Design Dialogues

Right before Christmas🎅 we wrapped the first trimester MDEF with a exposition in the central hall of IAAC displaying our project outputs. On the 21st of December this event called 'Design Dialogues' exposed the videos, posters, interventions, prototypes and other materials of the projects we had been working on.

Preparation

Leading up to the event we had a distinction of the projects running and had a clear seperation of who would display what and where.

figure 1: Project division and the collaborators involved.

Execution

After a short introduction by the faculty the rounds of presentations started gradually and people began exchanging opinions, feedback and ideas.

Conversaciones Maduras

Our setup for our Design Intervention was centered around a TV-screen displaying a visual compilation of the workshop and its preparations made by teammate Paula Bustos. A second screen showed our website created by Paula del Río Arteaga. Surrounding those were Vikrant Mishra's hot sauces, our personal posters, booklets, fertillizer and compost stand by Gerda Meleschkin. Participants could check our video and website, try the hot sauces, inspect our posters and discuss whatever seemed relevant to them.

Duckweed Incubator

figure 2: First sketch of the setup.

figure 3: Second sketch of the setup.

figure 4: Third sketch of the setup.

Next to our collaborative presentation stall Vikrant Mishra and I were displaying and presenting our Duckweed Incubator. We installed it on eye-level to allow people that were interested in it to see the complete system; including code, plants, hardware and sketches. Now and then we had the pump running to circulate the water and show its working principle. Knowing that this still had to be adjusted and finetuned to not disturb the duckweed we decided not to have it running fulltime but just occassionaly switch it on.

figure 5: The setup of the Duckweed Incubator during Design Dialogues.

figure 6: Most relevant feedback received during first term's Design Dialogues term 1.

Conclusion and continuation

Despite being the very last academic day of the year it turned out to be more a beginning of a project rather than the end of one. Being on the brink of the second trimester offers the opportunity to elaborate our product, welcome more ideas and work on new iterations and explorations. Because of the relative short timespan beforehand we went straight for fabrication and skipped a few steps. As a colaborative we will first have to determine our vision (both individually and as duo), decide where we want this to head to and work on the feedback we got. One direction this project could head to is in to expand it into a aquaponic-setup when aiming for a more or less circular system.