Social Movement
Teaching the 'social' in social dance
CHALLENGE
Social dance is a non-verbal, improvised conversation. But outdated ideas of etiquette, gendered pressures, and a new landscape of amateur social dancers make it remarkably difficult for dancers to consistently find a pleasing, powerful, and humanizing social connection on the dance floor.
ROLE
Lead designer
OUTPUT
A training program for social dance teachers that is as much social content as technical training. The program is conducted for internationally renowned teachers during popular multi-day social dance events, and is marketed to dancer customers in the host city during the event.
ACTIVITIES
Research, ideation, art direction, logo design, campaign development
IMPACT
The positive impression this project had on my designer peers and mentors and learnings uncovered during my research motivated me to further pursue the space of social dance for my graduate product design thesis.
TOOLS
DURATION
CLIENT
Illustrator, Photoshop, Keynote
4 weeks
MFA in Product Design
Takeaways
1. Considering services as design outputs comes easy to me, and I enjoy their complexity. In developing a service, I got to think big-picture and small-details, from mission and vision to logo design, and in doing so I could use both sides of my brain and grow as a hollistic designer.
Next steps
1. Expand this project into digital interaction design to further develop the experience and make the product more engaging.