Abstract
The pandemic, which started at the end of 2019, has affected societies in their own socio-cultural contexts and altered the interactions of human beings through their use of personal spaces and objects. Changes in the design of a wide range of objects varying from small tools to urban furniture are anticipated, as the “new normal” will be fully established in the coming months and years. We believe that each individual is recognized to be affected by a different aspect of pandemic, which yielded the fact that for such cases the paradigm for design may shift to favor user needs more than maintaining usability. This study examined the personal behavioral transformations after the acceptance of “new normal” and how these would be reflected on the design of everyday objects, tools or spaces. In order to address this problem, we developed design research method that was based on the tales of utopic cities found in the novel Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino. In this method, students, who already started living under the requirements of curfew, were guided to turn inwards and relate with their needs that arouse in the pandemic period with one selected city narrative and try to find design solutions based on the metaphorical narration and language used in the selected story. From the analysis of 17 works based on abductive reasoning, we obtained results in two different categories: (i) 5 generic cases supported by user scenarios, (ii) 3 groups of artifacts interacted by analogue means.
Highlights
Covid 19 has been effective for most of the year 2020 and created a significant and dramatic impact on the life of all the people around the world
We presented an approach for uncovering the invisible tensions and reactions regarding communication that came to existence in the pandemic, due to the stress for contracting virus and isolation triggered by social distancing and curfew
With this study, being an early stage design research, our intention was to share the insights of the possible future needs and solutions for the “new normal”
Summary
Covid 19 has been effective for most of the year 2020 and created a significant and dramatic impact on the life of all the people around the world. Everybody’s primal concern was keeping healthy in those days, we recognized that most of us started to experience “invisible barriers” while trying to keep things going. These barriers, which were activated either from the environment or within the person, showed us that creating standardized affordable solutions for a society or even a particular group of people in times of emergency would result in the insufficiency of the product. Our design students of Communication Design of Ozyegin University faced for the first time with such pandemic and emergency situation As time passed, they all found out that they were not experiencing their usual routine of design process.
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