Month: June 2026

For this semester, I wanted to show a different side of design activism, namely, design activism through analogue experiments. I did that by first researching what kinds of experiments I was going to focus on and deciding on a certain topic that I wanted to focus on, since the whole area of design activism would’ve just been too vast. I thought about doing something on sustainability, but this would’ve asked different questions and it would’ve been tough to show sustainability in different ways than it is already shown. I also thought about doing something on fashion, since that is one of the main fields that I have knowledge in, but this was actually a field that I have already researched so many times and I wanted to get out of doing the same thing in all aspects of my life over and over again.

Therefore, I decided on the topic of food. Specifically the phrase: “Food is political” and the aspects of showing certain cultures or talking about problems certain cultures are facing today through fruits or vegetables as symbols. This turned out to be the right topic for these experiments, since I love working with food or showing different kinds of foods. However, it also turned out to be quite difficult to work with this, because it is such a political topic on many different layers. Food politics have been with us throughout the history of mankind. There was always some sort of dependence of people that put their livelihood on producing and cultivating different kinds of foods for other people that had more power than them. Wars were fought over food and some of the biggest panics that arised were, when food was scarce and there was not enough there for everyone. That is all still the case nowadays, even if we privileged people like to forget these aspects usually.

I may not have made the most of my experiments, but what I can say is that even though my life is currently really difficult and I didn’t have the time to do all of this, which is why all of my posts are now coming at once. I really did some experiments and I also did everything myself and put all of my own thoughts into these blog posts without using AI for any of it. I hope that it is still appreciated, because I just want to keep the skills that I have of writing texts. In times of AI writing is something that happens so fast and so easily, so it is easy to forget that it is a process that takes time, but it is also a process that gets the brain going and enriches us. So, in times of complicated AI texts writing in ways that people would never write themselves and everything becoming much more similar and much more artificial by the second, I hope there’s still people out there that appreciate people for trying and for being authentic with their own experiences. Thank you for the opportunity of doing these experiments, even though it was much more stressful for me than it should’ve been. Thank you for coming on this journey with me. Looking forward for the directions that I really will go in the future with this thesis.

I have already done quite many experiments for my research, this time I decided to activate another childhood memory and do something with play-doh. I had many ideas on how to approach this topic, since it makes certain playing aspects possible, so I’m sure that it would’ve been nice to also use some other tools than just plain play-doh. In the future, I would definitely try to also include using some stencils to make the whole object more patterned in the end. To add to that, it would’ve worked well to combine some of the colours and really mix them so that the different colours mix at some points and some others show up in streaks in the patterns, of course this method can only be done once, since the colours will then be mixed together and cannot fully be taken apart anymore. However, I think that in this case it would work out well to just form some abstract shapes with it and then use this type of structure for future projects.

The play-doh I used was of lesser quality, therefore it tended to stick to the hands more than it did other things. It was really hard to form and I think it would’ve also been harder to mix. When I started the process I already wanted to get it off my hands, because it was really uncomfortable to work with. Since this was still my experiment and I had to make at least something out of it, I decided to work on two simpler shapes that I had done before in some of my other experiments. The watermelon and the pomegranate. I only had little play-doh, so I had to make them quite small, which was fine, since this experiment was just supposed to get me started and help me try out different materials. To start, I chose the colours that matched best with the result I was going for, started to make the play-doh smoother by rolling it in my hands for a bit and then decided on doing simple shapes to just show the fruits for what they are. The pomegranate was just made out of red play-doh in two pieces, a ‘crown-like’ piece for the top and the round body of the fruit. The watermelon was done by using, emerald, black and pink play-doh and creating a watermelon slice, by making its distinct shape in a pink moon-like shape, the outer part in a similar shape but much thinner in emerald and the seeds in black. First I wanted to add just three seeds, but I decided it would look better with five seeds.

In the following pictures you can see my final outcome. Again I chose to stay with the same topic as all of my other blogposts, so the pomegranate stands for Iranian culture, while the watermelon stands for Palestinian culture.

One of my earlier experiments was making a collage out of paper scraps, so this time I decided to try it out with fabrics. Since I have been working a lot with fabrics in fashion school and I have so many leftover fabric scraps, I decided that I could at least give this a try. My plan was to be much more detailed than I was in the end, also because I found out that I didn’t have too much of the colours that I wanted to have and I didn’t want to use new fabrics, because this was supposed to be a project that uses up some of my fabric scraps. It started out with chaos. The chaos of rummaging through all of the fabric scraps that I still have at home. Then I chose some that fit the colour and topic scheme that I was focusing on for this part of the experiment.

The next step was to try to choose which of the coloured fabrics to use for which motive and cut it out, while trying to focus on which kind of fabric to use for what part of the project and what structures to combine for the right outcome. For the first part I worked solely with red fabrics and decided to just use the fancier ones, since the others just didn’t seem to work for this pattern-wise. I ended up choosing an old fabric of a ballgown and some lace to cut out a pomegranate, again standing for Iran, as well as some lace detail, to make it more interesting structure-wise. We are still on the same topic of using food as a political symbol for a certain culture.

