She had prepared everything already on Miro (the collaborative platform) with our individual boards and the cards of weak signals all around. We did some exercises mixing and matching these cards and finding how these cards could intersect and what their combinations would trigger in us, following an approach that Mariana was calling “Intuitive way finding”, where we didn’t to fully understand everything but rather just let the cards speak to us.
We then started working on another exercise which was more personal and less random, and this is where our design space started taking shape, every one of us had to work on Miro to create a specific system which puts together all the cards of our interest and creating around these cards a web of links, references and notes.
We then had to choose a single card to take with us on the hike, planned for Wednesday and see where this this weak signal would show itself during our hike. As the train was very late to arrive, I couldn’t make it on time to Barcelona, so I managed to take my card and do the hike here in Tarragona on the coast. My chosen card was “Attention Protection”, and I went around the streets and beaches of Tarragona while keeping this abstract notion of “attention” in mind, and seeing where this notion would show up in my walk, and what conclusions I’d be able to make from this.
The week also included an online lecture by Maria Gonzalez from ELISAVA research department, who explained to us the ongoing projects and research works that are taking place at ELISAVA. Maria’s lecture was followed by Guillem Camprodon’s presentation of the ongoing works and activities taking place at FAB LAB BCN, with a quick introduction on all the categories under which these works and activities operate. To be honest, this day a lot was happening in my home country and some people died and a lot were injured due to a sectarian clash and it really stood in the way of me focusing on the lectures to the maximum, as I was not able to access a calm mental state with such turmoil occurring in my home.
Finally, the week ended with the final session of the Atlas of Weak Signals intro, which included forming groups of interest on the Miro platform in order to exchange thoughts and conceptual input with other classmates who are targeting the same or similar notions. Then, we had 2 intro sessions to ELISAVA workshops, as we did a quick tour in the Graphic lab of ELISAVA, followed by the prototyping lab.
