Birds for Google

I've been drawing birds today for my Google poster. Really enjoyed getting the pens out again. Going to try really hard from now on to do more stuff by hand.

Elective A – Concept 03

Google knows everything!
Google knows everything about you. Consumers are being consumed.

Revolution episode three - The Cost of Free (BBC 2)
“The Cost of Free examines the trades made online by users of the web as they share their thoughts, their preferences, their curiosities and their desires with the many search engines, services and media which appear to be delivering information online for free. Every day Google gathers millions of search terms that help them refine their search system and give them a direct marketing bonanza that they keep for months."
Jo Wade, Assistant Producer

AOL Searcher No. 4417749
Reporters for The New York Times tracked down a Georgia woman based solely on a review of the AOL logs.
“No. 4417749 conducted hundreds of searches over a three-month period on topics ranging from ‘numb fingers’ to ‘60 single men’ to ‘dog that urinates on everything.’ And search by search, click by click, the identity of AOL user No. 4417749 became easier to discern. There are queries for ‘landscapers in Lilburn, Ga,’ several people with the last name Arnold and ‘homes sold in shadow lake subdivision gwinnett county georgia’. It did not take much investigating to follow that data trail to Thelma Arnold, a 62-year-old widow who lives in Lilburn, Georgia.”
www.nytimes.com

http://www.bbc.co.uk/virtualrevolution/

Elective A

For elective A I chose to do Poster design with Jonathan Barnbrook. It was great to work with him for a week, to get inside his head and see how he works/thinks etc. Very inspiring how driven and dedicated to ethical design he is!

The brief
Design a black & white A3 poster
to inform the world the truth
(good or bad) about one of these companies:

nike/halliburton/gap/starbucks/google/altria/nestle

Articulate your ideas in a visual form, clearly & simply.
Say what you believe not what you think you should say.
....I'm going to go with Google!

Final Output Map

Complete map

Having a bit of time to reflect I realise if I'd given myself more time I should have been more playful with the quote type. Perhaps looking at different ways of communicating the spoken word. These quotes were all from different people, perhaps I should have used different typefaces or added a phonetic element to capture each individuals speech patterns. Maybe a future project can be trying to communicate the spoken word as the written word!!

Detail

Visual Explorations

I really like the idea of creating the points of interest in a collage style. I feel it looks quite urban and also suggests that stuff has been collected. It really gives the sense of someone walking around, documenting what they are experiencing.

Visual Explorations

I started to collate all my primary data, creating these maps.

Primary Research

One of the UT projects asked participants to:
“Imagine creating your own personal map of the area, eg. quiet places to sit, favorite parks, family histories, unhappy memories and bad smells”

I love this idea. I decided I wanted to create a collective map of all the experiences (good and bad) of the people who live in my local neighborhood!

I really feel that this is what creates spirit of place, it’s not just about the geographical landmarks but about how areas hold memories and experiences and how people interact with their environment emotionally. So my research question is:

Is it possible to create a map that communicates spirit
of place?



Whilst doing my primary research I discovered this blog set up for the area. I got in touch with the guy who runs it and he put my questionnaire up online, which was great. I got a few replies and some emails from other creatives in the area working on similar projects.

http://www.stereostokey.com/

It also made it onto some twitters!

This made me realise how passionately people feel about their community and living here.

Urban Tapestries Project

In Else/where mapping I came across the work of the Urban Tapestries (UT) Project. I liked that their research was open to personal interpretation. The project “Allows people to author their own virtual annotations of the city, enabling a communities collective memory to grow organically”

I really like the interaction here. And how this is about mapping people’s experience of their city. It isn’t top down, it’s personal.

“A new software application for urban exploration has interlaced London with narrative threads, as participants in trial runs of UT map their individual experiences of the city via a network of handheld computers. “...The map had no directions, points of interest or even street names. It was up to the participants to go outside and ‘write their city’ by marking the places they visited and sharing their stories and impressions through the network.”
Else/where Mapping

http://urbantapestries.net/
http://research.urbantapestries.net/

1.1.3 Output

For output I am going to further investigate the mapping/walking/spirit of place

“...The situationists’ desire to become psychogeographers, with an understanding of the ‘precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals’, was intended to cultivate an awareness of the ways in which everyday life is presently conditioned and controlled, the ways in which this manipulation can be exposed and subverted, and the possibilities for chosen forms of constructed situations in the post-spectacular world. Only an awareness of the influences of the existing environment can encourage the critique of the present conditions of daily life, and yet it is precisely this concern with the environment which we live which is ignored.”

Sadie Plant.
The most radical gesture: The Situationist International in a postmodern age.

Square Walks screenprinted

I screenprinted the 4 square walks onto newsprint. The paper quality allows for a lovely show-through effect.

First walk

For my first walk I set off from Old Street roundabout northbound. I timed the journey with the stop watch on my phone. It was hard to get the timing spot on as I was stopping along the way taking photographs, which added a massive element of inaccuracy.

For the second walk I bought a pedometer to try and control the length of the sides more accurately. I had never used on before and I put it in my pocket. Because it was jingling around it malfunctioned. I only realised as the second side of the walk seemed to be going on for ages.

The third and fourth walks are more accurate in their distances.

Non of the walks created perfect squares, I knew that they wouldn’t due to the complex and historically organic nature of London’s’ street formations. What I wanted to achieve was a series of interesting and unexpected shapes and feel that this was successful.

