Designing for a Culture of Resilience
This project addresses the “bubble tea” phenomenon and its environmental challenges, presenting the preliminary findings of an interdisciplinary collaboration between 3 MA Design students from LASALLE’s School of Design Communication and 2 BA students from Singapore Management University’s Lee Kong Chian School of Business and School of Social Sciences.
The students engaged in a 6-week workshop, during which they collected data through visual documentation, observational studies and mapping techniques. The following four themes were identified from the initial stages of research to develop a framework for design:
Culture of Awareness
How do we design awareness in an age of widespread information and knowledge?
Culture of Behaviour
How do we design interventions that impact change across individual to systemic levels?
Culture of Lifestyle
How do we design new sustainable practices to promote new cultural and social movements?
Culture of Re-Education
How do we design information to communicate the issues of sustainability?
Coding, Sensing, Making.
In a series of workshops, students looked at design approaches through the introduction and use of basic coding applications to address the topic of bubble tea from different and often unfamiliar anlges such as code, data, observation or prototyping.
As part of these studies, students engaged in discussions, brainstorming and scenario-building exercises that led to the formulation of concepts for tackling the challenges posed by bubble tea waste through the design of a poster.
Outcomes
In response to the above framework, each student was tasked with designing a documentation of their research. These posters present systemic challenges through data visualisation, perceptual mapping, illustrations and speculations. This exhibition proposes to present 5 posters of 50x50cm and 2 prototypes developed in response to the poster scenarios. Initial design directions are provided below, demonstrating how the collaboration has produced the articulation of research to re-examine, re-think and re-appropriate the user experience against the systemic challenges of the bubble tea phenomenon.
Culture of AWARENESS
Ramya Chandran. Developing a system of awareness through measuring plastic consumption of users in a self-packing station.
Culture of BEHAVIOUR
Jayal Ateet Shroff. Interventions to change behaviour towards slow consumption practices.
Culture of RE-EDUCATION
Elyza Jan Mendoza Carbajal. Developing awareness and reflective practice through knowledge dissemination.
Culture of RE-EDUCATION
Ishan Singh. Educating researchers, designers and users through data visualisation techniques of coding through visual representation.
Culture of LIFESTYLE
Omar Faruq Raed Bham. Using innovative design to trigger new social interactions to promote sustainable consumption.