The Plot Thesis Workshop
On Friday, 11/5, we spent the day in a workshop with with Gill Wildman and Nick Durrant, Nierenberg Chairs at Carnegie Mellon, thinking about how our thesis topic fits into the the future of our personal lives and the world around us. A number of questions aimed at further shaping our thesis ideas emerged.
As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
Easy! Little me thought it would be perfectly logical to be an architect, a chef, and a professional baseball player.
What does the future look like?
As it relates to the future of my thesis, I was seeing a grim picture (with the help of Disney/Pixar) that needs some big-time help:
This is a forseeable change, due to a number of mindless factors that have us eating more, can the revert to a healthier body the same way, without knowing we are making big changes?
What thesis territory are you thinking about?
Trying to re-think my thesis through the lenses of service design, design management, and public interfaces, I began to link some possible directions for the project.
The Public Interface Lens:
- How can I re-frame food, to include nourishment along with pleasure?
- Will transparency yield smarter choices?
- Can I show people the bigger picture, from a personal perspective?
The Service Design Lens:
- Can small, effective changes prove to be enviable, so others will do the same?
- Incorporate interconnected services
The Design Management Lens:
- Why does our government subsidize quantity over sustainability?
- Discuss, don’t dictate. Especially with something as personal as obesity.
- Can we understand the values of parents to help them learn AND educate
Connecting you, your topic and your place in the future
I felt a renewed sense of passion for my thesis topic and the interests that I love and will continue to pursue long after my days at SVA are over. I may not be able to be a chef, a professional athlete, a nutritionist, a personal trainer and a designer, but being a designer allows me to find work to engage my interests and be a part of the changes that I want to see in families, in the food industry, and the governing of our food supplies.
A slightly re-defined thesis topic emerged.
My thesis will provide education via transparency in our food system and our current eating habits by taking small steps to reframe what we* know about our bodies and our thinking about food as both pleasure and energy to chip away at the problem of obesity, and related poor health, nutrition, lack of fitness and other diseases.
*We = family change-makers and food gatekeepers, a.k.a. parents responsible for feeding themselves and their families
