Gato Gordo is a studio and neighborhood-based research practice based in Mexico City that promotes networks of community design. Founded in 2019 by Reina Imagawa, the project utilizes design, play and pleasure as tools for generating strategies for inclusion. Closing its doors as a storefront in 2022, the project currently is collaborating with the Mexican government inits new neighborhood based initiative, Gato Vecino (which translates to “my neighborhood cat”).
—
Gato Gordo es un estudio y práctica de investigación con base en vecindarios en la Ciudad de México, promoviendo una red de diseño comunitario. Fundado en 2019 por Reina Imagawa, el proyecto utiliza el diseño, juego y placer como herramientas para generar estrategias de inclusión. En 2022 se cerró sus puertas como local y pasó a ser itinerante. Actualmente gestiona una nueva iniciativa vecinal, Gato Vecino.
💌: gatoallday [at] gmail.com
Year 2020
Type Independent project
Tools Fruit shopping, fruit eating (individually as well as collectively), interviews, focus groups, obsidian
Collaborators Direction: Reina Imagawa / Research: Reina Imagawa and Iza Castañeda / Team Jugos: Paulyna Ardilla, Brenda Hernandez, Delia Ochoa, and Melina Gaze / Production: Taller de Obsidiana / Logo: MAÍZ / Product photos: Emilio Espejel / Collage: Vivian Cárdenas / Sketches/Drawings: Reina Imagawa
/
Body, soul and sexuality.
Jugos + Licuados is a jewelry studio that promotes desires, discourse, fantasies and universes that recognize and amplify the power of the erotic. Handmade in collaboration with Mexican artisans, our designs utilize natural crystals and organic forms inspired by fruits and Japanese geometry. Each piece is an invitation to reflect on your relationship to pleasure. Founded in 2020 in Mexico City.
—
Cuerpo, alma y sexualidad.
Jugos + Licuados es un estudio de joyería que promueve deseos, discursos, fantasías y universos que reconocen y amplifican el poder erótico. Hechos a mano en colaboración con artesanos mexicanos, nuestros diseños utilizan cristales naturales y formas orgánicas inspiradas en frutas y geometrías japonesas. Cada pieza es una invitación para reflexionar en la relación con el placer. Fundado en 2020 en la Ciudad de México.
—
Sitio web próximamente.
💌: jugos.licuadosss [at] gmail.com
Year
2018 - 2019
Type
Residency
Collaborators
Francisco Lerios, Manuel Alcalá
Tools
Critical thinking, non-traditional models of participatory design, afterhours conversation spaces, WhatsApp + social media outlets, speculative narratives, sunlight, map making
Location
Museo Tamayo (Mexico City, Mexico)
/
Desde la perspectiva de is a 6-month independent design research project that engaged the museum guards who work inside Museo Tamayo in Mexico City. Using design as a tool for observation, documentation as well as investigation, the project worked closely with the guards while respecting the protocols of the museum to avoid jeopardizing their employment.
Site and context-specific methods were creatively devised to make the research possible, including: creating afterhours conversational spaces, compensating a guard on their day off to enact projects in public spaces, and eating breakfast with the guards before they clocked in.
The most significant insight was perhaps not the elementary knowledge we gained of the guards’ everyday life and role in the museum (that accumulated in the form of a publication), but a larger question around how people can conduct research in museums in an ethical and meaningful manner. Traditional methods of participatory research can be harmful in a place like the museum where the museum guards’ agency is already lessened by the powerful systems of hierarchy that govern their roles, duration of employment and power.
Year
2018 - 2019
Type
Graduate thesis
Partners
Museo Tamayo, UNAM, Oficina de Delegación Chapultepec, Agencia Barrio
Advisors
Sean Donahue, Elise Co, Norman Klein and Richard Wheeler (ArtCenter College of Design); Manuel Alcalá (Museo Tamayo)
Location
Mexico City, Mexico (fieldwork + production); Los Angeles, CA (exhibition)
Supported by
Taller Tamayo, Fundación Olga y Rufino Tamayo, Central de Muros, ArtCenter College of Design
/
rules for breaking rules was a 12-month people-centered design practice based in Mexico City, Mexico. Operating both inside and outside of institutions, it looked critically at the existing paradigmatic models of social participation embedded in art, design and urban systems. It produced playful public programs and installations in museums, universities and public spaces and questioned the role that design could play in realigning hierarchy and agency.
