Keep Calm and Kony On*

On March 28, 2010, the Washington Times and many other news agencies reported that the Lords Resistant Army, a militant terrorist group led by Joseph Kony, raided the Makombo region of the Congo and massacred 321 people as well as abducted 250 or so people. The only thing is, is that this massacre happened 3 months earlier from the time it was reported, on December 16, 2009. In comparison, the earthquake in Haiti was report merely an hour or so after it took place.

This is why I support the global attention that Invisible Children has drawn since they initiated the Kony 2012 campaign. People will always criticize. Some have already expressed that raising awareness won’t solve this issue. It’s true - it’s only the beginning of solving any issue and it must be followed up by methodical, strategic action. Nevertheless, raising awareness is crucial, especially when just last year when I was working on a project about child soldiers or fundraising to go to Uganda, nobody knew who Joseph Kony was nor ever heard of the LRA. 

(Above is a final project I did for my design class last year. It’s a daily calendar that shows the news headline for each day starting on December 16, 2009 when the massacre took place to a few days after it was actually reported on March 28, 2010. I wanted to physically show how much time and news could pass without us knowing about such atrocities.)

Is Awareness Not Enough?

Some people may criticize that raising awareness won’t solve this issue. Often times I’ve felt frustrated with many awareness campaigns, local and global, that pump out catchy graphics and cool T-shirts, wristbands, USB drives, mugs, refrigerator magnets, friendship bracelets, and whatever else to make the cause known. Take the environmental green campaign for example. Suddenly everyone started printing cute vintage-wash T-shirts with cartoon polar bears dangling on to a piece of melted glacier or tote bags with a giant “GO GREEN” stamped on the front. Did it solve the problem? I’d like to say a straight out no as many were superficial marketing stunts, but really, nobody knows. Maybe in some small way it did contribute to people actually caring about the environment. (A final project I did for class out of the frustration of the green campaign can be found here. Yes, I am shamelessly promoting myself.)

I actually initiated an awareness slash fundraising campaign of my own that can be seen with the same criticism that I have towards the green campaign. In order to fundraise for a 5 week “Global Issues Internship” in Uganda, I decided to stencil spray-paint T-shirts to sell at a minimum price of $15 to my friends and family through Facebook. It raised some awareness about the Ugandan civil war and child soldiers, but it’s difficult to measure how much change it inspired. At the same time, however, I wonder how effectively I would’ve spread the issue by writing a long report on it and sending that to potential donors. Sure, it would’ve given a much more comprehensive view of the problem, but sadly, nobody would’ve read it. Which brings me to my next point:

Are We Lazy?

A classmate in my West African Writers class whom I was discussing this whole Kony 2012 campaign with made a great point - how we had become so lazy. How the extent of our action for the most part is jumping on the social media band wagon and tweeting, Facebook-ing, and blogging about it. And perhaps in about a month, this media buzz will eventually die down and we will keep sitting idly on our asses, staring blankly at our Facebook pages waiting for the next big thing to show up. 

And Cynics/Realists/Whatever may say: Many of you who posted the Kony 2012 video on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and wherever else, won’t do much more than that for the rest of your life. The media buzz will eventually and inevitably die down and you will carry on with your life as usual. 

But that’s the difficulty with these graphic-heavy campaigns - though people may criticize the Kony campaign for its inability to enact more change than a click of a socia media button or Vimeo button, at some point in translation, information has to be condensed and trimmed for mass consumption. And as any smart consumer does in a supermarket, we need to review what exactly we’re “consuming” and avoid packaging labels that can be unintentionally misleading. Which finally brings me to this point:

Criticism is Healthy

I think it’s great that people are criticizing the campaign. And it’s great that Invisible Children is responding too. Criticism, as long as it’s constructive, will help the grassroots organization improve in areas where they may be lacking. And it also means that we are indeed smart consumers; that we won’t just passively accept everything that comes our way; that we actually care enough to critically respond. 

