Telling the Foreign. A Travel Kit for Design Students – ready for download!

 

The crucial element of our work within the project Cultural Spaces and Design is the work with our students. They teach us about the enormous potential of exploring cultures as a designer. After we realized this we tried to offer them a better support on their travels by asking them to do documentations of their experiences. From there, the Travel Kit was developed.

 

The little booklet named Travel Kit shows ways approach a cultural investigation as a design student. Take it with you when you travel! It is not academic – it is simply a collection of questions, summarized under six topics. The aim with this is to present something more seductive than a list of methods and literature, something to flip through, put into your pocket and get inspired. The six topics that organize the questions cover the different approaches we met during our work. They represent six different ways of exploration.

 

Here is a short summary and explanation of the six topics:

 

Exploring Cultural Spaces: Under this headline you will find questions related to ethnographic or design ethnographic research. They might inspire you to study behaviour and social manners, local practices, gender issues, use of public and private space or community issues. This content is inspired by ethnography and fieldwork, by the Situationists way of exploring and also by Hofstedes concept of describing cultural difference.

 

Exploring Material Culture: Questions here focus on materiality. They might raise your awareness for local design practices, for artefacts, object, bodies and their use and history. This topic draws from the research on material culture and design methods like the analysis of artefacts. The relevance of resources as a crucial condition for design is also taken up.

 

Exploring the Other: This approach deals with the Other as an important subject of anthropology. The questions might help you to become aware of your projections on the Other, that often reveal much about how culture shapes perception. Stereotypes and clichés can be realized and named. The exotic Other can be demystified.

 

Exploring Yourself: This chapter focuses on self-reflection. Questions draw from methods like heuristics, self-inquiry or autoethnography and they are all about exploring yourself, your values, your own cultural perspective and how that shapes your views on other cultures  and makes you do what you do and how you do it.

 

Exploring Interaction: Questions here pick up intercultural communication, problems of understanding and translation, cooperation across cultures and third spaces.

 

Exploring journaling: The last chapter deals with journaling and documentation itself. Questions circle around different modes of keeping a designers’ journals, as well as modes of notation such as drawing, writing, photographing.

 

You can download the Travel Kit here. We are excited to get your feedback and see your journal.