COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT

Another week, more information and more reflections. This week was the community engagement course. I gotta say it was a nice contrast to the past hectic weeks of classes. We started talking a bit about design and action. How we can engage with people and organizations around us. We also got to hear a bit what holon does and talk about some of their interesting projects like plasticpla, espai puntal, tik-ra, and others.

We went through some guidelines for interventions and community engagement for our research projects. The importance of situating yourself in context, which has been resonating a lot lately, also in relation to involved and creative communities, a need for enactment and long term transitions with a theory of change.

We engaged in a physical activity in which we used our bodies as a tool for prototyping. It sounded a bit strange at the beginning and I think we were a bit skeptical and rigid (given it was a bit earlier than usual and that the weather was cold). After some excercises that helped us relax our bodies, we started moving according to what our bodies actually wanted to do and not what our mind was telling us to do. I find this separation of mind and body very curious. There is something really unexplored and overlooked in this concept. Most of us don't really know how to detach from our minds, we are so used to analyzing and thinking about everything and not much to feeling things. I believe this is super important mainly for the creative process.

We had another activity in which we went walking around Elisava finding something that is urgently waiting to be born. I realized by analyzing the exhibition on the main floor that most students are talking about self expression in design and how important it is to explore new ways of designing and approaching your own creative methodology. People exploring more and more new ways of finding inspiration and getting to better solutions. There is a movement of empowerment for self expression in the creative ways.

We made a human graphic in which we had to stand in relation to an imaginary 'x' and 'y' axis. The 'x' axis represented how much you thought the world was going to shit because of climate crisis. After we selected our spot in the 'x' axis we moved to the 'y'. The 'y' was in reference to how much did we believe there was hope for a better future. The whole class was spread out in the classroom and had different opinions regarding this subject. It was interesting to listen to different perspectives on the subjects and the reason why they thought like that. We also did some human sculptures by first defining a system, which in this case was Education. After deciding on it, we mapped all of the bodies that surround it. Like teachers, classrooms, library, self-learning, financial stress, loans, cultural background, food, suppliers, administration, ministry, government, board of directors, transportation, and many more. We then chose the ones we gave more importance to and those we had to represent as a statue. So we had the actors and the spectators. I chose to be teachers and at first I didn't know how I could act a teacher without expressing the obvious actions related to them. When we did some excercises that helped us relax our body and get into our rol I felt more confident. I wanted to portray the huge responsibility and struggle the teachers have everyday while trying to support students with the necesary tools but also trying to sustain themselves in this hard environment. Our first sculpture was supposed to represent how the system is at the moment and the result was a sad sculpture we all engaged with. Something where things didn't have relations where they should and some detachments from responsibilities. Others felt more like they were lost. In conclusion, no one felt right. We then enacted a sculpture which we thought was the right one. But again, we didn't get it right. There was something too forced and staged about it. We weren't feeling it and I believe we were acting by how it would ideally would be perceived but not really how we wanted it to be. After getting some more feedback from our spectating classmates, we changed the sculpture one last time. In this one we were all sort of in the same level, which made us feel more comfortable and equitative. We were all sort of connected between each other which made us feel like everything would flow better. But there were still some things that I would have done differently, like getting loans to integrate more with us and be a relevant part of the system. Lots of people would not have acces to education if scholarships didn't exist or student loans. There is also the addition that each of us comes from different backgrounds and we've all had different experiences in relation to education. So that made our interpretation more complete and diverse.

FIRST SCULPTURE-PRESENT SITUATION.

SECOND SCULPTURE-IDEAL SITUATION.

THIRD SCULPTURE-EMERGING SITUATION.

We also developed some work related towards the physical intervention we want to make. To do that, first we need to define our challenge. Our challenge as a collective is to reconnect with nature. In this sense, we wish to bring nature closer to people and find ways to make agriculture more accesible to everyone. We started thinking of ways people could grow their own food at home. Also some ways in which people could learn more about growing food in a non-intimidating way. So, we mapped out what services, organizations, businesses, places and resources we had in Barcelona in this MIRO BOARD.

We selected the organizations we thought were a better fit for what we were looking for and we started to fill a chart for each of them, describing their context, current situation, limits and engagement, theory of change and design opportunities. (This is also in the MIRO BOARD).

We divided by tasks and so Gerda, Ruben and I went to connecthort on Saturday and after volunteering like every Saturday builind with biomaterials, we talked to the guy in charge of the courses on how to grow your fruits and vegetables at home. He specified a need they have with this, which is the structure containing the plant they give to the people to take home. It is too big and has some things that do not work. This could be interesting to redesign because it is the bump to take away so people can actually be facilitated with the tools to do agriculture at a small scale at home. We are also planning to contact some local farmers and to visit Valldaura, which could give us interesting insights about farming.