Reflecting on ISFS

It’s been four weeks at DT! Time is flying by - it feels like just yesterday we were introduced to the program, and now we’re through one fourth of the semester. (And, as my roommate and I were discussing today, already one sixteenth of the way through DT - this is a pace I don't feel like I was prepared for. But I’m getting off topic, here.)

I had a lot more fun with ISFS than I expected I would. I feel like part of it was the low pressure - we weren’t really required to accomplish anything, beyond meeting the assignment parameters, but rather just observe the way people behaved and try to analyse it. Which leads me to the other part - one thing I’ve been focusing on more, in this environment, is asking the right questions, as opposed to finding the right answers. Jonny and I didn’t have a formal answer as to why someone took down our installation and threw it in the trash, screwdriver and all, but I do think it was important to note, considering the political history of Washington Square Park, the plethora of noise complaints over the past year, what counts as ‘disruption’, and police presence. 

I think Jonny and I worked pretty well together. We had similar ideas and goals for the project, which made for a smoother working experience, and we were able to get into how to articulate and execute the project much faster. Our main issue was time: we have very different schedules and it was difficult to work around that. If we had another few days for this project, I would have liked to iterate more, especially with the bubble wrap - would different demographics behave differently with the bubbles? Would children? (We talked about doing some of these, but we did not have enough time.) How would different times of day affect behaviour?

I appreciated receiving feedback from my classmates; I think people brought up perspectives that I might not have considered otherwise. It also prompted me to engage more vocally with others’ work. It was also interesting to note how almost everyone got some variety of unexpected interactions with their installations, and always in a different way - and to see how people dealt with that, and iterated on their projects.