Some critics: Visible Children Tumblr / The Daily What / Foreign Policy

The Organization: Invisible Children’s Response

Though I haven’t read every criticism about Invisible Children nor reviewed their financials thoroughly, I can say with confidence that the organization is doing the right thing on garnering as much media attention as possible on this issue. If modern-day Hitlers like Kony aren’t put on the global spotlight radar, him and his brainwashed army will continue to ruthlessly maim and kill people without an agenda. Why was that massacre in Makombo not reported until 3 months later? Maybe it’s because the media doesn’t care about Africa. There’s no juicy story there. It’s all been-there-done-that news. It’s really sad, but it’s the truth in many cases. Hopefully the Kony campaign will make us look at the atrocities being committed by the LRA in an objective way, so that we won’t become desensitized to people dying and being killed just because it’s Africa. 

In the next post, I’d like to explore what Ugandans think of this campaign. Hopefully my friends there will respond with some thoughts. Maybe they think we’re crazy with all this buzz, who knows! 

*Sorry about the corny title. 

The Mzungu* Journal

After scanning 150 pages, cropping them, rotating them, and all that other annoying stuff that I didn’t know went into the deceptively time-consuming process of online publishing, I’m finally done! Here’s the digitized version of my Moleskine journal that I wrote in everyday during the 5 weeks I was in Uganda. These pages were my pillow to cry on, my imaginary messenger between loved ones, and even an understanding friend I could vent to about things that pissed me off. I’d like to virtually dedicate this publication to all my supporters who rooted for me and prayed for me throughout the entire process of getting to Uganda. I’m forever grateful and blessed.

Warning: It’s long and text-heavy so feel free to flip through it at least and just see what catches your eye. Enjoy!

Click here for a larger view. 

Just fyi, photos will be up…soon. I’m still trying to figure out how to sort all 3150 of them. 

*mzungu: /moo-zoon-gu/ n. a term Africans use to refer to foreigners

If You Could Have Any Job…

If every single job in the world was paid by the same rate, I wonder what jobs people would want. Where will we see the most changes? Will the rural farmers suddenly want CEO jobs or would they continue farming? Both jobs pay the same any way. Would the corporate CEO quit and decide to be in a band with his old buddies from high school? Would we have ANYBODY left in financing? Because I really don’t understand how people can be genuinely interested in that field. I don’t mean to offend. I actually want to know if it’s because I’m just not a finance person or it’s because it’s generally not that enjoyable. Maybe a bit of both? Let me know.

Would there be a disproportionate shift in jobs? Would some fields just disappear because of the lack of interest in it? 

For me, I want to be a social designer in today’s world but if capitalism failed and we could just do anything we wanted, I would try a lot of things out. I’d try being a baker one year, then an astronaut the next, then a broadway musical actress, a soccer player, a traveler, a news reporter, the president of both an industrialized and developing country, a street musician, a famous blogger, a fashion designer, a filmmaker, and a furniture maker in the woods of Switzerland. 

This question just came up because I was thinking about people who are unhappy with their jobs. 

Maybe the question is not of doing what you want but doing what makes life better for you and your family. Thoughts?

———- EDITED ———

It’s Easier to Design for Rich People

Poor people amount to more than 90% of the world population. And they have commercial demands too.

But at the moment, there are, in simple terms, 9 designers pumping out cool products for 1 rich guy while there’s only 1 designer listening to 9 different poor people to design affordable and need-based products/systems. The proportions are all messed up! Here’s why:

For my footwear design class one of our projects was to design $1 shoes for developing countries. I was really excited because it’s the type of thing I’d love to take on in the future. But I soon realized it was a flawed assignment. How the heck would I design cheap shoes for poor people without physically observing where/how they live and what kinds of local materials their area produces? How do I know what kinds of shoes they really need without asking them? It’s not like the Internet has a well-updated list of specific consumer footwear needs that you can pick and choose from. Out of hope I even typed “chat with poor people” to see if I could somehow get in contact with someone in a developing country and ask them what they needed.

You might think it’s over-doing it, going to those places and asking what they want. But that’s called market research and product designers of corporations big/small are doing it everyday with you and me. The process is not any different just because your market is poor. 

