EKA diary

EKA DIARY

Eesti Kunstiakadeemia

*Tallinn, Estonia*

My adventure in Tallinn begins!

Bog trip at Raplamaa

Old town of Tallinn

My new academy :)

My courses:

1. Industrial design project 3:
"Industrial design studio on the topic of mobility and minority groups – a small vehicle concept will be designed. Students will analyze the existing last-mile transport infrastructure and design for a minority group, currently neglected by the transportation start-up scene. From the technical side, the course aims to teach the choice of material and construction principles. "

2. Tangible Interaction Design:
The goal of this course is to explore interactions beyond screens and involve senses beyond sight in our design process. Students will get to experiment with paper prototyping, soldering, electronics, optionally woodworking and 3D-printing.

3. Emotional Design:
The aim of this project is to explore the often overlooked emotional side of design. Students will focus on mobile experiences and game design methodology, learn the methods that go into designing for applications, and see that emotional design is a fundamental aspect that separates great design from the good. The students are tasked to create a mobile design prototype that provokes human emotions.

4. Digital Portfolio Development:
The aim of this course is to create an outstanding portfolio that is the key for a successful application for work or an internship. The couse will follow through a series of sessions throughout the semester to help students design and craft it. In the first part of the class students will learn the designer fundamentals of HTML/CSS coding, to give them more freedom in the portfolio design process.

5. Design for Play:
Welcome to PLAY LAB! Come and research what material combinations, forms, movements, situations trigger the playful human being. Experiment, be silly, follow your instincts and find your inner child. Play will be experienced through different perspectives and contexts to open up the broad definition of play. The outcome of this research is our commonly created knowledge that is documented in a written and visual manner. The course ends with a public playful event to share our experience.

6. History of Ideas, Objects and Connections:
We will look at key concepts in the history of ideas – power and the state, inequality, sexual politics, colonialism and empire – in dialogue with material culture. The literature and objects for discussion will be taken from across the 17th-21st centuries. Students will also be encouraged to share examples from their specialist fields, in what should be a dynamic discussion about ideas, historical objects, underlying power structures, and relevance today.

7. Exhibition projects for Erasmus students:
"A special course dedicated to Erasmus students to produce their own group exhibition in Tallinn. From planning to organising to finissage. deal with. We will have different guests talking about different aspects of a show. We will go through all of it together and create an exhibition at the end of the course. Most of the meetings will take place as a seminar, where we talk about our interests, issues we have with exhibitions and topics we find relevant. The exhibition project is open for students from different departments. Students are encouraged to contribute to the exhibition in different ways. (From creating and artwork to designing the space, installing the works or dealing with the graphic design)"

Design for Play

Characteristics of Play

Tangible interaction Design:

-Input & Output
-Brainstorming session
-Arduino class
-Forming project groups

Design for Play

Material properties
(sound, distorted vision, strength,...)

Digital Portfolio Development

After looking into good and bad portfolios, these are the things we find make a good portfolio

Tangible Interaction Design

-quick prototyping
-finalizing concept
-discussing how to build the product
-redesigning

'Our smart device is specifically designed to help university students optimize their study sessions through the use of the pomodoro technique. With a variety of focus sounds and ambient lighting options, our device creates the ideal environment for deep work and productivity.'

Design for Play

Ambiguity of Objects

Tangible Interaction Design:

Material decisions & testing
(plexiglass & wood)

Estonian Independence Day

24/2/2023

Tangible Interaction Design

-finished wooden base
-ordered materials
-coding development
-cnc drawing in fusion 360
-improving design details

Parade at freedom square

Design for Play

Use your body and its limits to play

Week trip to Lapland, Kilipsjärvi, Finland
:)

--> starting to make a portfolio on Webflow

We created a game called 'the Waterfall' where one group had to mime a sea creatures situation to their partner through the waterfall, while the other group tried to interrupt their communication 'being' the waterfall. They had 2 mins to communicate the sentence to each other.

-final design decision
-start making the wood base
-begin to code the tech part
-working on fusion 360
-buying materials

week 1

week 2

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week 3

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week 4

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week 5

I presented my previous projects and interests to Erasmus students for the exhibition project

The history of Ideas, objects and connections:
-The Encyclopédie by Diderot
-Encyclopédie vs religion
-female role in the Encyclopédie
-lace making and furniture making

History of Ideas, objects and connections:
-Hobbes, Power & State
-We are separate yet inseparable
-Society and state
-Law of Nature

History of Ideas, objects and connections:
-Dressing up and Performance
-Clothing is a language which announces the wearers social class, occupation, religion, gender, etc.…
-Louis (XIV) the Sun King

History of Ideas, objects and connections:
-Gender and Space
-Crime is one of many factors that shape women’s urban lives in particular ways.
-the theory of space forces us to focus on the role of things in interrelationships just as well as other people.

