Mentor: Critical Journal Ep.17

Marc Owens Avatar Machine, RCA Graduation Project

Two weeks ago I met my mentor Marc Owens a designer graduated by the Royal College of Art. It was very positive to see how he expressed his interest on my project. I send him a resume of all the proccess that I have been through until that point with my project and a quick paragraph and sketch about the idea of making a desk as my final design project. He could not see the conection and why I ended an apparently interesting proccess where I was going through into an object so common.

It took me time to convince him, it was more a chat between two friends than an official tutorial in which I asked him about not just his opinion but also for advice... He saw the point that I was not making just a desk, it is an object in which I am trying to project all the theory and context development that I created for a near-future scenario.

As a conclusion of all the proccess I have been through I can say that as a designer we are suppose to express who we are. Our work reflect part of our persona so you have to be confortable enough with it to be able to defend it... I guess I was not feeling that way before or I did not have ebough support to continue into that path...

Anyway, the most interesting thing we talked was about the Maslow Piramid. This graphic is a constant reference for Marc work and he said to me that is esential for every designer... at the end we are designing for humans and we have not chaned that much over these thousand of years.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a theory in psychology, proposed by Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation. Maslow subsequently extended the idea to include his observations of humans' innate curiosity. His theories parallel many other theories of human developmental psychology, all of which focus on describing the stages of growth in humans.

Maslow studied what he called exemplary people such as Albert Einstein, Jane Addams, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Frederick Douglass rather than mentally ill or neurotic people, writing that "the study of crippled, stunted, immature, and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy."Maslow studied the healthiest 1% of the college student population.

via wikipedia