California Dream Reimagined: callture

berlin California culture segregation installation Experience social impact adobeawards human research

[TESTLAB] BERLIN:

Every year, ArtCenter's Graphic Design program sends 8-12 students from different majors to experience, research, and develop and understanding for the unique city, Berlin. Every group that goes is given a different topic, and are prompted to utilize the city in order to respond.

“Homeland conditions forced ArtCenter students to seek creative asylum in Berlin to reinvent the California Dream.”

PART ONE: BERLIN

Research:

Explorations: We ventured throughout the whole city, trying to understand the East and the West and all the crevices between them. We spent the most time immersing ourselves into Prenzlauerberg, Kreuzberg, and Charlottenberg.

Interviews: Roaming through the city, we interviewed anyone who was interested about that they think of California, what they would say their 'Californian Dream' would be, and what their 'Berlin Dream' is.

Friendships: We quickly realized that this is a great city to make friends, there are people of all cultures and background, and they're talkative, and honest about who they are.

Initial Observation:

Diversity here isn’t segregated. People aren’t afraid to trust.
The coexistence of different people here is not forced, but
happens naturally.

Key Findings: Two of the most important experiences to developing out solution.

A Workshop

We were blindfolded and were given smells to interpret, then we randomly drew or wrote memories or feelings that were triggered by the smell. Then we were taken to a room, still blindfolded to smell and interpret again, but this time with activating our sense of touch. As a group, we realized that our interpretations of the same smell changed when we activated our sense of touch.

Hosted by: Sissel Tolaas, smell researcher, and Yasmine, lead from Microsoft Hololens

Dinner in the Dark

After realizing the power of being blindfolded, my team and I found a restaurant where eat in the dark, and are served by a staff that is completely blind. We were able to speak to each other with a lot of freedom and had to trust that we were listening to one another. Especially when we shared food or held long conversations across the table.

From this point, we brainstormed and experimented with different environment settings and played with the senses to create an experience for people learn and be insinpred by the concept of callture.

PART TWO: CALIFORNIA

When we arrived home, we hit the ground running working on production and execution of occupying the space and producing this experience in time for the night of our showcase.

Callture

The reinvented California Dream, calling all cultures to become a cullture of all culltures.

What if we created an experience where people could realize the added value of togetherness: My group proposed an experience to be conducted upon our return to Pasadena. We invited everyone we knew to come make a friend and meet someone new without letting their natural senses of judgement get in the way.