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week 6

Design for Play

The toy is a gate to the world understood through play.

Industrial Design

we visited the Estonian e-bike factory of Ampler, they really know how to design for their target group

Tangible Interaction Design

Endterm:
-laser engraving
-drilling
-coding
-bending plexitubes
-assembling
-rendering
-...

Deep Flow

^Temporary prototype until the exhibition at Viru Keskus on the 2nd of April

Digital Portfolio Development

I presented my first idea for a new portfolio, showing a possible front page

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week 7
Break

Industrial design

i had to read an article on 'Little Sun' created by Olafur Eliasson and Frederik Otessen. The author untangles differences of meanings between cross-domain art & design objects, he does so by examining the Little Sun and some of its mediations.

By applying the indicative framework invented by Juan Pablo Bonta, you can make it easier to understand what the meaning of the object could be.

On the other hand, the text suggests that a well-intended gesture toward non-Western consumers may end up being a patronizing Western gaze objectified in a toy-like product. This method appeals not just to wealthy Western customers, but it also strengthens the modernist strain in dominant Western design and art traditions. As a result, the object may remain in design museums and be considered a collector's item while still meeting its claimed social design aims.

Commercial side of Little Sun >>>

On Tuesday I visited Tartu, the 2nd biggest city of Estonia

Interesting weaving technique

Learning about the Estonian culture at the National Museum in Tartu

Old embroidery tool

Old envelope pouch

Explored the Old Town, the Upside Down Museum, the National Museum, the Ruins,...

I wrote a blogpost about our team's process during the Tangible Interaction Design course

Besides the exhibition, this project is finished, the next one that will replace it Emotional Design

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week 8

History of Ideas, Objects and Connections:
-Inequality: Rousseau
-Know our enemies and understand how they were thinking in order to get why we still have massive inequalities nowadays.
-‘This is mine’ -> how modern civilization started where inequality exists.
-Elites lead to a great inequality.

Industrial design:
we created a Figma board

-created a questionnaire to interview elderly on what they desire to improve their walking experience
-made a moodboard

-observed elderly on the street
-researched
-brainstormed

Design for Play:
theory of games
-The primary thing about competitive instinct is the desire to excel others, to be the first and to be honoured for that.

-To our way of thinking, cheating as a means of winning a game robs the action of its play-character and spoils it altogether, because for us the essence of play is that the rules be kept---,--that it be fair play.

We had to design a game and afterwards we all played them

Tangible Interaction Design:
Although the project is over we have the exhibition Sunday 2/4 so we still had one week to improve it for the public.

what I did:
-laser engraved a front sheet for the volume bar
-spraypainted the plexiglass tube
-fixed the mesh fabric

!!!NEW COURSE!!!

Emotional Design:
We had a lecture about emotions:
-Emotion vs Cognition: finding the value of emotions
-Negative emotions (ex. anxiety) evoke focus, positive emotions (ex. happy) evoke creativity
-Emotions help you judge situations
-Why should designers care? You can influence the users’ emotions, additionally if the user is emotionally connected to an item, it will cherish it more and use it for a longer time (sustainability).
-How? Effectiveness, efficiency, satisfaction -> elevates good design into great design ->These three pillars are interdependent.
-Beauty and brain of design need to be harmonious
-Book: Emotional Design by Don Norman

‘When we connect with something there are always three levels involved:’
1. Visceral: first reaction, aesthetics
2. Behavioral: what is does, how it’s used
3. Reflective: what does it mean to us? does it symbolize something to us?

Final Assignment:
Redesign a behavioral boring application (timer/alarm/calculator/…) and incorporate emotional connection (happy, excited, annoyed, angry, frustrated…) to it.
->prototype (Adobe XD, Figma, Photoshop) visual support of idea
->presentation
->visual of documentation

‘Take something boring and make it more exciting emotionally (visceral, behavioral, reflective)’

Exhibitions poster and visuals for our project

click on this visual >>>

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THE EXHIBITION

OVERVIEW

DEEP FLOW PROTOTYPE

THE MAKERS

week 9

History of Ideas, Objects & Connections:

Presentation:
Activist artist that is driven by material history, human rights and responsibilities?--> AI WEIWEI

Ai is known for his political activism, social commentary, and avant-garde art. He has worked in a variety of mediums, including sculpture, installation, architecture, and photography.

