Group report on Abandoned materials market

12/ 9/16

Abandoned materials market - Wasted

“…products are no longer bundles of functional characteristics but rather means to provide and enhance customer experiences” (Page 54 Bernd Schmitt reading)

Abandoned materials produced a market called ‘Wasted’. We really enjoyed how it repurposed things that we would throw away and take for granted into things that we would put to use. For example, we will use the bottles we got from the SecondLife Glass stall and do the ideas in our jars from The Jar Made Me Do It. It was really interactive and stalls had communicated between each other so there was a really nice connection between ideas, for example we made wallets at the Crease stall and painted them at the Printsie stall. The Abandoned Materials and Gifting themes worked really well together and all stalls were successful in this. The market had a really exciting energy to it, yet it was also had a very relaxed and easy-going flow to it. In contrast to the Impossible Things market, there was no pressure to see stalls in any specific order and there was no time pressure. This market felt like we had control over where we went and how long we spent at each stall, but still felt very organised and did not lose its structure. The atmosphere was also more lively and upbeat than our own market. 

Notes on Abandoned materials market

- The theme of the abandoned materials market was gifting
- The overall theme was used well and they has re used material very well and it showed in each and every one of all of there stalls
- Loved the idea of the zines and answering what you pulled out of the bowl - they also used old thrown out assignment paper
- The overall market was very upbeat
- They have reused old materials and out them to use well like re purposing old bottles and making them look like a beautiful piece of art from the a second life for bottles stall.
- The stalls combining like making the wallets and painting them at another stall but you could also have just a plain wallet and you could also paint on a piece of paper from the painting stall and take it away.
- We liked how you got given something useful at every stall and got to take something away
- The overall market was educational and taught you something new about something repurposed.

collecting things for our market

after talking about how we were going to make our stall more of an environment we decided that we would like to give the people the option to have tea or coffee or cold drinks if wanted, i proceeded to go and discuss this with local company KPMG and told them about our assignment and the idea that we had for our stall and creating a quilt for wellington hospital children's ward, they thought that we were supporting a great cause and wanted to get behind and help us out as much as they could , they then proceeded to contribute to our market stall a selection of tea and coffee, paper cups, plastic cups, hot water jugs, a glass jug, stirrers,milk,  juice and also lids for cups as well. 

Impossible things - time warp market

- Time warp - past present and future, the ideas of things that aren't there yet - sort of tangible and illusive and invisible
about myths, legends, and tribal pasts
things that are little bit of stories and whats to come and whats been and gone

- Elusive (Playing with perception)
- A trick
- Trying to make things that are intangible tangible - they are trying to conceptualise and materialize the impossible
- Touch and feel stuff
- The play a game in 1 minute/ played naughts and crosses found it didn't really relate
- Able to paint your own dream
- write what we need to do more on some of the stalls because there were a lot of people and not enough people to explain what to do to the amount of people waiting
- The element of surprise worked well for the stalls - Make a deal with the devil
- Had to wait 20 mins to get in and had a continuing long wait throughout the whole market for majority of the stalls
- The doctors of office stall was very cool, interesting take on the concept but also a lot of fun
- taking you back to kindergarten - finger painting - your own birthday party - playing with play dough - tight and congested - cute little party bags were given out - make believe
- Although the children's drawings ranging from 2-13 were very cute they didn't work that well in the concept of time warp
- use of finger painting on the wall
- Proper high school detention was very funny and certainly took me back to high school apart from what we had to write about
- Quite cool how we were given out maps and flyers for the overall market
- Detention slips given out
The markets line up was well ordered but very congested and didn't allow for much freedom and room to move
- Unexplained emojis
- Upbeat music
- Bright and colourful
- noisy almost like and old school childhood party
- arrows on floor for direction
- lost hype by the time i got in there
- Organisers dressed up in costume
- Retro

Poster

I had started looking at poster ideas and thinking about who we were donating it to and what it should look like so i decided to keep it very simple using a small portion of our patches and photos that i had gotten from the hospitals donating foundation to use.

Proposal and production snapshot

We have completed our proposal and production snapshot so that we and the organisational teams know where we are at, what we're doing and what we're going to need. 

Everything we need for our market stall to work

All of the things that we are going to need for our stall and quilt making to work.

Fabric squares - all cut
String and pegs
x2 Sewing machines
needle and thread
paint brushes
Fabric paint, glue and pens
Ribbon
cushions/ bean bags
cups, jug, plunger, tea, coffee, tea towel. cloths
Banner
Fabric to drape around to create an atmosphere
instagram cards to do
posters
photos printed for the stall
table
chairs
fabric scissors

need to look into getting some fleece to sew the finished patches to finish of the quilt

Instagram account

We have decided to create and Instagram account to add pictures of each quilt patch to. This creates what appears to be a digital quilt for everyone to look at and see everyone else's quilt patches, they also are given the ability to see what the final product looks like and so they can see what happens to the quilt and where it goes after the market.

