Lecture Reflection Task BETTER LIVES
I was pleasantly surprised with the way the Better Lives unit unpacked this year, having switched courses and re-doing First Year again for me felt somewhere repetitive and I wasn’t exactly looking forward to it, especially having found the Unit last year very slow and honestly tough to engage with.
I still thought sadly many of the lectures I attended were underwhelming, and failed to fully dive into the subject deep enough to keep a strong attention. I found myself dozing off sometimes as many of the themes among the likes of Culture Appropriation, Inclusivity and Sustainability I feel like have been over exploited and can feel repetitive at times. I still thought there was a severe improvement from last year but I wish, instead of beating these subjects so much they emerged more into insight about fashion and media practices, while putting these themes into context for them instead of repeating the same themes over and over again as the main focus. I never want to imply like these topic are not fundamental, because I think they are a crucial imperative in the way fashion should develop for the future, but in my opinion the way we were saturated with it almost made a lot of people lose interest for it.
Not to say everything was bad, there was one of the lectures I found specially interesting, it was the one on Empathy by Professor Lorraine Gamman, she gave a very interesting lecture about the psychology of empathy in society and discussed very interesting topics about the way fashion can be both constructed with empathy and for empathy. It was really compelling the way she was very specific with concrete examples of books and videos plus several case studies for us to go into further development into the subject and she analysed the pros and the cons of everything she was recommending. She seemed like a very interesting lecturer with a background more focused on scientific research and psychology rather than fashion, which I personally find fascinating and I found her lecture specially compelling.
She discussed ways in which designing for empathy might be developed; like User Centred Design, in which the situation and feelings of users are thoroughly studied by methods like active listening in order to promote understanding and a good perspective of the user experience, rather than what one person might tell you their experience is in their words, as she said:
‘’The way I might explain to you how to prepare a cup of tea might be really different to what I do when I go prepare that cup of tea myself’’
In her lecture she gave examples of her own work, like the furniture design for prison cells, or her phD on shoplifting. Other works by people were also discussed, one which I found particularly compelling was a project called Mile in My Shoes in which the user grabbed a pair of shoes, and as they walked in them were listening to a podcast of that person’s life.
To conclude, I think the Better Lives project is a great initiative, but as it is still very fresh in my opinion it needs some polishing still. But I think giving art students a point of scientific research and specific pin point to explore on is very useful, and I found the lecture by Dr. Gamman fulfilled those needs for me.