Anyway, the $1 project was difficult. It was so much harder than our previous projects where we had to just redesign historical shoes into cool modern day ones. Our teacher brought in bags of material swatches to look at. Binders and binders dedicated to midsole rubbers, upper meshes, exotic animal leathers, high-performance technology synthetics, and even reflectives. You just pick and choose, try different combinations, and BAM you got yourself your next bestseller. For the $1 shoes I had not choice but to take someone else’s research and base it off of that. I used Jacqueline Novogratz’s experience in Mathare Valley, the oldest and worst African slum, where she personally spoke to a woman who had escaped extreme poverty through entrepreneurship. (Click for her amazing TED talk that will change your perspective on poor people and poverty)

It’s just easier to design for rich people. In the world that you and I live in the physical and systematic infrastructure of industries from material-sourcing, to manufacturing, to production are all well-established (and just to be clear well-established does NOT mean well-designed). So it’s pretty straight-forward to design something and get it produced just like that.

Anyway, here’s what I ended up with for the $1 shoe. 

Making “Fun”draising Letters Fun

I’ll be going on a Global Internship trip to Uganda this summer for 5 weeks with a team of 11 other students from various Intervarsity chapters throughout New England universities. I’ve wanted to go to Africa since I was a little girl watching the Oprah show, where she’d do amazing things like build educational institutions, etc. I finally have the chance! The cost of this trip is $4250, which is steep, so I’ve been thinking of ways to fundraise. Mission-related trips always require support letters that you send to friends, family, colleagues, churches, and even strangers. I wrote one before for my very first mission trip to Japan but I didn’t raise anything at all. So this time, I decided to change it up. Inspired by the crazy infographics from Good Magazine, I tried my own infographic support letter to send as pdf files to my friends, family, colleagues, etc. It explains how this global internship trip links to my vocational dream of becoming a social designer in context of a Christian, as well as 5 different ways to support me or the cause.

Enjoy and please consider supporting! Thanks. 

**The actual pdf file with external links can be seen here:

http://www.pdf-archive.com/2011/02/04/uganda-infographic/uganda-infographic.pdf

Concept 1 was my original idea described in the previous entry. I constructed just the cap of the dome to create a concave form. But as I built the cap I was tempted to carry on and create most of the geodesic sphere so as to create a space for people to interact in. If I did this my original concept would be lost. So I decided to do both. Concept 2 shows the final result where I continued the cap shown in Concept 1. The cap and the rest of the “sphere” are two separate parts attached with velcro straps. 

Concept 2 is entirely different in that there is no utilitarian purpose to it, nor does it apply any sustainability measures. It’s an intimate space created for the individual to interact with. Inside, the highly reflective golden mylar panels bounce the light rays from the bulb in all directions, creating a 360 degree experience for the viewer. When you talk inside of it, sound waves behave similarly as they incessantly bounce off the panels, creating echos as if in a cave. The spherical shape of the structure also contains the warmth from the bulb and further creates an inverted sun-like experience. 

Through this project I hope I created something aesthetically pleasing but just as importantly something useful or at least meaningful. 

Doing More with Less

Buckminster Fuller was all about “doing more with less.” He’s most famous for the geodesic dome, or “Bucky Ball,” which is a self-supporting dome-like structure constructed solely of triangular shapes. This structure is relatively cheap and easy to build (usually within hours) and is a great example of material efficiency, which was much of his work’s focus. The characteristics of the Bucky Ball makes it ideal for building immediate shelters in areas where natural disasters have destroyed people’s houses.

I came across this project, Domes for Haiti, where an artist and activist named Lopi LaRoe traveled to Haiti to build 10 domes for orphanages she personally assessed and selected according to need. She too was inspired by Fuller’s geodesic domes. Her post was also inspiring to me and worth reading. I just love how when she went to build the domes she didn’t take a crew of her friends from home. I love how she hired teenagers in Haiti, to empower and inspire them but also to equip them with real skills. This “local sourcing” of labor is a great example of what Paul Polak talks about in “Out of Poverty.” Instead of bringing in labor and materials from the country that’s aiding the developing country, finding labor and materials from the developing country itself creates jobs and promotes sustainability. Because LaRoe employed 5 local teenagers they are now skilled in building domes and can use these skills in the future or be able to fix the domes if they ever need mending. By paying them for their labor LaRoe essentially integrated the local economy into her project without making it a mere charity case. 