An Instagram account gives us a technological platform with which to connect with our audience and maintain a communication that is relevant to them. It may also help to make the participants of our market feel like they are a part of something that is bigger than themselves, feel like their creative labour is valued and appreciated, and feel an ability to appreciate the final product and the work of others. It also gives us another means of facilitating the market experience and something that we can appreciate and we can feel a sense of achievement about.

https://www.instagram.com/creative_industries_1920/?hl=en

Our offering

Some different kinds of materials i had looked at and sourced from different locations some from family and my own home. Tried to think about different patterns and also different feeling fabrics.

Reading summaries

Group Study - New York Times Magazine - The Work issue

Summary/ Main bullet points

This reading focused on researching what makes a good/ successful group and what makes a bad/unsuccessful group, and looking into the traits and habits of each group and how certain personalities worked together, and it wasn't necessarily the smartest people that made the best groups.

Positive

• Studies show that groups tend to innovate faster, find mistakes more quickly, find better solutions to problems.
• Studies also show that people working in groups tend to achieve better results and report higher job satisfaction.
• Two behaviours that all good teams generally shared include, members speaking in roughly the same proportion ( equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking)
• The good teams also had a high social sensitivity, skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues.
• refer to traits such as conversational turn taking and average social sensitivity as aspects of whats known as physiological safety.
• enthusiasm for one another ideas joking around and having fun - allowed everyone to have fun and feel relaxed and energized.

Negatives

• Always feeling like you have to prove yourself, team dynamics putting her on edge.
• when she talked to her members of her group their responses were friendly and warm, when they gathered as a team things became fraught
• If only one person in a group spoke or a small group of people spoke it lowered the collective intelligence.
• people in ineffective teams had less social sensitivity towards their colleagues.

Affective labor - Michael Hardt

Summary/ main points

• The primary point of this essay is to put into context the changing role of affective labour in the capitalist economy.
• The processes of economic post - modernization that have been in course for the past twenty - five years have positioned affective labour in a role that is not only directly but at the direct pinnacle of the hierarchy of labouring forms.
• Affective labor is immaterial labor.
• Shift towards services is most recognizable in the dominant capitalist countries.

Immaterial Labour

• The passage toward an informational economy involves necessarily a change in the quality of labour and the nature of the labouring processes.
• The primary structural change between these models involves the system of communication between the production and consumption of commodities, that is the passage of information between factory and market.
• Factories will maintain zero stock and commodities will be produced just in time, according to present demand of the existing markets.
• Most services indeed are based on the continual exchange of information and knowledges - results in no material and durable good.
• Symbolic - analytical services - tasks that involve problem solving, problem identifying and strategic brokering activities.
• Manufacturing is material labour of the production of durable goods, immaterial labour of analytic and symbolic tasks, which itself breaks down into creative intelligent manipulation, on one hand, and routine and symbolic tasks, on the other.
• The production and manipulation of affects and requires (virtual or actual) human contact and proximity.

Biopower

• Biopower is the power of the creation of life, it is the production of collective subjectivities, sociality, and society itself.

Experience Prototyping 

Summary/ main bullet points

This reading talks about 'Experience Prototyping' as a form of prototyping that enables everyone to gain a first hand at existing or future conditions / experiences through active engagement, asking questions like what is prototyping, and looking into the practice or experience prototyping.

Introduction

• We find ourselves stretching limits of prototyping tools to explore and communicate what it will be like to interact with the things we design.
• 'Prototypes' are representations of a design made before the final item exists - this informs both the design process and design decisions.

What is experience prototyping?

• The concrete sensory experience of using an item - what the user looks at, feels, hears when they use the item.
• We can say an experience prototype is any kind of representation. In any medium that is designed to understand. explore or communicate what it might be like to engage with the product, space or system we are designing. 

Why is experience important? Why now?

• We find ourselves more often designing complex and dynamic interactions with converging hardware and software, spaces and services.
• The tools we use to design - e.g. prototypes, influence the way we think.

Experience prototyping in practice

• Three different activities in the process where experience prototyping is valuable - Understanding existing user experience and context - Exploring and evaluating design ideas - communicating ideas to an audience.

Understanding uses experience 

• Experience prototyping is applied here to demonstrate context and identify issues and opportunities in the design.
• Questions to ask at this stage include, what are the contextual, physical, temporal, sensory, social and cognitive factors need to be considered as you design, What is the essence of the existing user experience? What are essential factors that should be preserved?

The patient experience

• Builds upon peoples own imaginations and the use of other proxy devices to recreate essential elements in a personal experience.

The ROV pilot experience

• Use a proxy device to provide the team with specific insight into an experience that was not readily available to them.

The role playing a train journey experience

• informative and fun for a designer to find out what experiences would be like in a particular context through dramatic improvisation.

