Developing a Topic

Class exercise

The first class of Project Development was spent working with Pedro’s design framework - a set of cards split into categories, or facets, that together make up the distilled essence of a given project.

The categories are:

• Topic (The broad concept you’re addressing.)
• Device (The way in which you’re addressing said topic; can be metaphor, irony, etc.)
• Attribute (An adjective that describes the doing, the active method of the project: e.g. Kinetic)
• Mood (Self explanatory, sets the tone of the project)

The framework is quite useful in that it enforces constraints, and does so at all levels of the project. It’s easier to ideate because the core facets are separate, and come together only when the design process begins in earnest, thus deferring friction for a later stage, and encouraging immediate creativity early on.

Thinking about topic

I’m leaning towards the idea of danger, which can maybe be best described as a series of somewhat related words:

danger, fractures, awareness, discovery

I’ve spent a significant part of my life in ‘dangerous activities’. I’ve been, over the years, any one of: a climbing guide, an offshore sailboat captain, a competitive cyclist, a carpenter, a boat refitter.

One of the throughlines in all of these activities is the idea of sensing danger - in other words, keeping track of one’s awareness, and ideally heightening it in order to increase the amount of information one is considering at all times in order to predict and avoid catastrophic situations.

I think there’s a lot to be done around the idea of sensors, interfaces, and devices that dialogue with this idea of human awareness in difficult and unforgiving environments. Part of it as well is being able to extend this sensing to equipment, in order to keep an eye on material fatigue and failure.

I’m not entirely clear on what shape this will take, but it feels like a beginning.

A navigation sheet, created for a night passage through a small channel into a tricky port