Living With My Own Ideas¶
During this week we keep experiment the FIRST PERSON PERCEPTIVE as a way to involve ourselves, our bodies, to create an intimate connection with the contest. The first person perceptive is a way of acting, of looking at things, of being involved. It is a way to act and react. It has challenges, scales and rules in order to understand myself in context: my boundaries, my limits and my possibilities. In order to be more in tune.
My Companion
During today’s class Kristina Anderson gave us the task to build in 10 minutes a companion with wasted material that we brought from home. This companion is supposed to satisfy a desire: CURIOSITY, the need to gain knowledge.
I built Nadir. Here she is.
Nadir and I are gonna live together pretty easily. I will wear her when I’m awake and active, and when I’m not she still will be, producing light, and will stay next to my bed. She’s my companion and her aim in life is to bring curiosity and help me out to gain knowledge. Basically she’s a boredom clock for me: until her light runs, I will try to achieve the most I can from my everyday life, she’s there to remind me not to procrastinate, to explore, to experience also when I feel that I’m stuck in my routine. Also, I will constantly have to check if her light is still on so I will always have an eye on her. That’s our pact: I’ll take care of her and in exchange she will be a life curiosity reminder for me. When I build her, her light guided me: I started without a specific idea and then I ended up building an altar for her and also making her wearable for me, in order to be in touch and actual contact with her. She matters for me because I noticed that since I moved to Barcelona I’m experiencing newness a lot, and I don’t wanna stop, so to me it’s meaningful to give a shape to this idea and willing.
After 41 hours Nadir still works, her light is still on. This really surprised me cause due to her old age I thought she would have not survived more than 24 hours. But here she still is, and hopefully she’ll survive even longer. She fulfilled her main function: any time that I looked at her she was helping to actually using up the spare time that I’ve had available in the last days and I actually didn’t procrastinate in any of the things that I wanted to do. Spending time with her during the night and during the time that I was home alone (my flatmate is not in Barcelona right now) made me realize another important meaning that she has for me. I truly felt her as a companion: I felt more comfortable walking around Barcelona in the dark and less lonely while I was home alone Tuesday night. She started by being just an object with a specific function, so it was very surprising to discover that she is way more than that (and also she’s something more than I designer her to be). I feel that I’m surrounded by objects all the time, but they just mean their function to me. Nadir managed to be more than her function. She truly helped with time and boredom management, she motivated me and kept me company. I was a bit skeptical about her actual meaning in my life but it worked out well.
24 HOURS
How can I take action on my concept in a brave way? How can I immerse myself into the topic of wasted food? I should feel an experience. I should live the topic from the inside and explore it in a first person perceptive. The food waste problem has many facets and can be faced up to in different ways. My brain started running ideas of how I could get more involved in the problem but eventually I ended up with a decision and that’s what I’m gonna do:
My area of acting is Raval, the neighborhood where I live. I noticed that in Raval, being neighboring La Rambla has many food accesses and options. Not just restaurants and food chains for tourists but also groceries for local people. For 24 hours I will just eat food that’s supposed to be thrown away by groceries, bakeries, bars… I will go around and just ask if they have some food (any kind) that they would toss at the end of the day.
How did it go? See the video here
What they offered me: Especially in fruterias they offered me way more food that I needed, but I knew I could not eat it all so I picked a little. For instance they offered me two huge boxes of zucchini, a whole box full of tomatoes and carrots. Also, they told me to come back the morning after to collect more. Some places like bars and cafè told me that they do Too Good To Go (which is a great way to save wasted food) and so I made the decision not to get food from them. I decided also to avoid big chains like supermarkets of cafè because they couldn’t give me any explanation on where the wasted food would go (that’s because the people I talked to were employees and not responsible for the shop). I focused more on local groceries so that I could get in touch directly to owners.
What I collected: One pain au chocolat, two boccadillos with jamon, three zucchini, seven bananas, one pear, eight carrots, one croissant with ham and cheese.
What I ate:
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breakfast: pan au chocolat
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lunch: croissant with ham and cheese, zucchini and banana
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snack: a pear, and I baked a banana bread
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dinner: zucchini and boccadillo with jamon
I managed to eat more than enough, very healthy and very good too. Didn’t expect it at all.
Some reflection
I think that when you start to involve yourself in the process you actually understand the process better. Most of all, you understand most of its potentials and limits and all of the strings attached. You actually live in first person an experience and you free yourself to the initial plan idea, in order to be more open to any kind of change, because the process itself is bringing you to that. Using myself as a tool allowed be to build memories, feelings and stronger opinions about the topic that I want to explore, it allowed me to be an “inside player” instead of an “outsider planner”. It opened myself up to different paths and gave me many more inspirations. I understood that anytime that I feel stuck I just have to go and do, to listen and to be. There’s no other way to design for people.