Driving Question: How can I address some of the present threats to global health while promoting human rights and social progress?
Project Overview: In this module, students were introduced to the foundations of global health. They learned about basic concepts, measurements, and determinants of health, and a number of key perspectives for considering global health issues.
For her project, Estelle explored water scarcity in Honduras, which leads to a lack of basic sanitation and clean water for up to 1.8 million people. Non-communicable diseases in Honduras attributed to water cause a DALY rate of 4,540 per 100,000 people. Disease spreads through contaminated food and water tanks, and poor management, climate change, and political unrest worsen the issue.
Project Reflection: “Exploring the niche of environmental global health opened my mind to so many new areas of interest in this field. I thoroughly enjoyed this module and felt like the skills will be very applicable to other modules.”
Driving Question: How might we produce a product or concept that contributes to a more sustainable fashion future?
Final Product: My summative product for this module was a textile art rug bag that visually incorporated ideas of punk and queer fashion. The bag itself is sort of a tote bag style and on each side there is a different design that I hand punched. For the “punk” side of the bag I designed a traditionally punk aesthetic image of an eye, a large X in front of it, and the words “F**k off”. When designing this, I wanted to keep in mind the traditional punk look as well as the values of being anti-capitalist, anti-oppression, and just generally living outside of the traditional social norms. For the other side of the bag, I wanted to express more ideas of the queer self and experience with a rainbow design around a stick figure body. My aim was for it to be colorful and expressive, just like the queercore fashion movements that intersected with the punk subculture.
What were your goals for this module? How did you achieve them?
I wanted to have fun creating my own unique textile art piece that incorporated different subculture fashions I was interested in exploring. I also wanted to grow in my creativity and continue to make new pieces as an artist. I got to learn a lot more about the history of punk fashion and the queer community’s influence on it. I’m really happy with my final product because I think it’s a very unique piece that not only visually represents the aesthetics of this movement, but because I also made it myself, it embodies the values of the punk and queercore movements as well.
What did you learn about yourself or about your creative process or about your medium?
I’m pretty new to making rugs, but I’ve absolutely fallen in love with the art form. Making this rug bag was a bit of a risk, but I’m really proud of how it turned out. I like taking creative risks and having fun with my art. In the future, I hope to continue to have fun and practice creativity with any art project I do.
Driving Question: How can I use creative art practices to engage in discourse and dialogue on counterculture, social justice or everyday life through zines?
Project Description:
In this module I made a zine (book) about the life of Rupert Murdoch, why he does what he does, and how his influence works.
Quote:
I learned that with a little bit of inspiration and a non-judgemental audience, art becomes a lot easier.
Driving Question: How can we think critically to effectively inform citizens in a media manipulated world?
What were your goals for this module? How did you achieve them?
Our goal was to raise awareness about hemp and show some common misconceptions about this plant while connecting it all to the theme of sustainability. We presented our campaign on Instagram.
What did you learn about yourself or about your creative process or about your medium?
We learned that the process of choosing a font is a very long one and that critical thinking skills can help us find misconceptions in the social media world.
Driving Question: How can I incorporate more local and homemade food into my diet to improve my sustainability and health?
Project Description:
My project is a short book of recipes I have written myself that use local, sustainable, and healthy ingredients. To write these recipes, I looked at foods I eat most often and local foods I have access to decide on the items before researching the history of each item and the different methods used to make them so I could create my own recipes. I also researched how a recipe is written, how to cater to your intended audience, the proper language to use, and the elements to include. My final product is a collection of these recipes that could be used by relatively new cooks.
Reflection:
“This project was especially interesting because I have done a lot of cooking and baking in my life, but I have never been one to follow recipes. Doing this project and creating my own recipes really helped me understand how recipes can be useful as well as how much work and effort goes into making each one. I think I will now be at least slightly more inclined to follow recipes when cooking in the future.”
Driving Question: How can I contribute to solving a problem in my local community?
