3. 3
DOGMA DECISION
As a group of four, I was with Emilija
Marinkovic, Huub Offermans, Sebastiaan
Krijnen. We did not decide to choose one
single dogma, so we decided to go for 4
different dogmas:
Death and mourning: everything surround-
ing death has to be sad and we all have to
feel empathy with the one that had the
loss. In each culture there always is a spe-
cific ritual.
Economy/value. Everything has a price.
There has to be a currency instead of ex-
changing favours for example.
Respect: we all should respect older peo-
ple and from higher status.
Rural vs. urban life. Urban life is much
more advanced and better, and the people
richer and happier.
We all liked these dogmas and did not
have a favourite choice at the beginning,
but once we started working deeper with
them we decided to go on the direction of
the third dogma (RESPECT-STATUS) since
we though it had many more design possi-
bilities and we found more interesting.
4. 4
In the second presentation we set a com-
mon definition of the dogma:
“The idea that people have a lower or
higher status and therefore a correlat-
ing degree of power or value in society
based on a variety of features e.g. their
abilities, weath and in case of prejudice:
gender, race, sexual orientation etc.”
Status is very close related with power.
It is something not very tangible but you
know it when you see the people. In
our society we all assume that someone
with a higher status has more power and
therefore move value. The taboo that
came with it is the rudeness. We tend to
treat better the people with higher status
and treat worse the people with lower
status, nobody wants to talk about that
but we all know its there.
What we aim for this dogma is to break
the dogma with two options, one is to
break it by making it disappear, making
everybody have the same status and that
way everybody will treat the same to
each other. The other option is to make it
disappear by making it present and mak-
ing the people conscious of the differ-
ence of status and by creating awareness
we can create empathy and get respect
especially from the higher class to lower
class society.
5. 5
DOGMA SELECTION
In the next week, he had to go into group
of two. I worked with Huub for the next
two weeks. We focused the dogma on the
part of making the dogma present and try
to create empathy with the two main high-
low class in society. We looked at things in
common have the homeless people of the
streets with a rich person. We found out
three main things; they both needed mon-
ey to get food, or some king of good. They
both need to sleep and they both need to
eat.
We had a couple of design solutions to
make this happen:
The first idea is about the currency we
use here, more specifically in Europe. We
designed to turn around the concept of
bills and coins. We made small coins with
the size of 5c coins, we gave the value of
500 to those coins. This way the rich peo-
ple will fell like the homeless people, full
of small coins in her pockets. We designed
the opposite concept for the euro bills.
We made a 5c euro bill with the shape and
appearance of a 500€ bill, this way the
homeless people will have a stack of big
purple bills.
6. 6
The second design concept we had is the
sleeping concept. We plan to make lux-
urious the benches where the homeless
people sleep on the streets. In the images
you can see what we thought of, but the
concept is make it look like he is sleeping
comfortably in a nice bed with nice sur-
rounding, that way he can feel better. The
opposite again with the high society class.
We though of making a patter with shapes
of newspaper in the sheets rich people
sleep with, maybe that way make them
feel how poor people feel very night when
going to bed.
7. 7
The third idea we had was about food. Our
proposal consisted on placing fridges with
shapes of trashcans in normal rich houses,
and designing trashcans with shapes of fridges
for the streets. What we wanted to point out
was the big problem of everyday life about
throwing useful trash, especially food. There
are millions of tons of food wasted in the
trash everyday all around the word. We want-
ed to contrast the thing that what for us is
trash; for the homeless person is their dinner
they will have tonight
8. 8
After presenting this to our class, we decided
to go for the last concept about the food and
trash since it had some more user testing
possibilities.
We did three user tests to confirm the dog-
ma and strengthen it. We placed normal and
tasty food inside a grey trashcan in a specific
place in the TUE faculty where people usual-
ly pass by. We made a hidden camera video
for 20 minutes and only two people had a
try at our nice food. In the videos attached in
this DVD you can see more closely the de-
tails and the reactions of the people.
After that, one day after we place a blue
trashcan with the food inside as well. This
time, in the 20 minutes nobody dared to try
the food! We asked the people why they did
not do anything, and most of them said that
a food that is in the trash, they don’t trust
the source and it may be risky for them try-
ing something that can harm their stomach.
Well, it is clear that the homeless people
have a stronger stomach that the rich people
then.
Now, with the results of the two previous
videos, we decided to try the same but
this time place the food in a normal table
with normal plates. Maybe this time people
would take the risk!
Certainly, we were right, in those 20 min of
recording many people tried the food and
even came back to have some more since
they liked the food a lot.
With these three videos we wanted to show
that with the same food, just changing the
presentation and making it look a bit low
class food people from higher class will
DOGMA DEVELOPMENT
9. 9
reject it. But what they forget is that it
is still food and food is something very
valuable in life and not many people
have the luxury to have it in the fridges
every day!
We presented these three videos to the
class and now we had one week left, we
had to try something out in the streets.
We decided to try the opposite way, we
placed a small mini bar fridge outside a
grocery store with a sign of “place your
reusable food here”.
Our main goal with this experiment was
to connect the two high-low class peo-
ple by helping them. This way we can
create a chain, the rich people feel they
are helping someone more needed and
the poor can feel closer to them since
they feel that people care about them.
This fridge would work in a way that for
example someone does not want his
sandwich anymore, he leaves it there
and since it’s refrigerated it can still be
in good composition by night and the
homeless people can have a nice dinner.
Unfortunately we did not get much use-
ful footage in a video where we placed
the device outside in the streets.
10. 10
INDIVIDUAL
My individual contribution to this assignment is a product design of the
fridge-trashcan. I believe that the form giving of the device is something
crucial at this stage. My proposal is to design a normal trashcan, that look
a bit like a trashcan but at the same time it can clearly be identified by a
special trashcan. Nowadays, almost no trashcans have clean colours, when I
mean clean I mean white. Since we are talking about fridges as well, a regu-
lar fridge colour is white as well. My idea is to design a white trashcan that
can be related to “reusable food for the poor”. We identify blue trashcans
as paper trash, we identify green as plastics or in some cases glass. My goal
is to design it in a way that in the same way we identify this objects, we
can do the same with white trash as the reusable concept. This way create
respect between the two main status classes.
11. 11
REFLECTION
This is an assignment that I had my goal quite foggy. I really did not know
what I could benefit from this learning activity. Human beings are always
attracted to uncertain things, at least myself. I found the assignment de-
scription a bit mysterious and that is why I chose this assignment. Through-
out this whole 6 weeks I enjoyed a lot this assignment, especially because
it’s something like I never done before in this faculty. I find that this assign-
ment has a lot of potential especially in innovation. A design that can be
“dogma-proof” can change a whole system and break barriers.
Concerning my group mates, I had very good experience working with them
and the work was very nice and easy going.
