THE Questions

SOME Structure

What drove this project was curiosity and persistence. The project was an experimental, non-linear, process-oriented research project that was developed out of hands-on design. 

I started with curiosity and a question. 

There was a ton of reflection along the way, then design, introspection and research through design, some errors, more learning, and lots of thinking, moving and doing. 

To provide this project with design freedom and some sort of practical structure, it passes by as an elaborately designed 5-course meal. The exciting part? Each course comes with a super-special Pakistani recipe, a family jewel re-written, re-imagined, and re-narrated. Perhaps as a joyfully misinterpreted inheritance with my involuntary design collaborators – my mother, her mother, her mother’s mother and…

With each course, I explore a new function of your fluttering mind in a wild and wacky way. It might take a bit of soul searching on your part to make sense of this for your daily lives, but once you find your answers, it’ll be like Wheres Waldo – hidden in a stream of chaos but forever circled with a marker as the man who is meant to be found.

Even though the courses of this irregular meal are in order, expect to be a bit flustered by some back and forth. The first course, Hors d’oeuvre, is for some fun bits served to get you warmed up, a classic home-felt, hearty starter to what drives the project. 

The second course, the Appetizer, enters with some fluttering bits to allow you to let go of autopilot. The third course, the essential Salad, is an assortment of raw ideas and beliefs with some flavorful dressing that drove my design process.

The fifth, the grand Main Course, the largest meal, is all about the actual process, the questions, and the revelations - the extensive Design Process, the most essential part of the project that is often overlooked. The sixth then, is the Dessert, the sweet and decadent end of the meal that we all eagerly look forward to, the culmination of all that we have explored, learned and discovered.

The oft-forgotten Reflections follow the Dessert, almost like a sixth course, if there was one – the mignardise? The realm of true introspection. A necessary pause to let it all in. Perhaps with a shot of Limoncello for hearty digestion.

The go WILD sections are no replacements for any official process that you may follow. View them as a multiverse of possibilities. They are indeed supplements: an additional practice derived out of my own learnings that you can add to yours. They are interspersed as tearable pages – take them out, experiment, don’t forget to use your hands, and be open to experience what comes your way!

Why a meal, you ask? Food is a powerful communication tool and a great medium for generating experiences. A fleeting practice in our daily lives. Food helps us all relate to each other, question our existing realities, get in good spirits and marvel at the unexpected. All the while eating to our hearts and drinking to our bellies. Brilliant, don’t you think?

This book, and this project, pose more questions than answers. They are methods that worked for me. I’m not an expert, I don’t have all (or any) of the answers. I am, like us all, but a work-in-progress. The exact imagery, probes and findings may not resonate with you. But it’s important to understand those semantics don’t matter as much as their fundamental origins - what they are really about. If you feel too flustered to let go of this book, don’t yet! Pick it back up, strap up your apron and stick that fork into the sizzling steak! Or freshly baked cauliflower, for my vegan friends?

My advice? Take everything with a grain of Himalayan salt.

Bon Appetite! :)

Side Note

This project is way too wild and wacky to put into a linear post.

Nothing BUT the real deal (aka the book AND the objects) can do justice to the experience of the project. 

If you like what you've seen and read up until now, download that PDF (in the drive link) right at the end. And so while you're at it, cook some of the recipes in there too! :)

PS: If you REALLY like what you see, and would want a super special, almost-lickable hand-bounded printed copy for your collection, holla at me (mail to: saniyaj6@gmail.com).

hors d’oeuvre

‘I oscillate between thinking I am crazy, and thinking I am not crazy enough.’

- Joyce Carol Oates

appetizer

‘Your work isn’t a high stake, nail-biting professional challenge. It’s a form of play. Lighten up and have fun with it’

- Sol Lewitt

Introspection refers to the reflective act of looking inwards to carefully examine the transient and intricate thoughts swirling around in our minds. It is a state of awareness wherein you look AT your experience rather than THROUGH it. 

A remarkable oddity of our fluttering minds is how little we understand it. The certain sense of amnesia that applies to our everyday experiences, the partial consciousness that we appear to be walking around with - can be termed as mindlessness. 

Mindlessness is a frame of mind characterized by a state of rigidity, a single perspective, wherein it is characteristic to pigeonhole experiences, ideas and people into single categories. It makes one oblivious to other ways of seeing. 

Why does it matter in design? Well, when something is processed mindlessly, the potential for reconsideration, reinterpretation and emotional response and creativity is lost. A tendency experts called premature cognitive commitment. 

For instance, is a chair just a chair? A piece of furniture that one sits on? Can it also be a table? Firewood? a Weapon? Stepping stool? Turned over to become a barricade or fence? Identifying a chair as only a chair reduces the possibility to identify, acknowledge and make use of its myriad of possibilities. 

As a designer, this is an essential part of not just a design process, but also of designed objects. Langer insists with her research time and again that the mindful state can be cultivated and learned. In this project, I experimented with these ideas of the mindful state as ‘humanistic, interpretative, and naturalistic’ tools or approaches towards understanding subjective experiences, opportunities for learning, motivation for change, and a means to enhance the creative capabilities in the process of Design Thinking.'

But what does all this have to do with anything, you may ask?

