It was great to see the results of your work on the first round of assignments - your commentary during the discussion this morning was smart and thought-provoking. Keep it up! You are an inspiring group.
Today was a fairly massive influx of information regarding the culture, problems faced and solution precedents encountered by communities in Western China; I imagine that you may be feeling disoriented and confused at the moment. But not to fear - we will provide you with plenty of opportunities to absorb knowledge about these communities at a more reasonable rate over the next three weeks.
Assignment 2 Details
1. Please reflect on the brief introduction you received today to the problems encountered by nomadic and agricultural communities in Western China related to energy. Select one or more problem areas as the scope for your four-day design project. These include:
- Cooking food (like delicious momos [see above]) and boiling water (FYI: water is generally served hot for drinking)
- Biomass fuel collection and pathogen exposure
- Biomass fuel use and indoor air pollution (IAP) exposure
- Maintaining bodily warmth, indoors and outdoors
- Heating the home
- Electricity access and reliability
- ...or a focus area of your choosing
2. Develop a set of design concepts that approach that problem from several different perspectives, and prepare visuals along with descriptive text (on the order of a few sentences for each concept). Present these concepts on four or more 11x17" pages for discussion on Tuesday. Feel free to bring in reference or inspiration images as well for pinup.
3. Please begin working in a medium-sized (I'll let you define this) sketchbook devoted to this course so that you can easily organize your process drawings for each project. You may want to set aside a few sketchbooks because we will be producing a lot of concept work during this course.
4. Draw, draw, draw - I want to see sketchbooks getting full of ideas. This weekend is all about producing lots of iterations. Make them beautiful, in your terms. So turn on some music and go crazy. If you start to feel like you want to make a few models instead, go for it. But photograph them well and put the photos on your printouts alongside sketches.
Comments and Assessment Standards:
I invite you to unleash your creativity and talents for conceiving, visualizing, and presenting ideas during this project.
My assessment of your work for this project will be based primarily on how deeply you explore the range and depth of your process as a designer. I am not looking for solutions in this exercise, per se, but rather an early indication that you are willing to put in the time it takes to learn to become an excellent designer/social entrepreneur: to work patiently and persistently with loosely defined project parameters, to be a flexible and agile thinker, and to continually to develop mastery of craft (form, space, material, behavior).
Do not stress over issues of feasibility, but strive to introduce intelligent logic into your decision making process.
Consider all of the various people in the community this might effect. Villages tend to be groups of less than 100 families that either share a collective plot of farmland or own neighboring pastures for grazing livestock.
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Please email me with questions at any point over the weekend or on Monday. I would be happy to answer them. Check your email tonight for links to OED-specific information resources that may be useful for your work over the weekend.
I'm very excited to see what you all bring in!