This project culminated in a 3-day exhibition as part of the ArtCenter College of Design graduation show in the Pasadena Convention Center in Pasadena, CA. The objects on display featured:
(1) Fieldwork documentation mounted on platforms of differing heights with bright yellow “captions” that further elaborated the human component of a design practice that did not culminate in the production of things
(2) “Genres” of people-centered design practices that were derived from filmic genres, specially devised to expose the complex substrates of a participatory design practice and the different forms/qualities it takes on. Examples included “participatory magical skate realism” and “new wave urban youth surrealism”
(3) Book featuring photos (taken with various cameras, by various actors) annotated with yellow cards that emphasized the different roles of the designer, where for instance in the museum the designer’s role shifted from that of a resident designer to a potential employee
(4) Lastly, an iPad that showed videos from fieldwork and further highlighted the role that the designer plays in determining the social dynamics and affordances of a participatory design practice
Year
2018
Type
Graduate studio (thesis)
Tools
GIFs, collages, diagrams, typography, charts, photos, sketches, binder, Adobe Premiere, Adobe Illustrator
Location
Graduate Media Design Practices Studio (Pasadena, CA)
/
This line of research was inspired by what I learned over the summer working with skaters in Museo Tamayo (Mexico City), especially through observing the amount of enthusiasm the skateboarding community expressed towards intervening in fine art spaces. I was curious to know more about the relationship between these two disparate seeming yet equally artistically-inclined populations, especially in regards to their obsession and passion towards forwarding a certain cultural aesthetic.
In skateboarding, cultural aesthetics are delivered through means of videos that show off technical dexterity and precision of the skater’s engagement with urban space, in the forms of magazine ads, posters, zines and graphics that emphasize the countercultural and anti-capitalistic attitude of skating, and through the likes of the shared stylistics, tricks, looks, fashion, lingo, perspective or behaviors of skaters that became replicated by millions of practitioners in cities all around the world.
Skaters often live on the margins of mainstream culture (i.e., socioeconomically excluded from the Marxist society) and find themselves in a position where it becomes crucial to use their very bodies and existence to propagate their cultural aesthetics. Contrarily, fine art spaces possess the means to construct more permanent social architecture such as white box galleries that pronounce their aesthetic on an institutional scale.
Some of the original questions I brought into this conceptual space hit a dead end (e.g., why do skaters love skating in galleries - besides the fact that the floor is super sleek?). but the various media studies were useful in 2 ways:
(1) I was able to play with different tools to visualize the creative processes and fundamental difference between skaters and museums, using things like collages, diagrams, flipbooks, illustrations, and typography. The GIFs, for instance, were first created as a way to emphasize the precise moment where skateboarding could be considered a political act (through how the skaters orient and use their bodies specifically in ways that allows them to subversively create conditions for play), but then evolved to provide context as to how both skaters and museums use construction as a delivery method to produce culture, which ended up also being a dead-end, but was an interesting concept to toy with.
(2) I realized that museum guards, and not museums, had a lot more in common with skaters than I initially thought, because they are both actors who negotiate agency within institutional settings (this insight led to another project, the guard and the city).
The project was also useful in delineating the history of institutional critique that was helpful for writing about my work in museums.
Year
2014
Type
Undergraduate studio
Tools
Water, Perfect Cube silicone mold, red food dye, wood dowels, paper towels, glue
Collaborator
Rosie Greenberg
Location
Columbia University (New York, NY)
/
anatomy of ice cube was a response to a studio brief that asked us to: study the process of ice melting, without using more than two materials, and without exceeding 15” x 15”.
