Reflection as a design tool

This reflection process doesn’t come so natural to me as I tend to avoid retrospect processes. One of my objectives out of these reflections is to eventually get to know me better and be able to observe what It’s meaningful for me in a more agile way. I have never used the reflection tool so often before and even though it’s triggering some anxieties and insecurities I’ve been able to pursue a constancy on my morning pages. I use these for a deeper personal introspection but have been of great help to do the masters reflections. 

“We learn every day. Everything we do confirms, changes, or challenges
our beliefs. However, most of that learning is invisible for us ” – Reflecting in and on Action, Sebastiao Ferreira

Learnings

Looking back into the first term I would say that my 3 main learnings are the following:
 
● Let me go with the flow. I usually got really uptight with finding the best perfect idea compare my self with others and I’m learning to let myself go, trust the process, collaborate and share ideas.

● Writing as a medium to understand what I think. I tend to overthink a lot and it has always been difficult for me to put my ideas into words, I still find difficulties about it, but through forcing myself to write I have managed to better understand my thoughts. 

● Have a respectful and demanding look on myself. Understanding my skills, how my personality affects the way I design. Attitudes can be transformed into skills, my weaknesses turned into values. 

As things that I’ve done differently from the past and I’ve found helpful intakes from them: 

● Writing for documenting. As I have already mentioned before, documenting has never been my fort but I have come to realise that helps a lot on the processes to create new projects and reflect form past ones.

● Creating a multiscalar design diagram for my design space. As I fashion designer I was used to creating design spaces that we called mood boards for inspiration, materials, reference projects, prototyping… But I have never used to place the resources at hand.

Next steps:

I came up with this poster for design dialogues as a tool to start conversations about ideas for future projects. The concept was based on a new years resolution list, to keep in mind my interests along the rest of the masters. For now I’m very interested in working with communities and artisans around ceramics and glass, but I don’t feel like I have it completely figured out yet.

Actual creative block - 1st Feb 2022

I came up with this poster for design dialogues as a tool to start conversations about ideas for future projects. The concept was based on a new years resolution list, to keep in mind my interests along the rest of the masters. For now I’m very interested in working with communities and artisans around ceramics and glass, but I don’t feel like I have it completely figured out yet.