Design to me is tattoo cover-ups. It’s song remixes. It’s the ability to see a product, a process, or a situation, understand it for everything that it is and involves, and have the creative perspective to see how it could be different. Design is the ability to understand everything that is present and be able to identify what is missing that could make a positive difference. This process/type of insight is something I hope to develop with the case studies over the semester — I want to understand exactly why commercials like the World’s Most Interesting Man were popular when they were, and be able to improve on that popularity and/or apply it to the future. I want to take a week to develop a prototype, and then try to re-imagine everything I just designed, finding the missed opportunities,and improve. 

Challenge 0: This challenge was definitely a combination of connecting aesthetic experience to experience of meaning, as well as assigning personality to products. I assigned “personality/roles” to objects in my room based on their color (ex. my red woolen winter hat actively “keeps me warm” and “comforts” me in the cold weather) and the emotional response elicited by the color. 

Challenge .5: The design elements that I added to the SkyMall product were inspired by my attempt to connect with the “concern” of the consumers of the product; I tried to understand what consumers were looking for in christmas tree ornaments and ended up adding elements to the product that would connect to memory (based on the idea that christmas ornaments are a seasonal item that gain significance based on the story associated with the ornament such as time of its purchase).

Challenge 1: Through the element of our Escape the Room experience that involved participants identifying their identity within the game based on the objects in their room, we encouraged participants to invest in the objects around them and assign meaning to all of the elements in the environment.

Challenge 2: With this challenge, my partner and I really tried to use the idea of emotional experience as the crux of our show — the fact that emotions come more from what people expect from a situation or product than from the situation/product itself, we believed that by challenging and contradicting the audience’s expectations for our show’s characters, we could elicit the largest possible reaction.

What I’ve Gots: When I think about the products/services I have chosen to use for my WIG assignments, they all are products that have either made me feel unique among others, or have made me feel as though I experience the product differently than others. Converse products are an example of products that do both of these things —- each product is very unique from other company’s products, but somehow the Converse brand has also supported and encouraged its customers to make each product their own by physically transforming the product (ex. writing on sneakers)