Ice cubes were crafted in Perfect Cube silicone mold to provide equally melting surfaces. Red food dye was added in the process of freezing. Paper towels were carefully adhered to individual wooden frames then inserted into a larger frame. The ice cube was placed on the top frame and during melting, resulted in creating a print-like effect as huge colored beads of droplets dripped down and inhabited the paper towels.
The architecture of this technology and the melting ice cube made it possible to document an almost anatomical trace of the melting process, creating a function akin to an automated silkscreen printing machine.
Year
2014
Type
Undergraduate studio
Tools
Hand-cut styrofoam, window screen, zipper, nails, indigo thread, acrylic paint, Elmer's glue, Gorilla glue, Rhino, Illustrator, clay
Location
Columbia University (New York, NY)
/
Recording erosion was a multi-phase project that started by creating an object that could record, document and reveal the unseen geography of erosion that emerges between your feet and the ground.
These shoes were not meant to be durable but the complete opposite, erosive: the greatest challenge was conceiving a design that could withstand the body weight of human being but also be able to slowly give into it. Styrofoam promised a surface that was supportive while remaining open and malleable to things in the urban environment, enabling the person to walk through different urban terrains and collect/record different modalities of erosion.
Once the functionality was confirmed, the design was re-evaluated to provide wearability and comfort. Still keeping in mind the fact that the shoe is a recording device, the final design prioritized minimal connectivity between the fabric and the sole to maximize the space allotted for erosion.
After a series of field studies and visualizations, which included using Rhino as well as codifying the erosions into hand-drawn abstract notations, I produced a physical model of a fictional park where a person can walk through an architecture of erosion. The patterns expressed by the lasercut lines were inferred from the ebbs and flows of erosion that the shoes experienced in the city. Materials from various sites of engagement were collected and preserved between acrylic panes, such as grass, pebbles, dirt, dead leaves and miniscule broken pieces that may or may not have come from glass bottles.
Year
2018
Type
Design research
Awards/Grants
Honoree, Design for Social Impact, Core77 Design Awards 2018
Spring 2018 Research Assistant Grant, Experimental Geography Studio of University of Oklahoma
Supporting media
juego reconstructivo (sculpture); juego es poder, parte I: ciudad de méxico (short film); [side B] (lookbook)
Tools
Rapid prototyping, co-design activities, design research, public interventions, maps, metal/welding, film
Locations
Mexico City, Mexico + Los Angeles, CA
/
Juego es Poder is a design research project that explored a taxonomy of play in urban space in Mexico City inspired by the ways skaters creatively dispute the conventional use of the city. The project looked at play as a physical engagement that creates an orientation to urban space that allows people to reimagine and embody alternate relationships, affordances and opportunities.
The project activated play as a method to:
(1) Physically confront the rules and perceptions around conventional uses of public spaces such as parks, plazas, and sidewalks and explore how improvisational play can reveal the incongruence between the imagined use of public space and the actual praxis of it
(2) Challenge the solution-based approach of government-built play spaces (that may or may not be intended as youth containment strategies) and demonstrate alternative playful opportunities in spaces not specifically designed for play
Working closely with young skaters in Mexico City to reimagine the regulated use of public spaces such as plazas, parks, and streets, the project applied the informal and improvisational approaches of skating that temporarily rendered elements of the built environment into a personal space of exploration.
Skaters do not just play in space; they play with space. Inspired by the way skaters make space pliable through their activities, the project identified new forms of play that activate unexplored layers of social interactions in the city.
Year
2016
Type
Graduate studio
Tools
Milkcrate Athletics 6 panel snapback, Arduino Uno, GoPro Hero 4, HTML, Javascript, vellum, foam stickers, fleece, battery pack, velcro, LED lights
Location
Graduate Media Design Practices Studio (Pasadena, CA)
/
When the connection a phone user has with their phone is prioritized over the real human interaction they (could) have with someone right beside them, the phone user is typically viewed as impolite. How can the language of phone use be used to empower the space of the phone user instead of stigmatizing them as being socially dysfunctional?
interFACE was designed to allow the phone user to have complete ownership of their social territory when it comes to “having to” interact with non-phone users during phone use. It continuously makes fun of the non-phone user: when the proximity sensor senses a person, it notifies the phone user via their phone and the phone user can either flip the “BUSY” or “SUP” switch.