Project Description:
The project aims to spread awareness on the importance of education to the underprivileged and the existing educational opportunities. I will be directing a documentary that spreads the message of the project’s aim. This solutions fills the gap off the unawareness on the importance of education and the opportunity available to their children.
Reflection:
“I am really excited to work on directing my documentary once the schools of Tamilnadu opens. TGS was an incredible educational opportunity for me and I want to give back to my community by connecting children to existing educational opportunities in India.”
Driving Question: How can I use photography to raise awareness about our human behavior’s impact on the environment?
Project Description
My personal project this term is a photography project about human behavior’s impact on the environment. While wondering why we are not acting as urgently as we should for the climate crisis, I found people often see the crisis as a distant challenge, both in time and in space. Through this project, I wanted to raise awareness about the impact of our daily and individual actions on the environment, and ultimately, bring people closer to the challenge.
Reflection:
“My main takeaway from this project is that, no matter how global any challenge is, the individual action will end up making the difference.”
Driving Question: How might we produce a product or concept that contributes to a more sustainable fashion future?
What were your goals for this module? How did you achieve them?
My goals for this module were to learn more about the circular economy in Estonia’s fashion industry and create a sustainable sneaker design using existing solutions. I achieved my goals by doing research and then creating a small presentation and designing a shoe using Photoshop. I gained inspiration from various sneaker companies. My presentation is down below, but you can also access it HERE on Canva, in case you’d like to check out the links and citations.
What did you learn about yourself or about your creative process or about your medium?
In this module, we focused on all the necessary and unavoidable future developments in the fashion industry, which will hopefully happen during the next few decades. As climate change is slowly starting to emerge from all the other problems under the sun, companies are trying to keep up with the demand for sustainable garments. A good illustration of how serious climate change is would be comparing it to our body temperature – if one’s below 37 degrees Celsius, it’s alright. However, only 2 degrees make a big difference in one’s well-being. For example, when I had a high fever, I felt extremely lethargic – now, imagine the Earth not functioning properly. Exactly – it would be a mess, especially happening at a rapid speed!
It was encouraging to learn how other countries have inspired the Estonian Ministry of the Environment to participate in improving their circular economy systems and how studies conducted have found that, although there’s still a lot of improvement to be done, the environmental awareness index had increased from 37,5/100 in 2014 to 47/100 in 2020. This module made me notice a lot of things I haven’t before, and before buying anything, I’d advise everyone to not rely heavily on surmise, but rather think twice before letting a new clothing item into your life.
My summative consisted of making a brief summary about sustainability in the Estonian fashion industry. Additionally, I also designed an illustrative sneaker that could contribute to the importance of sustainability. I learned that it’s very challenging to learn how to use Photoshop, even more so to master the art of designing a sneaker (which I think I still need to practice in case I want to continue exploring this area of fashion). I didn’t know a lot about materials and where they’re sourced from in Estonia, nor did I know how much of an impact we could have on garment factory workers’ health and well-being. It wasn’t a big surprise for me to discover that making a sneaker using entirely Estonian-sourced goods would most likely result in more CO2 emissions than just buying it in bulk from Finland, where they, in turn, get it from India or Turkey.
Driving Question: How might we produce a product or concept that contributes to a more sustainable fashion future?
What were your goals for this module? How did you achieve them?
Across Africa, traditional prints are integral to feelings of belonging to a group, defining identities, and showing who you are. For generations, cultures around the continent have traditionally made textiles. Using my brand, I hope to show homage to these cultures and disseminate the stories behind their textiles while also using fashion as a catalyst for change to encourage more women to engage in more physical fitness.
For this project, I designed two collections for my activewear brand, Jarabi Fitness, paying homage to traditional African textiles and celebrating African culture and heritage. The designs included West Africa Kente prints and Dashiki prints. Using my platform, I also created blog posts detailing the cultural significance of the prints.
What did you learn about yourself or about your creative process or about your medium?
I learned that my creative process tends to veer towards putting hours of work in on one day when I feel motivated, as opposed to stretching my work out over time. Once I feel a jolt of motivation, I’m able to get a lot of things done.
