Photograph clicked at El Masnou Station, Barcelona

Living with your Own Ideas

For the 1PP Design Intervention through a video vignette exercise, my chosen enquiries were the following ones:

1. Can technology be consumed alongside food?
2. Can art systems influence the Food Industry/Ecosystems? 

For the exercise, I was lucky enough to be able to explore both the questions in one activity. Food, being the intrinsic part for my journey through MDEF, made this activity almost fall right in place for my bigger picture. It was a perfect way to gather insights and to make myself feel challenged in a conscious and ‘aware’ kind of way. My focus was the various kinds of Interactions between food systems, people and consumerism with the local Supermercat(s) in focus.

I was really interested in getting out there and interacting with people alongside their stories. But hailing from India, speaking Spanish has not been one of my strongest assets. This made the activity even more challenging in unexpected ways than what I had expected. To make things fun and dial the tension down, I tried creating a gaming activity, using ‘Augmentation’ as my ways of exploration. Utilizing the psychology of reward-winning, I created a game where people could play to win fruits and vegetables of their choice for free. The player is supposed to use the phone screen as their eye to navigate through the market. Certain parts are covered with AR probes to hide the prizes. On an average, each game has 3 probes and the individual who manages to guess all, gets to take either all the right guesses or any one thing of their choice from the market.

Many variables like linguistic barriers and rush-hours made the activity extremely hard at many points. In a period of 5 hours, I only managed to gather two somehow successful plays for the game. In unforeseen ways, the game and interactions made me gather a lot of insights about what goes on inside a local grocery supermarket. I witnessed the intricate codependency between food supplies and their suppliers across various different times of the day. From my interactions, the correlation between linguistic proficiency and behavioural science was also observed. This was mainly derived from the struggle of trying to interact with somebody who doesn’t understand the opposite person’s language which was a major barrier to overcome in my case.

After the first few hours, I realized that to understand the marketplace from my perspective, I need to play the game myself rather than letting other people play it for me. This gave rise to the second version of the game. The aim of the new game was to make a player navigate through the market, to choose and pick any 3 ingredients of their choice. These ingredients were supposed to be my next meals that day. This did the job of magnifying my ethical consciousness of the game. This happened because this time I was not only playing a part in the game but I was also consuming it. This added another dimension to the activity and made me introspect my own perspectives. At some points, I questioned the authenticity of the enquiries I was targeting and the experiences I was absorbing. The back-and-forth through switching cameras and planting probes after every game-play was hindering my standpoint to play a justified and unfiltered game.

My pastworks have been extensively guided either with a design brief or a deliverable. This activity was the first time that I was totally engaged and focused in exploring rather than worrying about the final video vignette outcome. My fight and personal stands were much more involved and in place than usual, while trying to explore this challenge. While trying to involve myself as an Instrument, I saw my enquiries turning into real-life situations. I was put in a spot multiple times where real-time and instantaneous navigation was required. This gave rise to sometimes correlated and even random insights/information. The constant attempts and jumping-in magnified the real-time aspect of the then-current situation and made me more conscious about what I need to learn and avoid next.
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As a Design Practitioner, I feel much more obliged to open-up my boxed realities and let loose of my horizons. Challenging situations and explorations sometimes lead to unexpected information, correlations and outcomes. In words by Oscar, I need to indulge in Design much more as a nomadic practice rather than sedentary.
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As a resident of Barcelona, I feel much more obliged to have conversations and attempt learning the language. This key value is only going to help me in indulging deeper into conversations and stories of people around me. I also feel obliged to be conscious about the smallest decisions that I make in my everyday life to keep the ecosystem of the city harmonious and balanced.
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As a human being, I’m realizing the importance of exploring and putting myself out there in uncomfortable spots. I’m going to try to be well-communicated, aware and conscious of the life that I make on this planet.

Few of the insights that I gathered during the activity are as following:

• For research or collecting data, mornings and early evenings are one of the hardest times to communicate with people.

• Crowds navigating through or towards the Metro or bus station are the hardest to talk to.
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• The footfall of working mothers or couples increases during the evening because of pre-dinner preparations.
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• Most of the stock in a vegetable supermercat comes early in the morning to avoid traffic during early rush hours.
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• Depending on the demand and season for a produce, the stock gets supplied and restocked many times a day, and sometimes from multiple locations.
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• Various supplies in a vegetable supermercat come at different times from suppliers depending on variables like source, availability, distance and kind of produce.
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• Vegetable supermercats dispose of a ginormous amount of natural and food-waste that results from defective food after transport, peels and rotting.
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• The stale or bad produce is only cleared-off the next morning exactly before the arrival of new produce.
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• Locals seem to be conscious about plastics, which makes carrying tote-bags quite a lively and popular trend.
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• Blue Cheese smells bad while cooking, but tastes great while eating.