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.
