Harry Solomons

Week 6

This week, we were forced to recognise as a group that we were all very far apart in our individual interpretations of where we should take the project. After discussing what we should do next, we moved to using clothing as the key building material, and discarded much of the work we had done on the musical cubes idea that we had been focusing on.

The sketch of our new idea (Credit: Chen)

Last week, I had been ill for Thursday and Friday, and so had missed a lot of the discussion of our ideas. Upon returning, I found out that many members of the group had lost interest in the idea of dispersed seating. Some had grown more attached to the outcomes of the “representation of femininity” workshop they ran in the first couple of weeks, and felt that this was inadequately represented in our current prototype – despite issues several of us had with the conflation of feminism with femininity, an issue I thought the workshop had helped perpetuate.

I also took issue with the immediate dismissal of the idea, as I felt we would get better results by committing to our existing plan than by pivoting at this late stage. I also felt that the idea lacked key aspects that had gained good feedback from our project partners and from tutors, such as playfulness and dispersal, and was thus sacrificing accessibility. However, I did agree that the material was effective in making our central concepts of space reclamation more explicit.

We were still attached to the cubes, in order to promote mixing and matching
So we designed small prototype cubes to show how personality can be shown through the clothing
However, we had to scale back the idea when we realised how long it took to build a single cube
We were able to get a lot of second-hand, unsaleable material from local charity shops for very low prices

This week has stressed the importance of intra-group communication. I had been completely unaware that a lot of the group had not followed the research links that had led us to the design that we had – although I felt as though I had taken steps to allow people space to communicate these concerns, these hadn’t taken into consideration the gap in knowledge of surrounding theory, as well as issues of trust and language. While I think we have arrived at a good idea, we wasted a lot of time, close to the deadline, without addressing these points, and I am disappointed it has taken this long for them to be sorted.