Collective Design Intervention 02

What is our relationship with objects? This intervention was an attempt at trying to understand what gives objects value.

Group : Lucretia, David, Maithili

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What is the relationship people have with objects?

Lucretia, David and I decided to join forces to do the second group intervention. Our areas of interest were fairly along the same lines with different approaches. The key question that all of were asking though was what is it that people value and why? What is the relationship people have with objects. We went through an intense process of brainstorming where we came with multiple ideas which made sense for us to explore.

1. Our [_] Museum

We started question the idea of the museum and how objects have value after they are placed on a pedestal. Its interesting how museums have a peculiar context of displaying objects out of their contexts and yet managing to make it invaluable. We wanted to explore the idea of flipping the narrative of the museum over its head, by letting people decide what objects should be displayed in the museum. We designed stickers which looked like blank museum plaques which people to fill in. The idea was these stickers would be distributed and people could have them on any object - personal, owned, communal, public - that they thought should be displayed in a museum that would no longer be one space, but a distributed network around the city. Each 'artefact' would have a picture taken and uploaded on an online archive. Though it would have been great to explore this idea, during the process we lost track of the original intent and logistically it became difficult to build the alive archive within our time constraint.

As a second step, we tried to simplify the idea the and get similar feedback by creating a google form. We ensured that it would be a super short form that wont take up too much time to fill in and consequently reach a larger audience. But interestingly, we received feedback from people that the form is so simple it almost looks like clickbait. So after sending it to around a hundred people, we received only one response.

1. Focus Group

We had to now improvise! We decided it would be insightful to have an intimate group discussion about people and their relationships to objects. We invited people from different programs at IAAC and asked them to draw the objects that were valuable to them on a paper. The activity was intended to be an icebreaker and it worked quite well. People drew objects that were really close to them, shared stories about them, why they were valuable amongst other things. The exercise was to understand why people value the things that they do. From the conversations that came up, most people had memories associated to the objects- memories of their childhood, their parents, grandparents, things that were not only nostalgic but also sentimental.

It was an insightful experiment but in retrospect, the question that we asked directed people to think only in terms of owned objects. Had we reframed the question to be more open ended, maybe we could have gotten some more communal objects or maybe not...