Blog Post Four by Sofia Whitaker Tabet
I chose to comment on Xia Qiu’s blog post not only because her ideas came from the emerging technologies class, but also because she is already thinking on how she could create a business with everything she has learned from it. It seems to me that she clearly understood the power that technology has to create innovative and therefore really successful businesses and how to merge the real world and the virtual.
She mentioned that the lectures she has attended had a provoking therefore impactful change on her way of thinking and that this will possibly reshape her vision for her future work. As her Better Lives project is Make-up brake down, she started brainstorming new ways to change people’s approach to make-up and for this, she proposed two businesses or ‘’speculative ideas’’; the first one would be the X-reality, where she can create virtual make-up where while using the camera to capture people’s image and add make-up on it, and the second and in my opinion, her best idea, was the dynamic makeup. Qiu explains that after attending a digital learning lab on projection mapping and using the software Mad Mapping she had the idea of projecting images and videos to a surface. Connecting this with her Better Lives theme and Nick Almond’s lecture, she then, developed this super successful and innovative idea of the makeup being projected on a human’s face. ‘’In this way, the virtual makeup will not only stay in the virtual world but also come to the physical world through the projection of light and shadow’’, says Xia Qiu on her blog post.
Although she had an extremely innovative approach to what make-up could be in the future, she didn’t connect this idea to the better lives themes. In other word, she didn’t mention that her work is, in fact, sustainable, because she is not producing any physical makeup, and as we know, if it’s not a special vegan makeup, the regular ones come from petrol and derivatives. Her idea also tanges diversity, as it adapts to the human face, no matter the gender, race and skin color, and last but not least, they are socially responsible because regular makeup are usually tested on animals and the work force is usually underpaid and work in poor conditions, just as the fast fashion companies do. In fact, this task was to actually connect the themes with our work in the future and she just didn’t mentioned any of them.
Besides her really innovative and successful ideas, I would suggest her to maybe think on ways that they connect further with the better lives themes of sustainability, diversity and social responsibility and to express them clearly. Otherwise speaking, she will ‘’sell more’’ her idea to people and in the future, business partners, if they connect effectively to these themes. Not only because they are really trending on at the moment, but because they have to be addressed in any business. They need attention and they are actually, the future of the fashion industry. Apart from this, Xia’s idea was by far, one of the most successful ones that I’ve read til now on the Better Lives blog posts.