MY RESPONSE: 

I got a little side-tracked, but here’s how I responded to Fuller’s philosophy of doing more with less in my final light project for Spatial Dynamics. I roughly used some steps of the design thinking model: 1. Need-finding/identifying the problem 2. Research 3. Ideation 4. Rapid-prototyping

My problem was to create a light structure that would maximize the area of light distribution using limited materials, (meaning I could not simply use more light bulbs.) I tried to create a fairly utilitarian light structure that wasn’t just a pretty lamp that suppressed light with its elaborate and purely aesthetic lamp-shade but one that capitalized on the lightbulb’s potential energy. 

I brainstormed forms and thought of concave/convex lenses. Convex lenses, like the lenses in our eyes, make light rays converge at a certain point called the focal point. Concave lenses, however, do the opposite, diverging light rays. So I decided to build a concave form for my light piece.

I “ideated” ways to construct a concave lens or at least simulate the basic shape of it. I first thought of a soccer ball structure that uses hexagons and pentagons. Then I settled on constructing a geodesic dome, which seemed easier to build. 

Like Fuller did, I tried to efficiently use materials by planning out beforehand which size and orientation was best to cut from the standard size of the foam core boards I bought in order to extract the greatest amount of triangular panels possible. (This alludes to how the availability of resources we have in the world should be the determining factor for how much we produce, NOT the demand.)

RAPID PROTOTYPING

PROCESS

Since this post is getting really long I’ll post the end results and photos from my final crit! 

(For larger view of photos click on the link at the end of the post that indicates however many minutes/days/weeks ago it was posted)

In the previous entry I wrote about how advertisers/marketers should partner up with the UN or NGOs to advertise global issues as if they were the next cool gadget. I attempted to do this with the topic of war. 

THE BEHIND STORY

In my junior year of high school, I was studying Wilfred Owen’s poems in my english class and came across one of his most famous works “Dulce et Decorum Est.” I usually don’t like poems but this one was just too good to simply read. It’s about the pity of war and how so many young lives are wasted on the battlefield. Owen was a soldier himself who fought in WWI, which is what makes his poems so raw. He enlisted a young, optimistic man but quickly realized how himself and every other young adolescent “soldier” had been deceived by the false glorification of war. There was no glory in drowning in poison gas with froth spewing out of your mouth.

Even while studying the World Wars in history I never understood war. Maybe it’s because I lack the necessary political and historical knowledge but I just never understood it. I just don’t get how after the first one that killed about 6.8 million civilians alone and proved to the rest of the world how war should be avoided at all costs, there was another one just 21 years later - the improved sequel with more efficient, action-packed ways to kill as many people as possible. It really boggles my mind. It’s like a sick game to see how many people each side can kill before both sides think they should stop. 

I don’t care what anybody says about protecting the nation, eliminating enemies, etc. Absolutely nothing justifies killing fathers, sons, mothers, daughters, wives, and husbands often by the most inhuman means just to prove military prowess, to fulfill a political ideology, or whatever. 

MY RESPONSE: POSTER + PHOTOSHOOT

The above posters were created on Adobe Illustrator using images of various weaponry I found online. It’s supposed to be ironic as the guns form a heart and the peace sign. I chose to use graphics because it’s a medium that’s often used in the public domain, especially for mass media advertising. Graphics are meant to be succinct and catchy so that as many people can obtain the necessary information that the ad is trying to convey in one glance. My hope was that people can look at the posters at a glance like they would any other commercial ad on the streets and realize the condemnatory message behind it. 

EXHIBITION Another important part of completing this project was the implementation of the posters. I chose to display them in a public space where there are constantly many people. I chose one of the busiest college streets in Seoul, Shinchon, where buildings are covered in colorful graphic print ads. Thanks to the help of my model friend Julie Kim, I was able to integrate the posters (which I had printed on large banners) in the streets, on billboards, in subways, and amidst the people just passing the streets.