Intercultural Design
6/1/20-23/2/20
Kyra Binti Rizal Hamzah (0337085)
Intercultural Design
Instructions
Week 1
Introduction to module, lecture by Mr Charles, picked groups for our project.
Presented our topic ideas, decided to go with Karakuri Ningyo. Needed to do more in depth research to come up with our problem statement, especially on the mythology side.
Week 2
Lecture on culture by Dr Jinchi
We discussed our topic further and developed our research. I found a really helpful website (www.karakuri.info) that had plenty of cited information on karakuri ningyo in many aspects, from the history to the mythology and much more. I took down notes and summarised what I read into one page in my notebook.
Once we sorted out all of that, the 4 of us had a group call 1 night to discuss preliminary ideas for our project.
Week 3
Due to Chinese New Year holiday. we didn't have lecture nor was Mr Charles around for consultation/presentation, so we just prepared our slides this week.
Week 4
Project 1 presentation.
Week 5
The trip to Japan itself!
Week 6
Presented the data we collected; Mr Charles seemed satisfied with our research and our observations (I'm really glad that on the morning of the presentation I added a slide for just our overall findings, and that Jessie made a table to compare some of our findings.)
Throughout the trip, I took a lot of videos for data collection and wound up with a lot that didn't end up being used, so I turned some of those clips into a vlog.
Week 7
Project 2 presentation- We didn't get much feedback besides Ms Anis suggesting which of our two preliminary ideas to work on, which was a mechanical wayang kulit, but later in the week we had a discussion with Mr Charles, who felt that we couldn't convey a strong message with that idea. After that we decided to do a video instead.
Chooi Yen and Jessie did the voice acting, then the two of them and Angie illustrated the assets for our video. I took the task of animating the video itself as well as adding sounds and subtitles.
Reflection
[ edit: Now that I'm done, I realise that I wrote so much more here than I initially planned to. ]
I really looked forward to this module in the beginning, partially due to the travelling part, but also due to the idea of our final project being open ended, free to create any outcome.
The research portion went smoothly, with only a few hiccups like being unable to visit all our targeted places during the trip and timing conflicts between group members (due to both of those reasons, on our final night in Tokyo I headed to a museum alone just to make sure our research covered all the bases we needed it to.). All in all, I would say that our trip was very beneficial both for our project and just in terms of me generally getting inspired as well.
Unfortunately, since we returned to KL from the trip up until now, the day we have submitted our final outcome, I find that my excitement and pride in our work has been slowly sliding along a downwards slope.
Any matters that happened among our group were easy to overcome, and despite the bumpy journey of our projects, I'm grateful to have had worked with them, and working with a group consisting entirely of people I was unfamiliar with was definitely a learning experience; it took a bit of warming up to each other in the start to get the ball rolling.
One hurdle I did not expect us to come across was having to scrap our entire plan that we had discussed throughout week 6, at the end of week 7, leaving us with 11 days to regroup, brainstorm, and execute a fresh idea.
As I mentioned in the weekly update portion of this blog, we initially wanted to create a mechanical wayang kulit, or at least a prototype of one, for our outcome. We had come up with sketches, various ideas for what the puppets would show and done plenty of research on how we would make it work, and were quite happy with the idea, and when we brought it up during the Project 2 presentation, it was not received with any negative feedback; the only issue we had then was deciding which of our concepts for the puppets would we want to create.
That same week, we met with Mr Charles to ask for his opinion, but his answer wasn't really...... what we asked for. To put it shortly, he felt that our message wouldn't be strong and that we would spend way too long figuring out the mechanisms (despite us having already done that, and explaining it to him), and we spent about an hour with him, and he heavily criticised our idea and gave some new suggestions instead. Why not a performance? Or a video? For the rest of our time with him we wound up discussing video ideas, which is what we wound up creating.
I don't have a grudge with Mr Charles or his suggestions, and I totally agree with him saying that we didn't have a message to our first idea. That's why we went to him in the first place; to figure out the message in our project. I personally felt that if we thought it out a bit, we could have strengthened our wayang kulit idea and pushed through with it. To be honest I felt that it would be something interesting, unique and interactive. But my group members didn't seem to think it was worth pushing, so we then pursued making a video as we discussed with him.
This is a personal opinion and unrelated to the group, the class, or the lecturer; as this is the reflection portion of my blog, I do want to critically reflect on my experience throughout this semester.
Anyways. To me, the idea of having this week long trip abroad for research, and having such an interesting subject matter, would just be wasted if all we produced was a video. As sir had said about some of our other ideas (like producing a comic), it's overdone. Cliche. Frankly, the key discussions we put in our video could have almost completely been conceived without us having visited Tokyo, and with only the preliminary findings we had before the trip.
I believe(could be wrong but... this is how I see it lah) that part of being a design student (and eventually, being a designer dealing with clients) is about striking(or juggling!) a balance between your (or in the case of group projects like this one.... your group's) personal ideals, the ideals of your lecturer/s and most importantly, the project at hand. I really don't feel like this balance was accomplished in our final outcome. I think towards the end we had put the lecturers opinion first, the project second, and totally disregarded what we wanted. There was no balance between the three. I don't say this to point fingers at anyone, be it the lecturer or my group. I do think that everyone just had very differing views, which is why we have group projects, right? To teach us to work together? Mr Charles has every right to think that us dressing as robots and roleplaying a scenario is a good idea, just as I have the right to believe that we should've stuck to our original idea, and so do my fellow group members for wanting to go along with making a video.
For all I know, I'm just a narcissistic brat, and everything I think is wrong. Maybe prioritising things as we did, was the right thing to do. I will continue to reflect on this; the more I think about it the more I can turn my regrets into lessons.
All in all, I think the greatest lesson I learned from the final project stretch of this module........is compromise.