The idea was inspired by observing how people using their phones will face other people at a constant 45 degrees angle, signifying with their bodies how they are not completely available but also not completely unavailable. I wanted to push this dynamic to the extreme.
Year
2014
Type
Fellowship
Collaborators
Irina Schneid of SCH+ARC Studio (project guidance), FABberz (unprecedented laser cutting magic)
Tools
Strand Bookstore $3 hardcover, lasercutter, various tools
Location
New York, NY
/
The act of hiding suggests that someone feels uncomfortable, unsatisfied, and/or unsafe in the space that they are exposed to, and that they are attempting to rewrite the space by overlaying a different reading of the space on the existing one. Even in school - a place that is primarily intended to benefit the social and individual needs of children - hiding can be observed on many levels.
For instance: (1) children hiding behind other children because they don’t want to get called on during class; (2) children locking themselves in the safe confines of spaces such as bathroom cubicles and lockers from their fear of being bullied; and (3) children trying to hide from everything and everyone by pretending to be asleep at their desk during breaks and class.
A self-deployable unit, Storey empowers children to become authors of the spaces they inhabit by allowing them to curate a common setting – lunchtime – and to re-design the act and space of eating.
The child will open Storey, disguised as a textbook, to find tools such as a magnifying glass (with a book reading/pathfinding light), a surface scratcher “pen”, earplugs, and a way-finding map among others. A strategically designed section contains place setting for their lunch + condiments to host a prêt-à-porter eating experience.
Upon meal completion, Storey can be locked up for safety and carried in the user’s arms or in their backpack without appearing conspicuous. Book and keys can be given to a close accomplice for two or more users to share their Storeys.
The project aimed to encourage collective territorialization (and perhaps privatization) of spaces in schools by giving children the functional and emotional stability to breakaway from the uniform and preset scripts of eating lunch as a public, synchronized, and place-specific experience.
Year
2018
Type
Graduate studio (thesis)
Tools
Phone call, post its, marker
Location
Graduate Media Design Practices Studio (Pasadena, CA)
/
To make something out of the (messy) intersection of design, architecture, play, skating, skaters, museums, museum guards, and power plays, I made a tool that would help me generate potential projects as a way to just test things out: because sometimes you hit a point where you are just so stuck, that you need to unravel to move forward.
After playing this game, I would say it is a good method to get out of a creative rut, and discover through-lines that were previously untouched. I would recommend it to my future self when I am in situations where I need to pivot. The outcome of the activities (the 50 design briefs) need some lifting to become refined into actual research questions, but does definitely provide some interesting and crazy conceptual directions.
Adapted from a chat with Sevan Gatsby.
How it works:
1. First, take about 10 minutes to write down as many relevant problems (research questions) that you have right now. Or problems that you care about and want to advance in some shape or manner. Then, do the same to write down as many relevant facts (observations or insights) from your current research. These are essentially things that you have learned and would want to develop further.
2. Randomly pick one problem (P) and fact (F) and juxtapose it. For instance:
There is not a lot of opportunity for play in museums. (P)
Security cameras have blind spots. (F)
Together, these two elements constitute a potential design brief, or hints for potential design projects.
3. Go through steps 1-2 until you have 50 of these.
4. Work a bit more on the briefs so that they become useable. For instance:
How can blind spots of security cameras become an opportunity for play in museums? What are other blind spots that exist in the museum and can they be activated as well? (refined brief)
5. Do this process with all of the 50 briefs but do so as you identify the ones that seem most relevant, conceptually new, or provocative. Some of them you will find impossible to refine so you can skip these. (For instance, in my list of 50, you can see I skipped developing #4)
6. Analyze and choose the ones to move forward with. Sometimes you will move forward with none in particular but the process might have given you new through-lines or questions.
Year
2018
Type
Design research (thesis)
Supporting media
playing in the museum (thesis paper), desde la perspectiva de (publication)
Location
Museo Tamayo (Mexico City, Mexico)