fromkeetra

(i should have blogged this earlier... but i only just woke up. woohoo spring break!)

the thing i enjoyed most about keetra dean dixon is her use of "wonder" and "irreverent whimsy."

her speaking about these things was really timely for me, considering my upcoming type project on marian bantjes, for whom wonder is a great driving force for her work. (maybe not quite so much irreverence, but definitely whimsy, too.)

wonder and whimsy are things that i recognize that my own work is lacking, not because i am a hard-ass who does not take any joy in visual things, but simply because i never quite know how to get it in there. (this is one problem that i am excited to keep learning how to remedy.)

i really adored her missions for working: facilitating social relations, questioning patterns and standards, sparking wonder, surprise, and delight, as well as patience and optimism, asking people to become attentive to things that they might previously have ignored, opening doors to the play and vulnerability that we tuck safely away during the daytoday, and twisting the cynical loop with sinister/sweet dichotomies that make people smile.

she treats design as a kind of social experiment for creating eye-opening, mind-opening, heart-opening experiences and sweetly manipulates her viewers into smiling and reconsidering what it was that they were expecting.

she does this through four types of object/experience: the summaries that look at a situation and reflect it back to the viewer, the synthesizers that make unexpected combinations into new but still basically familiar experiences, the records that take down the evidence of an experience into artifacts, and the platforms that act as a stage for new participatory experiences.

all. that. is. so. cool. and she is so obviously a design-thinker to recognize those categories in her work and sort things in that way.

all in all, i think keetra's lecture opened my eyes to a great deal of methods and reasons that would never have occurred to me otherwise, and i do feel inspired (and even slightly better equipped!) to start trying to nurture more whimsy in my own work.