The Process
Final Reflections
I decided to apply for the elective ‘Poetry in Design’ because I was interested in the methodology proposed to improve and design for cultural sensitivity in the everyday life. I was also interested in the methodology because it has been a completely new experience confronted with the more traditional courses that I have done both here in The Netherlands both in Italy during my bachelor.
As discussed with the entire group, during the 8 weeks of the course, I have reflected on the temporal organization of the elective. I do think that this elective and this methodology need a special moment to be studied and appreciated. Poetry in Design needs the full focus, in order not to loose the connection with the poem and with the values that you extract in the all process, from the first reading, in the translation and the analysis. On the other hand, this planning has given to me the opportunity, week by week, to have the time to focus only on the poem and experience more in depth the methodology. In 8 weeks I have had the time to let the poems become mine, and this is for all the three versions, the Italian, the English and the Dutch too.
Starting from a poem to create a design project is a new and very effective way to let the users experience cultural elements connected with the poem. Poetry is a way to communicate, the poem tells us a story, and we, as designers, have to work on how to translate this story in design subtleties and details to let the user perceive the cultural values of the poem. The goal is to inspire people with a design that comes from a poem and invite the users to reflect. As a group, we have decided to start from an Italian poet, Giacomo Leopardi, because we discovered together that we were all fascinated by his poetry for different reasons. Thanks to the lecture done with the Dutch poet Jan Glas, I have learned the value of how to translate and redesign a poem in a different language. The translation of a poem is always a work of redesign because in the new version you translate and select words with new eyes. For this reason, I think that the analysis of the poem starts already with the translation of it. Through the personal redesign I was able to define values and, through group discussions, we were able to define the cultural values that we had found interesting in our design. It has been really important to share the translation sessions and the analysis sessions with the three of us because we have been able to confront our interpretations and to extract from the differences the cultural values. For example, the interpretation of the farthest horizon in the poem L’infinito: Angelique and Wouter imagined this horizon flat, I instead visualized this horizon fragmented, with different levels of hills and mountains.
In the process, I had the opportunity to learn that the redesign could be done in different ways. If at first I have thought of a redesign only in the aesthetic level, learning the methodology of how to use Poetry in Design, I have changed my way to imagine a redesign: starting from a poem to redesign an everyday object you do not only redesign the aesthetical form and interaction, but you redesign the use. The moment of the interaction is the moment where we can design details and subtleties that are connected with the poem and the values extracted from the analysis.
The recitation of the poem has been a powerful tool during the entire process. The individual recitation gave me the opportunity to completely feel the poem, and the group recitations have been an effective way to find the direction when we had the feeling throughout the iterations to be a bit lost. Also very important has been the recitations that we have done in front of the class; thanks to these we have improved week by week the recitation in order to transport the audience with us in the poem. Thanks to the open discussions that we have had after every presentation within the class, I have experienced the methodology of reflection on action[1], that we have used as a group throughout all the process for the iterations done. This enriched step by step the analysis of the poem and the resulting interpretation of it.
I found really interesting to work for a design not starting from a problem to be solved, but finding inspiration from the analysis of a poem. Starting from a poem, the goal is to design a product that invites people to be poetic. The poetic design has to be experienced in the use of the product.
1. Yi-Chu Lin, Huang-Ming Chang, and Rung-Huei Liang. (2011) Designing Poetic Interaction in Space. Human-Computer Interaction, Part III, HCII 2011, LNCS 6763, pp. 559–568