Exploring and evaluating design ideas

• The main purpose is facilitating the exploration of possible solutions and directing the design team towards a more informed development of user experience and the tangible components which create it.
• Through experience prototypes of these items and their interactive behaviour we are able to evaluate a variety of ideas.
• early stages - multiple design directions need to be explored, efficiently prototyped and compared.
• A tactile immersive - represented by a palm sized pebble 
• a shared experience - where the control functions can be split by two hands or two players
• a full body physical experience - represented by surface of skateboard

Children's picture communicator

• A true exprinace prototype for users - providing a really relevant experaince - seems to require a level of resoultion and functionality such that it can be let loose into an everyday context and more fully intergrated into peoples lives

communicating ideas

• Understand the subjective value of a design by directly experiencing it - Usually done with the intention of persuading the audience. 

Create and Reflect - testing service concepts with small scale prototypes

Desktop Walkthrough

What is it?

A small scale 3D model of a service environment. Employing simple props like lego figures lets designers bring a situation to life, acting out common scenarios and helping develop prototypes.

How is it made?

Kept fairly simple, insights into the service environment. Simple lego buildings with labels

Why is it used?

Allow and iterative analysis of situations depicted. New ideas and refinements constantly being introduced to the simulation. Walkthrough models provide a common language, various people can assess and co-develop a prototype, or analyse and restructure a problematic touch point.

Service Prototypes 

What is it?

Simulation service experience. Informal role play style conversations . Detailed full scale recreations.

How is it made?

Usually some form of mock up of the service system will be created. The prototype will generally be developed iteratively, with suggestions and refinements being constantly incorporated. 

Why is it used?

Far deeper understanding of a service than is possible with written of visual depictions. - learning by doing -, focus on user experiance. Help iterate design solutions as they can quickly incorporate and test ideas and refinements they may provoke.

Our offering and what we are going to need

One sentence summarising. 

A collectively made quilt for charity, 

What kind of space, will you need? (how much , sunny, dark?)

We will most likely need some space that has a lot of light, more natural light

Facilities?

We will need at least 2 - 4 power plugs, we will need the use of some light, chairs, tables.

Sound spill?

We are going to have to look into how much noise the sewing machines are going to make

Charity

So after a lot of investigation into different charities and ringing around and finding out what their needs are, we have decided to donate the finished quilt to Wellington Hospital Children's ward.
After talking to the person in charge on hospital donations they did mention that their preference for the quilt to be as close to a single size bed as possible.

And we have also contacted them about any imagery we can use, and they have allowed us to use the imagery off of their website.

Class brainstorming

Lecturer feedback and points to think about

Think about how we can sustain it - using Facebook, snapchat ect, building hype somehow.

Create patches and leave them around uni promoting our stall at the market,

asking people weather they like our idea or not and weather they would get involved and how we could make it better and what would make them get involved.

Using the fabric patches we already have to hopefully create an excitement and curiosity for our stall and a want to come and try out our idea.

Use photos of the organisation that is receiving the gesture to promote feel good feelings.

have visual product there already started to be created so that people can see what they do and what happens to the patch they create. 

Possible things to use.

Fabric pens

Glitter glue?

Fabric off cuts

Sourcing materials.

Ask other people and peers if they have any snaps that can’t be used. 

Ring around for a bulk amount of fabric offcuts.

Offering

Who for?

Audience is the key, students at Massey are the audience -  we will need to further discuss our idea with more students who are in the other markets and also students who aren't in the paper if they will get into out quilting for charity idea.

Also for the children at the hospital who we are donating the final quilt to be used.

What exchange?

----------------------

What is your exchange?

the audiences labour is gifted to someone who needs to and the audience receives a positive feeling for doing a good deed, we are the facilitators of the idea, for the audiences.

What is your Budget? 

Our budget is about $25 each ( $100 for everything) are there things we can beg, borrow or repurpose.

The space - What do you need?

Potentially the use of a table and stools, preferably somewhere that is open and has a nice amount of light like by the windows, possibly the need to accommodate for a large group of people.

When - time management/ Planning?

Going by weekly schedules and who’s available to do an amount of work or not and help others with their portion of the work when it’s needed and expect the same in return to help balance the workload between each other.

Why? content/ Philosophy?

• look at readings as a starting point - Hartd

Charity research

After thinking of our idea to make the quilt i began looking into charities that would take donations in the form of a quilt over money, also looking into charities that are underfunded by the government and need that little but extra to help.

The charities and places to donate to iv'e narrowed down to

• Ronald McDonald house.
• Womens Refuge.
• Children's wing at Wellington Hospital.
• Starship Hospital.
• Sending to an orphanage overseas - E.g. Cambodia.
• Red Cross Refugee Centre.
• Homeless Shelter.
• Child Cancer Foundation.
• Te O Managa Hospice.
• Canteen - Cancer Kids.

http://www.projectlinus.org/about/

This was another project that makes all of these beautifully coloured quilts and sends them to children who are suffering from illness, trauma and devastating loss. (some of what they do for kids is shown below)

Research

We had been doing research into doing interactive experience during todays lesson and i went and found some examples to help with ideas and also showing some of the ideas that we had though about doing.

- Georgia -