Positioning myself in writing — A Snapshot
Who Am I?
What a question. But in course of the Interaction Design theory class I answered the questions as follows: I am an aspiring designer that is interested in the outdoors. I think as designers we have a responsibility towards social, political and economical topics; and this is also what interests me most. Currently the whole corona pandemic is holding the world in breath. My personal story is influenced a lot by the absence of my mother I think. My mom died when I was 8 years old and I never felt comfortable enough to confront myself and others with the topic. I told people, friends and sometimes strangers about the fact but never faced the true meaning of her death and the influence on me, my life and also my surroundings. Especially in the beginning of the pandemic a lot of people died from the disease. Most of them died alone and in a lot of cases their families and friends were not even allowed to hold a funeral. This brought the issue of death and dying back on my mind.
What is my ambition as a designer?
My ambition as a designer is to bee cool, designers are cool and I want to be cool as well. Not but for real, sometimes I am asking myself if this is really what I want to do, to be a designer? I have a lot of things going on in my life and school and becoming a designer is just one of them. But I think my ambition to continue becoming one, is my hope that I can combine my interests. I think life is too short to work only for the money. But working passionately and having a life besides work that is passionate and interesting as well is really hard. So combining my worlds is my ambition. For example the outdoors are endangered by climate change. So doing projects and working in the field of the outdoors with my skills of being a designer would be a little dream. I don’t want to stand still in life. But also I think at the moment in mainly makes me nervous to think about where I want to go in life, what I want to do and with whom I want to spend it with where. That’s probably why my answer is so frittered.
Pick a topic of interest and say something about it that no one ever heard before.
The last task of the session was to pick a topic. Ok, I’m picking Death / Dying but say something about it that no one ever heard before?? I was struggeling, to say the least. These are the thoughts I wrote down:
Let’s make the matter of death and the act of dying something not as horrifying as before. For example; designing your own death and funeral. Designing your last hours. Designing your life before your last hours. How do you want your family to experience your death? Do you want to leave them something behind? If yes what is it? Death is an experience that we have to live through alone. No one knows what is afterwards but what can we do to make it less grave? And, how did the pandemic change the matter of death? What if you can’t see your loved ones in your last hours? What if you don’t even have loved ones? What if we could experience death before? What if we could test dying?
