Internship Monthly Blog 1

Above is a picture taken when I accidentally slept too much in High Speed Rail and ended up in Taichung when I planned to stop at Hsinchu.

I help do research for an Israel jewelry designer, Victor, for a collection book that he's working on. It's a book that will contain 100 world's top leader fashion brands in this world today. My main job is to help him research at least two brands' that are on the list. I need to find information about the founder(s), the brand's establishment, its philosophy, and its direction for the future.

My main job is to gather information, not to write it. I help him make sure all the dates and names are correct, there's no contradiction between different sources, the spelling of their original names, etc. There's a lot of reading for each brand. However, I could actually learn a lot from doing it every week. Because of this internship, I have no excuse for myself from not reading anymore. I never had a good habit of reading, and this is something that makes sure I will spend time reading every week. Also, I'm starting to began to catch up some tricks about gathering important and necessary information from reading long texts.

Meet The Soule

Soule is a clothing designer that Sheilah knows. We had a Skype interview with her a while back during social sculpture course. Her main job is to help design theater actors' costumes. On her own time, she makes shirts that send positive messages such as being green.

We got a chance to see how she organizes her research and even some of the work that she had done and what she was still working on. It was interesting to see how she puts her research together. She printed off all the images that inspired her and pasted them all on a board. It looks like a collage. That way she gets to see all of the images at once.

Since that interview happened a while back so I don't have much clear memory of what exactly did she say. However, what I read from Tina's post, I recall she said something about how she first went to an art school for the passion of "beauty" but now she considers the "ideas" within an artwork more. I kind of disagree with that idea. I mean, how do you compare "ideas" and the "beauty"? What does a good idea mean? Does the idea of doing drugs mean a "bad idea"? What about "beauty" What is "beautiful? Most people would say anything that most people agree appeal to look nice would be something that is "beautiful" But doesn't the sense of beauty change from time to time or even from different culture to another? What is the true beauty then? The answer is both the level of the quality of "beauty" and "ideas" should depend on the audience as an individual. A "good idea" could be expressed in many many different ways. The job of an artist is to preform that idea she or he wants to send out, in the form that the artist wants the people to see.

The Smartest Guys in the Room

The movie, "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" is about how the big company, Enron's, falsity to the people in order to cheat for money and caused a lot of jobs loses. Enron chairman and chief executive, Kenneth Lay, died from heart attack. The CEO, Jeff Skilling, is still in prison today.

It's very similar to most of the stories we learned from Global Ethics class. It's all about human's greed. This movie is different, though. All the rest of the stories had left me thinking, "Don't they care about the other people?" but this movie provides a scientific "proof" It explains an old experiment that was testing on humans before. When a person is in charge of electrifying the person in the other room, he will later on become use to it. Eventually, even when he knows the voltage is high enough to kill someone, he has already lost the feeling of sympathy. That experiment can go to some stories we heard, such as Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart provides low cost to the customers by getting low cost labors. Even though Wal-Mart is in the States and most of the low cost labors are in China, I doubt that the heads of Wal-Mart have no idea about it. They definitely know what they paied to their worker is not enough for them to have three meals a day.

I'm not too sure about how ecomomy works, but if Enron had been lying and hiding about the numbers in their account, it should have influenced the whole economy. Enron's employees also had to suffer from losing their jobs just because the heads of their company wanted to earn extra money. To be fair here, Kenneth Lay and Jeff Skilling have got to be "the smartest guys in the room." Not a lot of people can create such a huge deception. However, too bad that they used it in the wrong way.

Blood, Sweat, and T-Shirt + Travels With T-Shirt In A Global Economy

The BBC document, Blood, Sweat, and T-Shirt, seems pretty much like the movie of the book, Travels With T-Shirt In A Global Economy. Both of them are about the process of discovering how T-shirts are made.
The book mainly focus on how shirts are printed where it is made, but never include where else it is involved. The shirts would have been flying back and fourth just to get the materials.
The movie is mostly about how shirts are made, or how the labors work. Most T-shirts don't cost much, but the hard work behind the process actually costs more than what the label says.

McDonough + Hawken

Both McDonough's Ted Talks and Hawken's list of principles for sustainability talk about the crises of using too much resources.

I like McDonough's Ted Talks better, because he actually gave out some possible solution there instead of naming whom we should blame to. His idea of planting on the roof tops is really interesting. Although "green roof" is not a new idea, he brought it one step beyond. Planting vegetables and plants on roof tops can help clean the air, it's a good use of the space, and we can also eat the vegetables.
Just imagine how many empty roof tops we have, around the world. It would be a "waste" if we don't have any good use of them. Some Asians, specially people from China and Taiwanese, hang their clothes on their roof tops, but by doing that doesn't really give anything back to the environment. Of course, they at least aren't "wasting" those roof tops, however, McDonough's idea can give out more to the community.

Hawken has the point that no matter how many little things we're doing at home to save energy, the big companies and corporation can still use all the resources faster than we can save them. We have been talking about how most corporation could harm the environment, but I still believe that we can't just go and blame on them and tell them to stop what they are doing. In a cold way of saying this, they are simply making a living. Mr. Sheu showed us a movie in his class, called "Thank You For Smoking", last week. It's a story about a cigarette company's going against the people that wanted to promote a non-smoking environment. From the movie, it shouws you that even the people working in the company already knew the facts about smoking too much, they still try their best to sell them out. Why? Because that is their job and they believe the costomers should be able to chose for themselves.
I would fight against the ones that purposly add other chemicals into their products to fool their costumers, but I would not blame most of the corporation for hurting the environment. Without them, a lot of us would not be having what we have right now.

Wast Not V.S. Senior Project

The article, Waste Not, from the book, Natural Capitalism, tells us how much waste we actually are producing. You know, those interesting statistics that show you how much it really costs just to make a bottle of water. It also goes one step beyond and talks about how expensive it is, to keep prisoners. It makes us to be more aware of how much we are "wasting" just by purchasing most of the products or maybe even doing wrongdoings to get ourselves into jails. It has a good point, we are producing a lot of wastes.

Now the question is, "what is a 'waste'?"

When you accidentally made an ugly mark on a piece of white paper, does it mean you just wasted that paper? It's either a "yes" or a "no", and it depends on one thing; Are you going to use the other side of that paper?

As I mentioned earlier, I would like to work at T-shirt designs for my senior project. The best way to create a lot of "waste" is by printing many shirts and have them all ended up in a trash can, instead of those green, giant, metal boxes that send clothes to places where people would be happy to wear anything that fits. Since that is the case, I would say one way to prevent from wasting is to print shirts only when I am sure the design is set to go. If I don't have too much confidence, I might as well let people order before I even print them.

To even create lesser "waste", I can even use used shirts. That way I would be taking the other people's "waste" and turning them into things that no longer look like "wastes".
Hopefully.

Senior Project - Inquiry Question

My inquiry question for my senior project, for now, is "do culture affects the designs people wear?"

When it comes to choosing what to wear, we often lead to the topic of "fashion". What is fashion and what exactly creates the "fashion"? Some says it's just the luck of a designer. The designer probably just drew his ideas out and got the majority's attention. Some other people believe fashion is all caused by the media; the majority tend to think that whatever is on TV, is the correct answer. I agree with both of these answers. However, one thing I doubt about is, can the same design be as popular as when it is overseas? I am now begin to try think about whether there's any impact from the culture that influences the "fashion" of that region.