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How did he get there?
1. Ai WeiWei was born in Beijing in 1957 and grew up with his famed dad which was a poet. Their communist leader initially embraced and liked the poet but soon after publicly disapproved during the anti-rightist movement of 1958. The family got send away to labor camps in remote provinces until the end of the cultural revolution in 1976.
2. They returned to Beijing where Ai WeiWei enrolled at the Beijing Film Academy in 1978.
3. He later co-founded an avant garde artist group called ‘The Stars’.
4. In 1981 he suddenly moved to New York where he started photographing his life. He started immersing himself more into art, being fascinated by Marcel Duchamp and the readymade as art.
5. He returned to China in 1993 he arrived in a country that was undergoing tremendous change. He started turning a critical eye towards al buildings of power, abroad and at home. He always knew the value of historic objects and was aware of the symbolic power of manipulating them. Chinese historic pieces became Ai WeiWei’s raw material base for his redefined readymade. Dynamically synthesizing the clash between reverence for the past and the irrepressible drive toward the future, for modernization is a mixed bag. With change, there is loss, history is erased.

Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn - 1995

In 1995, Ai Weiwei deliberately dropped a Han Dynasty (206 BC-220 AD) urn, capturing the action in three frames. It’s a highly provocative work of art. This series of three black and white photographs portray the artist holding a 2,000-year-old Han dynasty urn that, frame by frame, he drops, it falls, and shatters.
It shows the artist shattering this ancient vessel, an act recalling the reckless destruction of traditional relics during the years of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). This piece is as much a work of photography as a work of performance art, in each still an unaffected Ai looks directly at the camera aware of his destructiveness. In fact, to capture the action on film (rather than digital photography, which lets you review the image immediately), the artist actually broke two ceramic vessels, just in case. This kind of blatant destruction of artifacts may seem highly irreverent, yet it also forces viewers to consider issues of transformation and destruction of the past.

Presentation:

Industrial design: we got answers from the questionnaire, although they were not what we hoped for...

conclusion:
-no issue with assistance
-don't want electric vehicles
-don't struggle much walking

-struggle on the stairs -> new direction!

what already exists?

Exhibition project: brainstorming about our location options and what we could exhibit there -> old mall or small container in an art area of Tallinn --> themes: uncanny, liminal spaces, post-vandalism, ....

Design for Play
Indoor spaces

The environment for young children should take into account their desires and abilities to construct places and offer elements and instruments to satisfy their desires and help their abilities to grow.

OXO game in EKA

fishes being attacked by piranhas and the 'land' is the top of the 'sea'. when you get attacked you turn into a piranha until there is only one winning fishy left.

Emotional Design:

+ ideation technique, From the previous task, what do i find valuable for my app?

-engage with the user through gamification (braingames)
-share math tips and tricks
-clean, simple and coherent visual design
-previous calculations visible (‘my history’)
-text-based calculator/voice-based
‘how do you solve... 3+3’ instead of ‘what is ...’

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week 10

History of Ideas, Objects and Connections:
Objects and Class: Rousseau

Immortalizing the great thinkers -- Rousseau was initially buried on an artificial island designed by Hubert Robert, in nature.
He ended up getting moved to the Panthéon (historically built like a church, became a monument in honor of the great thinkers) where 75 men and 6 women were buried. People were also removed to the Panthéon, it was quite messy and at one point you would be considered on the ‘good’ side and later you could be considered the enemy. It’s a political decision made by the president. People have declined going to the Panthéon to get re-buried.

What is collective memory? It is written and gets re-written/re-shaped, museums are a good example, history is not only factual it is still controlled in a way and the people of power decide what becomes history that gets remembered.

Industrial design

option:
Designing an efficient handlebar assistance tool for the elderly to clip onto the railing of staircases requires careful consideration of several factors such as materials, attachment mechanism, and portability.

Step by step possibility:

1.the elderly person takes the foldable handlebar out of her bar/from her bag/from the storage spot at the bottom of the stairs
2.they slide is onto the rails
3.they attach their belongings to the hook on the handlebar
4.with empty hands they can now hold onto the handlebar safely and climb up the stairs, they can’t fall backwards because of this locking system that makes sure the bar doesn’t move backwards unless you press on a button
5.when at their appartment door, they slide/clip it off and either store it in their bag/place their shoppingbag on it again so it becomes one/store it away

exhibition project:
analyzing the locations, visiting them and seeing how people interact with the spaces.