The second idea was to use more yellow and light green colours, as well as, other Ghanaian fabrics that were leftover of some t-shirts to create a plantain and some colourful background representing Ghanaian culture a little bit. Luckily I still had a few fabrics left that made this composition work, otherwise it would’ve been harder to achieve.

In general I tried to find some more fabrics for other compositions, but since I didn’t find the right colours, for instance for another watermelon or for some other fruits or vegetables that algined to my chosen topics, I decided to just stick with the ones that I could make more easily. In the following pictures you can see my end-results for these types of experiments. I recommend you to give this technique a go as well, since it is a more crafty approach and includes some materials that some people tend to not work with that often. The goal of this process would be to then also really put it on a different kind of fabric and make a full collage out of it by sewing everything onto the base fabric. But I just wanted to try out the main idea for this experiment.

Last time, I did an experiment with sun printing or cyanotype. I also decided to do a similar thing through origami and focus again on political symbols or sometimes also possible political symbols for certain cultures. This time I tried to find some origami patterns that matched the ideas of the symbols I had and tried them out. I even inspired my mom to join me and also try out origami again, which was a really nice activity to do together. So I hope that something similar also happened for all of you with your experiments, because activities like this can bring people together, similarly as activism can bring people together.

Firstly, I focused on doing a few different foods that came to mind and in the end most of them turned out to be fruit. The only different one was again the corn, in this case blue corn, since this type of corn is supposed to refer to Native Americans again (similar to my last post) that faced and are still facing a lot of injustice. I like that the scale pattern of the origami paper that I chose perfectly matches the structure of corn and makes it look even better through this.

Secondly, I did a watermelon, or tried to do one anyways, for this project it was much harder to find the right paper, since I didn’t have the right pinkish colour in my repertoire, so I chose a more purple one that at least had the structure of some of the kernels. Again, as already mentioned a few times the watermelon stands for Palestine.

Thirdly, I decided to do an orange, again as a symbol for Palestine, because I remembered that there is a book called “Oranges from Jaffa”, which discusses the issues that Palestine had and still has with Israel.

Fourthly, I made something that is difficult to distinguish, it should be three plantains, but they look more like bananas, if one can even identify them. I think those are more difficult to put to a certain country or culture, since many African countries and cultures use them a lot and identify with them. I only really have experiences with Ghanaian culture, so, therefore, I would attribute it to them, at least for the moment. I’m always also happy to change my mind and learn something new and better about them.

Fifthly, my mom made an apple. I actually wanted a pomegranate, but apparently there are not really any patterns that are not 3D. The pomegranate would’ve stood for Iran, but I didn’t manage to make one in the end. I don’t know if the apple can work as a symbol for a certain culture, since many cultures cultivated the apple, so at the moment I don’t have an answer for that. In the following picture you can see how it went. I forgot to take process pictures, so I can just show you my final result.

Last time, I did an experiment with ironing beads or ‘Bügelperlen/Steckperlen’, this brought me right back to my childhood. But since I have been doing many things for my Print Production submission, I thought that trying out a printing technique would nicely fit my experiments, since I’m trying to do more different analogue work. I decided on doing sun printing, because this was shown as a technique that is also a fun experiment for children, so I thought if they can do it then surely I can do it too. Since I had never done this technique before I thought that I would do it in a fairly simple way, but of course for future experiments I might be able to try out a few more complex things in this direction.

So, without further ado, I will explain how sun printing works, what the challenges were and show you how my own process went. Basically the kind of sun printing that I chose (there are several different types and options to choose from) is cyanotype. However, as I already mentioned, I did the simple version of it and just bought some pieces of paper that were already chemically treated. I had to take the piece of paper out of its light-proof packaging, there is one side that is slightly blue, this is the side that you’re supposed to work with, since this is the side with the chemicals. Then you take some bits and pieces, it can be natural materials like plants or any other material that you can think of. The important thing is to tape the pieces in place so they don’t move too much, when you put the piece of paper outside. Then you leave it there for a while around 30 mins, you take all of the pieces off and wash the paper. The colour turns into a darker blue and the part where the pieces were turns into a negative image due to the UV-rays. Then the paper dries and you have your final print.

This was a very fun process for me and I also learned a few things on what to really do ideally. I chose to just work with cutting out pieces from a piece of cardboard and then stick it to the paper with tape. When I put it outside I decided to put some stones in the corners of the paper, even though it would show up on the print, because otherwise my project would have been blown away by the wind. Then I decided to spontaneously try out putting some small natural materials on top, like a stick and some daisies, for instance. However, I was too lazy to also tape them to the paper, therefore they moved and they don’t really show up on my print, even though, some of them were still on the paper in the end. It was a nice process, I will definitely do it again and try out some more things. I again decided to stick with the topic of food as a political symbol for certain cultures. This time I chose some corn as a symbol for native americans that were and still are brutally driven out of their own lands and I chose the watermelon as a symbol for palestine again.