Up until this stage I had a lot of different ideas bouncing around in my head and I was unsure of how I could connect them all together, until we started this mapping exercise.
To begin with I was just randomly writing down different areas of interest I had and trying to organize them under the 3 categories; cultural, social and political. This was somewhat helpful in terms of narrowing down what I was looking at doing as all of the ideas I had were very different but when I started to think about them as one instead of a series of different ideas they started to work together and depending on the specific area of the subject the ideas already had a solid link to each other but I wasn’t thinking about it enough to see this connection to begin with.
I started with words like;
- Reusing
- Working with the bare minimum
- Comfort
- Homely
- Country to city
- Modular and movable
And I started to notice connections between homely, comfort and country to city; as I grew up on a farm in the middle of the countryside and I am now in a constant “limbo” stage for like of a better word, moving between the country and the city constantly with no fixed home. This meaning that the only home I do have is the belonging that I take with me between the two places.
How to live as a nomad, as someone that is constantly moving around with no fixed connection to a location or a place but rather a strong connection to everything, but most importantly a very strong connection and need to the things they take with them on every adventure. This idea of how to create a “home” for a nomad started to drive the thoughts after this.
For someone who has no fixed connection to a place and travels everywhere would mean that instead of having a strong cultural connection to a place or things (like in the Maori culture) they would then have a strong connection to the earth as a whole, and have to give thanks and respect to the spheres of the earth especially I the context of design.
As a way of highlighting the current climate emergency that the earth is in at the moment it is important to highlight this in the designs that we are creating and use this to change our thinking and instead design in a different way to lessen the impact that we, as humans, are having on the planet and let it start to regenerate and repair itself.
This created a great Segway into compiling a tight knit collection of ideas and how these could all relate to each other to help form my research practice, and narrow down my research area to a more specific idea, and in turn help form my research question.
Georgia Christina Grace 