Or with Design?

Scientifically, it is important to note here, that mindful cognition can be guided by rules and/or routines, but it is not governed by them.  The true essence of a mindful and introspective process, then, is essentially a flexible and open mindset in which one remains actively engaged in the process of observing ‘novel aspects’ of things around oneself, amps up the intellectual curiosity to multiple creative solutions to a problem, becomes motivated to explore new worlds of knowledge and enter a general state of self-acceptance and exploration. 

In other words, novelty builds up a wide spectrum of a sort of encyclopedia of ideas in your mind (visual and textual), that greatly helps in problem-finding.

Now, to some of you, mindfulness and meditation may sound reminiscent of New Age crystals, pyramids, and Buddhist monks, with no connection to the reality of the ever-speeding real world. But here’s the deal. The benefits of a receptive state of mind are backed by a great deal of scientific and historic research, in real time! 

In the late 18th and 19th centuries, tourists would travel with a handheld slightly convex mirror, called quad glass. The idea was that if you turned yourself away from a beautiful landscape and looked instead at its reflection in the quad glass, it was said to look more beautiful like a painting. As Thomas Gray said, only through the quad glass could he see the sunset in all its glory. 

George de Mestral, a Swiss engineer returned home from a hunting trip with his dog. He incessantly tried to remove burrs from his jacket and his dog’s fur, with no luck, and became rather fascinated by the persistence of the burrs. He examined them under the microscope to discover that it was hundreds of tiny hooks protruding from each burr that would latch onto any surface it would meet. Dr Maestral came up with a sort of clothing fastener that would function to gently and temporarily put together two pieces of fabric – one with hundreds of little hooks and one with closed loops as found in many woven materials – like a kind of zipperless zipper. Fast forward about 14 years of experiments – his newly fangled fastener enters the world as the Velcro (vel from the French word velour or velvet + cro from crochet or hook).

What we see in all these examples and numerous more, is the reflective, open, and introspective state of mind that each of these creators seems to be in when brainstorming design solutions. Rather than treating what they feel, see and experience as humdrum chores and flies buzzing by each notices something new. Creative researchers call this ability to be more receptive to seeing associations between things in the environment and problems you’re trying to solve, ‘opportunistic association’.

cocktail break

salad

‘At the beginning of a new project, I challenge it conceptually to get a grip but end up making a lot of decisions intuitively. In the course of this process, I try to eliminate aspects that seem superfluous or only weekly connected to the content. A design process is almost like a ‘house of cards.’ Every decision is based on the previous answer and the next question.’

- Jeremy Jansen

main course

‘It is important to use your hands, that is what distinguishes you from a cow or a computer operator.’

- Paul Rand

dessert

‘To me, creativity is not about changing people but playing with them. As a designer, it is up to you to use this to surprise people and build something connected or disconnected - to what it is for. For it to have identity, content, statement and soul.’

- Rimasuu

Reflections

 This project taught me plenty, as a designer and as a person. It helped me understand that what matters is not the what, but the how. The spirit with which I create and the intimacy between. I identified the authority, power and responsibility that comes from such a mindful act of doing. It encouraged introspection, some constructive self-doubt, and accepted multiple ways of thinking and perceiving.

To say that it is okay to follow yourself wherever the attention settles - the intent, amused, compassionate, contrarian, and sometimes eclectic. To say that it is also okay to jump from a childhood memory of food to Montaigne’s discourse, and do justice to both. To say that the way to be is like the skeptic Sextus Empiricus, who had famously cautioned his disciples to ‘suspend all judgements’ on everything but the experience of their own senses.

This project was, perhaps, more than all, a cathartic gesture. It was an embrace of autoethnography as a self-reflective method in my practice. it taught me how to pause to understand, investigate and question. Question all that I believe is relevant not only to my self, but to an entire generation defined by a juncture of imposed ideologies, regardless of geographical location, caste, ethnicity, religion, profession or general beliefs. It helped me forge a far more comfortable relationship with my self, as not just a creative individual but as a creative individual with desires, fears and frustrations.

In a world increasingly being dominated by the Internet of Things, such data can be retrieved for for AI to acquire a first-person perspective, to live experiences like human beings, in the foreseeable future. Methods of introspection and mindfulness can become more valuable for creating out-of-the-box, experience-driven design knowledge and innovations for designers, because ‘we are not just researchers who sometimes have to strive to be objective, we are also human beings who live, experience, think, and reflect on our experiences.’

This book intends to embrace peculiarity. It is my personal nod to connections that are made in the mind that often do not make sense in a speculative middle of confusion, but cuddle right in if you just keep going. What matters is to keep going and listening to your own unique complex system of memories, sensations and learnings.

To bring out the fantastic in the mundane. Create new meanings of the familiar.

To exist, not in a state of Deleuzian tiredness of all that is known and expected but an extensively unknown, unexpectedly vast realm of possibilities.

During it all, I had fun like never before. I wrote and thought, created and cooked, ate and danced. I rediscovered and succumbed to my urge to make with my own two hands, to twist several genres around my supple fingers, and make obscure analogies if they felt right because they just might be!

It all makes sense towards the end. If there is ever an end?

But to keep going. 

As an ode to the self.