Lauren Bowker

The talk by Lauren Bowker was probably my favorite talk so far throughout Unit X. I like how honest and realistic she was when she spoke about her experiences and her work.

Here are some quotes in her talk I picked up on, which I liked:

-’Rejection is a spur’

- ‘Experience Gains ideas’ (traveling, breaking her back, getting drunk)

-’Don’t be scared, if you don’t do it someone else will’

-’Play up to the little artist persona’

-’Create something unusual’

-’Never say no to anything’

-’If something does not feel right, it probably is not right’

-‘I live day to day’

Although her talk was inspiring I also found some of the content quite scary because some ideas and projects she has been involved in were extremely futuristic. This theme has been something that keeps reoccurring to me over the last few weeks by not only Lauren but also in the talk by Brendan Dawes and by some conversations I have had with various tutors. They all mention about new technologies and embracing the digital, moving forward. As Lauren Bowker mentioned in her talk a lot of these new ideas about design are already out there but people and just not ready for them yet… and I found this quite frightening… are we completely moving away from traditional design?... is this a good thing or bad? Should we be only be thinking about the future? Or should we take into consideration the past? 

 

Whilst in the process of thinking about all these ideas last week I had a personal experience that made me start to question future design even more… while packing my laptop away for the holidays I spilt an entire glass of water all over my Mac causing the computer to die… in less than 5 seconds I had lost everything, pictures, work, documents, files… this made me start thinking about everything becoming digital is it really better? If it is better than having the hard copy of an object like a photograph or a book why can you loose digital so quickly? If you spill water on a book the pages get slightly smudged but the physical object is still there, its not lost there is still a trace of it… if you spill water on a Mac with no back up there is no trace of a document you were working on ever being there its gone. I know now we have the I cloud and external hard drives and luckily after a few days I did managed to retrieve most of my files, its just made me question how much we can actually rely on these digital objects… what happens when there is no electricity? No battery? No Internet access? Will it last or am I behaving too old fashioned?  Just some thoughts and ideas I have… although this experience has made me question things I am not against moving forward and thinking in ways people have never thought before, I just find it strange that this event has happened while I have been talking about similar ideas… is it a sign?

I also liked how Lauren Bowker has worked in a very collaborative way to get to where she is today, meeting new people from different backgrounds and working with them to produce work (like the airbus project). It really showed me that if you have an idea but you have no idea about how to do something to pursue that idea… find someone who can. As I am currently looking into sound in my project I have been having a chat with a friend who does physics to get a bit more background knowledge on understanding how sound travels. 

One last point I wanted to make about Lauren Bowkers talk was how she mentioned that so much can be achieved in a day if you focus, and in Three weeks she putt on the Phnx Catwalk show its the same amount of time we have had on our Unit X project so far… now that’s amazing.