Blog Post 8: Design Preview Report

For this design preview report, I will be giving a report on how my progress is going with attempting to find a design solution and solving my problem statement.

Problem Statement:

As the end of the school year begins to approach, I’ve started thinking about moving back to my bedroom in Beach Haven, Long Beach Island, New Jersey, after graduation. Having lived in Boulder for the past few years, I’ve focused most of my attention on making my college room a safe space that truly reflects who I am, so my beach room has remained practically empty. Now, my goal is to decorate it in a way that feels like me and provides comfort and inspiration. However, my parents insist it matches the house’s pristine, coastal aesthetic, which isn’t my style, and they’ve made it clear it can’t resemble a college dorm. So, I need to find a way to blend my personal style with their modest coastal design. Despite the contrast, I’m ready to take on the challenge of creating a space that feels like mine while respecting their vision for the house.

Exercise: (to help find ways to mesh the two aesthetics together while still honoring one another’s individuality & what makes them special)

VENN DIAGRAM EXERCISE

I began this self-made exercise by drawing two circles overlapping one another. Above the left circle wrote “svm’s y2k roxy coconut/surfer girl aesthetic” and then went onto writing “my parents pristine, clean and coastal aesthetic” above the right circle. After setting up the exercise, I immediately began writing traits and characteristics inside my aesthetic’s circle because I know myself very well and traits were effortlessly flowing to me. I also started with this because it felt the easiest. Although my aesthetic is very different from that of my parents’ I still felt as though writing qualities inside their circle would be relatively easy since they’re my parents and I know them very well and have lived with them for most of my life. However, as I began writing, only one or two words initially came out. As I pushed to jot more words down, I was met with resistance. The resistance I faced came about because I realized that the words that I was brainstorming had unintentionally all been negative or condescending in a way. This made me realize that maybe the reason I was having such a hard time coming up with ways to solve the problem of finding a design solution that combines our two aesthetics is because I was approaching this all in a fairly negative and dismissive manner. I was beginning to notice that I was tackling this situation in a my aesthetic vs. their aesthetic way, rather than framing it in a way that it was us against the problem. Once I acknowledged this self-limiting belief and began to once again brainstorm, but this time, being aware of this habit of mine, soon enough words began flowing to me again. This time, they were ideas I never really thought about in regards to its creative potential. Therefore, although it’s important to understand the contrast between my style and my parents’, it can also be helpful to acknowledge the positive aspects of each one as navigating this problem can be solved with much more ease and efficiency if it is done so with a mindset rooted in possibility.