<< the container is here

Design for Play:
Outdoor spaces/playground

-Playgrounds are a festival of shapes and structures organized.
-Good playgrounds open themselves up to play, and their props serve as instruments for playful occupation.
-Skateboarders are masters at seeing the playground in the urban spaces that surround them.

MY FAMILY CAME TO VISIT FOR THE WEEKEND! <3

Lahemaa national park,
Beautiful beautiful nature >>

KUMU, Art museum of Tallinn >>

Emotional design: deadline week!
-final usable prototype
-sketching
-moodboarding
-finalizing
-updating with feedback
+courses during the day

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week 11

History of Ideas, Objects and Connections:

The politics of the Museum:
-Zoo’s can also be seen as a museum where countries with power steal from other countries.
-Changing of names of works who would nowadays be considered offensive.
-‘the museum of the world’ in the British museum
-What would a world be like where all historical artifacts of each country would be back where they came from?
-Curators of museums can tell a story in a westernized manner/perspective
-‘Black death spectacle’, Parker Bright’s protest in front of Dana Schutz’s in 2017 at the Whitney Biennial
-Our practice is based on a list of standards we are so used to that we never even questioned them.

Industrial design:
1ST EVALUATION

option ideas:
1.the handlebar is foldable, everyone has their own, you have your own and attach it yourself to the railing system
2.the handlebar is part of you shoppingbag, everyone has their own, you have your own and attach it yourself to the railing system
--> they could have their own that they will want to bring with them outside because on challenging staircases in the city the rails have the same system which could help them
3.elevator system in which when you’re downstairs you press on a button and it slides down to you, when its up you leave it, their is one handlebar for the whole appartment block
4.every staircase floor has a build-in handlebar system in which you can unfold that one walk up the stairs with it and refold it and it automatically slides back down the one floor staircase
5.the handlebar is placed in storage areas up and down the building, you have your own and attach it yourself to the railing system
6.the handlebar is attached to the ceiling so it is not in the way of others unless you are using it

Exhibition project:
-Moodboard making on subjects we could work on for our exhibition

uncanny, unintentional still lives, post-vandalism, liminal spaces

Design for Play:
Event

'Maybe the purpose of democracy is simply to create societies where people are safe and secure enough -- to play.

measuring traditional soviet apartment building staircases^

'make the best ice cream'

little warmup during the mental health week at EKA

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Nature-loving weekend <3

Canoeing trip :)

week 12

History of Ideas Objects and Connections:

-Emotional baggage by Orvar Löfgren in Sensitive Objects:
there is a flow of everyday objects connecting the two settings, which creates some kind of experiential continuity. The personal bond between person and object is created above all by the constant handling, the packing and unpacking. ‘To live out of a suitcase’ is not just a metaphor but a real experience for many. The strong affects of suitcase contents are created by several processes of throwntogetherness and entanglement

-“Cruel Optimism”, Remembering Laurent Berlant
But optimism might not feel optimistic. About normal people, how we live our lives and how we feel.

The 9 nine affects by Silvan Tomkins: affect is the biological response you get and from that you get a feeling, they’re not the same. (ex: affect=goosebumps, emotion=fear)

Industrial design: The Last Mile

-we 3D modeled handlebar options and the space in which we would use them (coming from the measurements from last week)
-thinking of the mechanisms
thinking of the connections between our pieces
-thinking of logistics
-thinking of aesthetics
-thinking of materials
BUT struggling because we aren't engineers and these mechanisms are extremely complicated and figuring out if they would work in our concept is no easy task.

Design for Play:

Organizing our play event for next week!

Exhibition project:

We had a special guest coming in from The Hague to talk about organizing exhibitions; his name is Alexander Webber.

He talked about his work, curating, exhibitions and guided us in our ideas. We also visited an exhibition space we possibly want to use, named 'Manufaktuuri'.

I also worked on my portfolio

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week 13

Holiday on Monday:
celebrating the beginning of Spring

I went to the glass workshop and learned how to glassblow :)))

It is extremely difficult, warm, heavy and challenging but I enjoyed it a lot!

I made a tiny glass and vase, although it wasn't about the object, more about the techniques.

Industrial design:
creating models
finalizing measurements
finalizing materials
finalizing design functions
...