Welcome to Team DFA Design Journal’s first update! As our team name implies, our project this semester will entail working on birthing a DFA Design Journal. Why? There is not yet a standardized way for DFA studios to share their projects (buzzwords: cross-communicate and cross-pollinate). Our users are DFAers and we assume their day-to-day involves DFA. By increasing reference to works that’s being done/has been done we have the potential to significantly impact their lives. We have found that our project differs from other typical Rice DFA projects, in that we kinda have our solution already. So our first pivot of the semester has been to ask more than, ‘How can we create a DFA Design Journal?’. We want to ask, ‘How can we create the best possible DFA Design Journal using the design process?’.

We’ve identified the DFA studios as well as some other journals in our network (PLAT, R2) to reach out to begin our Immerse phase. We hope to start interviews this upcoming week so that we can begin to challenge some of our assumptions (‘people want a journal’, ‘non-DFAers have misconceptions about DFA’, ‘studios have trouble documenting for more than just posterity purposes’) and clarify our problem space (addressing things like sustainability, getting buy-in from other studios, distribution, curation). Here’s to a great semester and many blog posts to come! 

And in case you were wondering, here’s our team!

Maheen – loves white chocolate, puzzled by unicycles, trying to get a biomedical device patent approved

Taylan – loves house music and freebird burritos on sundays

Stacy – is a tea enthusiast and avid denim collector

Connor – loves north servery food

Kaarthika – likes chocolate covered raisins and fog