Thesis (how it started and it’s shaping into something...?)
For quite a while and during my first year as a design and technology student I tried to create tools that were driven by social justice and mostly inspired by my childhood in Peru and adulthood as a first generation immigrant going through life experiences in college, a professional designer, laser machine technician, and now as a graduate student.
I mostly explored elementary school education, agriculture education (vertical farming), politics and journalism, and the general topic of food.
Within the food topic I explored how the sense of smelling foods was connected to our memories. I created a project called Madeleine inspired by proust using the sense of smell connecting memories in literature. The project was internet of things 3d-printed based that let people experience smell of foods (without having food in front) to trigger memories for people to share and see the commonalities between their memory experiences.
Concerning food and agriculture I created Pacha, which is a web based food catalog designed to preserve farmers’ rights, indigenous knowledge and protect our biodiversity. The project looked to empower farmers through education by creating small social networks in which they would share their knowledge of foods, farming techniques or personal stories working their land besides saving information about their seeds and produce into the catalog.
First Thesis Studio Class
We were assigned an in-class exercise and use a grid of 9 to figure out what ideas/topics/domains were the most excited to each of us for then to start exploring and develop as a potential thesis idea.
How new technologies can help farmers protect their intellectual property from large agro-corporations.
Interested in how clothing could improve farmers performance.
How farmers in the andes can use livestock waste to generate electricity.
Interested in how foodie culture changes our eating habits.
... in how food and smells trigger memories that give meaning to our lives.
... how food and technologies can be used together to develop cooking skills.
Athleticism vs Us and Sports
... in how games turn average people into athletes - michael phelps developed double jointed arms and legs.
... in how underdeveloped motor skills affect distrophy and why physical computing can prevent it.
interested in how athletes’ movements can improve children’s motor skills by playing without seeing it as exercise.
I would like to study farming experiences in Peru and the US concerning intellectual property rights. I want to help publish unknown foods developed by these farmers to protect them from copyright infringement.
I would like to research on the best outdoor clothing brands. Then, I will develop a list of activities farmers perform in different climates to construct apparel for them.
I would like to research on the way farming communities have worked in the Andes for the past ~500 years to understand why their self-sufficient work cannot survive each winter. Then,I will build a system that uses their livestock waste to be processed to generate heat and electricity.
I would like to research the sociology of food to explore the foodie culture in different countries. Then, I will show its commonalities to tell the story of how it changes our eating habits.
I would like to research how memories are triggered through sensing smells. Then, I want to connect people and showcase their experiences.
I would like to research cooking techniques and why foods can never be consistently cooked equally. I would like to create a system to facilitate cooking at home.
I would like to research athleticism techniques, and how athletes’ trainings are studied. I want to break down three types of exercises athletes perform to showcase how their bodies developed through their careers.
I would like to research agility, balance, coordination, power, reaction time and speed in athletes compared with an average man or woman. From this, I want to draw the relationship between underdeveloped motor skills, athleticism and physical computing.
I would like to research games for pedagogy as well as motor skills developed between the ages of 6 and 9. I will list alternatives to exercising that I am interested in.
From there, I got more confused and ended up discarding ideas I really didn’t think could be developed further. Then, I wrote a list breaking down potential domains, subdomains, project ideas, inspiration, precedents...
Then, I built a venn diagram to figure out what else to discard from the huge list...
Then, I came up with two concept ideas.
The first one was in the intersection of Food Studies and Sociology. I would like to study the experiences behind sensory analysis because I want to find out how to recreate the senses that come with eating in order to understand why our preservation of memories is connected to our senses.
And the questions following that statement were:
If there are no memories, then we as humans are at risk.
Learning is based on memories.
We can’t survive without food.
We can’t learn what to eat without memory.
Why are people disconnected from their memories?
I want to create a new problem.
To analyze our senses through food memories.
Study cultural and historical identity through foods.
Needs to be experiential.
For the second one I analyzed Food Studies and Law and Economics to ask myself the following: How might small local farmers share their food knowledge to the rest of us? and answering: By creating - something - designed to preserve farmers’ rights, indigenous knowledge and protect our biodiversity. This - something - looks to empower farmers through education by creating small social communities and networks, which let farmers share their knowledge of foods, farming techniques or personal stories working their land.
To then follow up with this:
Maybe we don’t care about farming, we care about stories.
How else to create a voice for farming communities.
Look into Food CoOps and Farmer Associations.
Understand market and commerce aspects.
Consider politics in farming communities.
Research IP and Farmers’ Rights Organizations
FAO (Food & Agriculture Organization at the UN)
At the end of that presentation we did another class exercise that let us analyze the context, intention and impact of our future project ideas, but I had two ideas and decided that I would have to do it twice. And I came up with these two:
What do you plan to make?
Why do you want to make it?
How is this making a response to your inquiry?
- I would like to recreate the experience sensing foods to trigger memories because us humans cannot learn without memorizing. We would not be able to learn how, what or when to eat if we had nothing to learn from. -
I would like to experiment on recreating the experience of using human senses that would trigger memories of food backed by farmers’ indigenous knowledge.
What is the goal of your project?
The goal is to trigger a conscious debate for people to analyze how else food is important to us besides its primary use, give recognition to farmers’ rights and indigenous knowledge, and demonstrate that technology can change our perception of food memories.
But something was off and did not even finish the exercise because I needed to find a way to combine both ideas and introduce technology into it. Dave Carroll insisted that both projects were not yet connected to any technology or anything studying in the program.
I needed to figure out how technology is interacting with farmers. How it does it with food. How it does it with memory.
With the help of Dana Martens I decided to try the class exercise again.
Context - I am studying the impact of technology on the relationship between human sensory analysis and memories as it related to food from farming to consumption.
Intention - I would like to experiment on recreating the experience of using human senses that would trigger food memories supported by farmers’ indigenous knowledge.
Impact - The goal is to trigger a conscious debate for people to analyze how else food is important to us besides its primary use, to give recognition to farmers’ rights and indigenous knowledge, and to demonstrate that technology can change our perception of food memories.
