myself into this project and give it my full attention.
I spent a lot of time struggling to sleep while my body slowly began to wrestle with its circadian rhythms. The combination of outside stress and lack of proper sleep led to the extreme heightening of my mental health issues and this was inflamed by the lack of access to my regular prescription medication.

However I was very lucky to have a supportive group member who continued to push the project work while I was dragging my feet.

I decided that I needed to be active in making changes that would allow me to return to a positive lifestyle and take back control of my mental health.

The steps I took to begin to fix my lockdown was sourcing a new prescription and become stable mentally once again.

The next area I needed to fix was my sleep. I began regular exercise consisting of following workout videos, beginning running and continuing with my yoga practices. I found that once I established this I began to be able to sleep better and felt able to be more active in my life.

Finally I took on a new project from my home university involving working with a client to come up with a design proposal for the site.

Slowly my designers block began to lift.
I have included images showing my process of doing this.

BRIDGING THE DISTANCE: RESEARCHING SYSTEMS OF CIRCULATION AND COMMUNICATION

The form of natural communication which has always intrigued me most is that of our own bodies. When we become cold, nerve impulses are sent through out the body from the hypothalamus like small postmen delivering a message to the correct address. They deliver their message to the skin, causing vasoconstriction and shivering. They deliver their message to the erector muscles of the hair and they contract to raise the hairs over our bodies.
This all happens without us even having to move a muscle (pardon the pun). Our body is constantly sending out its messengers to race across the body and deliver messages and we are reliant on these communications to keep ourselves functioning.

I therefore propose a method of a feedback loop such as shown on the right - a way of sending out our 'nerve impulse' and reacting to the message we receive back to keep our shared body (our society) functioning.
The method most likely to be both functional and effective is allowing ourselves to put a message our to the public and inviting them to return with their own message. This could be done by delivering notes or posting them in public spaces with the opportunity to interact with them and recording those interactions.
An excellent way we could use this information to benefit our shared body is by publishing methods in which to keep ourselves functioning during lockdown.

GOING PUBLIC OR GOING UNDERGROUND?

Pros of unseen performative action:

Lack of fear of judgement. As people do not know who they are communicating with and can remain anonymous in their communications, people feel more free to express their true opinions than if they were approached by a person.

It also protects speakers right to privacy. If we want to truly receive open and honest responses, then protecting the privacy of participants is key.

Pros of public performative action:

More likely to receive the number of responses required as your presence and communication is more likely to stimulate a response.

You can reach a specific audience by only targeting certain people. This allows you to select only the most relevant people to your study.

Cons of unseen performative action:

People may choose not to respond at all. Will people take notice?

It stops people being able to claim their opinions - do we have the right to publish an opinion of someone without their name? This could be damaging as if we speak the words of others are we compromising their right to speak for themselves?

Cons of public performative action:

The responses collected may not be honest and open if their identity is known. People may hide their true opinions for fear of judgement.

We may unknowingly hold prejudice. Will our collections of opinions be affected by our own bias?

Potential communication map

Click here for speakers corner...

Title: Reprogramming Lockdown

Initially I was very enthusiastic about the project as I try to be with all new projects however after a few days I began to feel out of my depth.
I felt after the first week that I had so many questions I couldn't distinguish one from another enough to ask them and gain a clear answer so I therefore took some time away to compose myself and my thoughts in order to continue producing work of the standard I knew I was capable of.
I did manage to compose myself eventually with the support of my partner in this project who I am very grateful for bearing with me during this time. But I have learnt that during lockdown we cannot expect too much of ourselves. By sharing our experiences we are the art and the performative action.

During this project I definitely discovered that it is okay to fail. Our speakers corner did not go as planned however by failing we looked at new methods of collecting information and communicating in a more passive way by collecting actions rather than words to communicate how people were operating in lockdown. I also felt like I had failed at self motivating and I learnt that actually we must allow ourselves to fail to learn more about how we as people operate and what conditions we need to thrive and I definitely learned a lot about myself from this experience.

~ What worked? ~

I don't think I can state "what worked" in this project as I don't think it was about that. Nothing works entirely not just in actions during this project but in general. We cannot analyse "what worked" because that implies that things can either be or not be when in fact I believe it is more of a spectrum. Some parts were successful because we attained what we set out to attain and others were successful because we did not. It cannot be as simple as what worked and what did not.

~ Did anything unexpected happen? ~

One unexpected result of this was how disconnected we can be from peoples lives. During Tuning In, I contacted a friend from the UK who was studying abroad and simply by asking questions about him and his experience I learnt so much about him that I did not know simply because I hadn't asked.
I think another unexpected thing to happen was the journey I went on through this project. It is the first time in my education that I have gone through this type of experience and although some parts were not pleasant I believe that it was important to learn how to fail and how to grow from those situations.

~ If you could do it again, what would you do differently? ~

I would like to have experimented more with methods of communication and tried a broader variety of performative action. I think there are so many different ways to communicate and create this feedback loop with society that it would have been interesting to experiment more with this element.

As stated above I was very lucky to be in a partnership with Phoebe who was very patient with me when I was wrestling with lockdown de-motivation. We tried to divide tasks fairly evenly and she took the lead on the production of the comic strip and we both collected responses and then after I took the lead on creating the gif and collecting the images for this to supplement the collected drawings. I believe we worked well together and divided the work out evenly between us.

I am originally a student of interior architecture and design in Birmingham UK and my technical work has always been my forte so doing something so purely artistic and conceptual was a scary task. My time at WDKA has taught me so much and the change in culture and learning and teaching methods has been a good experience but sometimes I ask myself am I deserving to be here? Look at all this incredible work surrounding me and it can be intimidating at times.
I tried to throw myself into it however as you can see from my "BREAK TIME" section, I struggled at times.

I grouped with Maya for the resit period. After all these months of isolation it was refreshing to work together again.
Since the lockdown was basically over for her, while I was already back in Armenia in a full quarantine, we couldn’t relate the COVID isolation of April anymore. First, we had the idea of doing a projection mapping and sharing thoughts of people on buildings, so basically having the contrast of small bits of personal thoughts on big, uncomfortable spaces. This took us to a conversation about our current situations, and we realized that, in a way, we have similarities in our background: some current political heat, the socialist past, a lot of abandoned spaces.
We thought it’s more relevant and more open (educational, why not) to combine our current situations, common historical past and connect our project to it.

Also, we noticed how the quarantine detached people from the world, as everyone was literally interacting with their own close, small environment (room, laptop screen), so we wanted to create a space where people could just share simple images from their lives and see, learn what life is like in other parts of the world.

We thought of making collages with all these scenes/buildings and distribute it as posters around with short texts about human survival/class struggle/social conditions, however, not in a very sophisticated way.
For collecting images and sharing with people, we thought opening an Instagram and taking people’s submissions of places they live in, or just images from their city that mean something to them. This could be an Instagram page for instance. That would also allow to create a network and share personal images of scenery, to make these collective images (collages) and talk about really simple, human actions and encourage humans to share their visual environments with each other and think about questions, especially after/during a pandemic that has made us question a lot.

Our audience is every citizen, every person who evern walks around or just wonders how people further than they are living.