IDP 316 - [Critical] Design Thinking Studio
Deep Dive #2
Alex Widstrand
2016

For this second installment of the Deep Dive projects, we as Team CAT – Céline, Alex, and Tiejin – initially looked at the institutional decision-making centers, such as the Financial Aid Office, the Alumnae Relations Office and the Student Government Association, as potential “sites of power.” During our first field trip, we tried to visit these places, but the offices either turned us away or weren’t as fruitful as we had hoped. Feeling discouraged, we went back to the drawing board and took a radical shift in our approach: what if we looked at “power” in the literal sense? From there, we focused our energies on the school’s kitchens, which provides students with the energy to power their bodies and minds. Knowing that Dining Services had hired a new director at the beginning of the year, this new site satisfied another condition, “space for change,” as well. Lastly, being users in the dining halls ourselves, we know the resistance, “place of resistance,” that students have toward the dining halls and, by association, toward the dining staff and administrators as well. Kitchens: an idea that initially sounded like a silly idea during ideation, eventually proved to be the perfect site for power, change, and resistance.