Task
Our 1st exercise for design lab was to pick one item from a box filled with different artefacts (newspaper, book, postcard, report etc.) and come up with as many keywords as possible related to design.
Brainstorming Process
Our class was split into teams of 2 for this exercise. Abi and I paired up. Our artefact was a book titled “God Explained in a Taxi Ride”. We quickly skimmed through the contents of the book (luckily for us the book isn’t very content-heavy and is mostly a collection of short stories/jokes) and jotted down words that comes to mind. These words did not necessarily have any links to design, but are based on our first impressions.
Final Outcome
After the initial stage, we categorised our words into different themes mainly those related to the content and the graphics.
Some of the main key words we identified are:
- Pocket Philosophy
- Double Meaning
- Paradox
- Conflict
- Humor
- Colour
Learning Points
Each team took turns to present the keywords identified. After Abi and I presented, we realised we did the exercise rather differently with the rest of the class. I felt that we missed out some important themes such as “Religion” and “Society”. (Update: Two weeks later, we started on our concept map which maps concepts in Exercise 1 and 2. I took the opportunity to improve on this exercise. View here.)
We had a lot to learn from this exercise as we were tasked to prepare a list of keywords for our own research topics. This exercise provided us with the practice and the bare fundamentals to find underlying issues and themes related to our project.
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