not for your own community or culture, the question is how do we as designers kind of locate ourselves in that space? I feel it’s really about listening and absorbing first and then having constant dialogue with the community throughout the project. Absorb as much as you can, ask as many questions, and involve as many relevant contributors from that community that you’re working with where it becomes a truly collaborative effort. I think it’s really about being a mediator rather than being sort of a problem solver or providing a prescription for an issue to be solved. It sort of puts everything in perspective where you really don’t have to be from that culture but you’re basically facilitating and providing any kind of resources, tools we as graphic designers have access to and facilitating collaborations and bringing together a plethora of perspectives to the table. There is something that we as designers can distill from that and I find that to be a really exciting space to work within.
SM VM
So, do you enjoy the research part more or do you enjoy the form making of it more?
Yeah, good question. I think that with form making and research, what really started to evolve for me when I think about my semesters in grad school to towards the end of my MFA and now current practice, is that the more I started to research, speak to other people, and keeping making in parallel, I stopped looking at them as separate things was beginning to understand them inextricably woven, where form-making could be a method of research and vice versa. I think that the line starts to shift and blur the more you start to question them being binary or perhaps looking at it linearly. A lot of times when we are doing commercial work for a client, you would perhaps start with doing a lot of online research or you have like this interview sort of meeting with the client and then you go and sit in front of your computer and you start designing things. I feel like that linearity of research and then making is what a lot of traditional graphic design, client-driven projects exists upon and I think that that’s of course value in that process for certain aspects, but when working with community-led projects I think the lines of research and form making get a lot more blurred because there is no specific linearity of process.
Did you face any challenges during your thesis like while researching the Sora Sompeng tribe, did you face any challenges and how did you overcome it? I am asking this because obviously when it comes to ground research there are a lot of unwanted delays that happen or something always goes wrong. Yeah, I think that for me it was really about distilling all of the research from different fields since I was speaking with NGos, making my own field notes, looking through research papers by linguists and ethnographers, as well approaching this project through the framework of the decolonization movement. With each field there’s a universe of research so it was really about dipping into these different worlds and then building arguments from insights of each field Interview- Vaishnavi Mahendran
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