Walking Squares

Prototypes for 2 of my 4 walking experiments

Square > Physical shape > Walking a square

Square –
“1. A plane figure with four equal straight sides and four
right angles.”
Mac Dictionary Definition

By definition it should be possible to walk a square if you use some measuring device to make sure the sides are of equal length and a compass to measure you are walking north, then east, south and west. In theory you should arrive back where you began.

I wondered how possible this would be in a city like London, one that has grown organically over the years, where the streets are a labyrinth. I knew the answer would be no but began thinking the shapes the streets made would be interesting and unexpected.

“...by fixing my eye on the polestar, and seeking ambitiously for a north-west passage... I came suddenly upon such knotty problems of alleys, such enigmatical entries, and such sphinx’s riddles of streets without thoroughfares... I could almost have believed, at times, that I must be the first discoverer of some of those terrae incognitae.”
Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater

Is it possible to walk a perfect square in a city?
What will happen if I try?
What will I see?
How/what will I document?
How will I measure the accuracy?

Context II – Disposable Design II

I wanted to make a newspaper last for for longer than one day, therefore elevating it's value and purpose. One way to do this is to make it the medium for a print. The messages are simply about newspapers.

Context II – Disposable Design I

We throw so much stuff away. All this stuff is graphic design, time and money has been spent creating something that just ends up in the bin! I decided I want to attempted to elevate the value of this 'rubbish'.

I collected all the graphic design that I would ordinarily throw away in one week and created a diary in the form of a short quick time animation.

Secondary Research – Julie Shiels

I came across the work of Julie Shiels and felt it was a real comment on value in our culture. She collects packaging, discards of the actual product and then takes casts of the negative spaces left by the empty packaging. In essence making the rubbish part last longer and become more valuable than the actual product that it housed.





“Apart from being a mad critique of mass production and the era of the $2 dollar shop this work explores the ideas of material culture and asks questions about what objects will survive and become meaningful beyond their looming use by date. How do changing tastes affect the meaning and value of an object? ” Julie Shiels

Square > Viewfinder > Photography > Mass Production

Value (Art Vs Commercial Design)

“To understand value, we must study rubbish. Economics is concerned with scarcity: if something becomes dirt cheap it disappears from view... that which was worthless becomes valued: what was once admired is now despised. So the study of rubbish holds out the possibility, not just of understanding value as it exists, but of understanding the process whereby value is constantly being created and destroyed.”
Michael Thomson, Rubbish Theory

“Objects may be seen in two very different ways, one aesthetically and economically superior to the other, and moreover that in certain circumstances we may be able, to our considerable advantage, to control the way in which we ourselves and others see an object.”
Michael Thomson, Rubbish Theory

“Forces of commercialization have subject ‘the aura’ (the moment of awe seizing the first-time beholder of a singular work of art) to a perverse transmutation of value, resulting in a cheapened ‘cult value.’ Reproduction techniques could someday work in favor of the artists, for purposes both political and philosophical.”
www.artintheage.com
Art Collective working to the principles of Walter Benjamin’s theories.

Public Transport Portraits

I created a small book with my iphone portraits and the narratives written about them.

The pattern on the cover was inspired by the geometric patterns from bus/tube seats and also the red square!

Secondary Research – Martin Parr

I love the work of Martin Parr. I like how his images are anonymous yet so full of identity!

“He enables us to see things familiar to us in a completely new way... Parr’s term for the overwhelming power of published images is ‘propaganda’. He counters this propaganda with his own chosen weapons: criticism, seduction and humour... they show us in a penetrating way how we live, how we present ourselves to others, and what we value.”
Martinparr.com

Square > Viewfinder > Photography

I then just started to think specifically about portrait photography:

“What makes a portrait special? What attracts us to spend time considering the face of someone that we do not know and have not met?”
Sandy Nairne, Director, National Portrait Gallery

“(In the anonymous photograph) we know nothing about the people or the context in which the photograph was taken. In these circumstances, the imagination can take over. Let us read something into the photograph; let the photograph be a trigger of a narrative.”
Alexander McCall Smith, from the introduction to Being Human

These quotes got me thinking about anonymous portraits. And how when I sit on public transport I find myself thinking about the my fellow passengers and wondering who they are? So I started to take sneeky photographs of them with my iphone...

(incidentally it is interesting that technology allows us to do this, how often during a day are we spied on; CCTV, oyster cards tracking our movement, creditcards tracking out spending, search engines keeping tabs on our interests, ahhhh scary)



I decided it would be less contrived and more interesting for me if I asked friends of mine to write some narratives for these anonymous passengers.

I asked them:
_Who are they:
Name? Age? Occupation? Married/Single? Any Children?
_Where are they going on this journey today?
_What are they thinking about?
_Do they have any hobbies or belong to any clubs?
_What is the most exciting thing that has ever happened to them?
_Do they have any secrets?

A square is a view-finder

I first started thinking about the square as a view-finder and it's use in PHOTOGRAPHY!

A study of cropping 
– Does editing an image give it new meaning?

_
Selecting an area to be viewed puts importance on it – adds value! People question why has it been selected, try to make sense of it, give it meaning. (READ – El Lizzitsky, Susan Sontag)

_
Makes us see the banal through fresh eyes (Peter Greenaway Stairs project) Psychogeography.

_
Composition – What is considered beautiful? Is this effected by cultural differences, social class, job, generation, gender, political beliefs, the newspaper/magazine read, TV channel preferred. Do people that work with/study images (designers, photographers, artists) read images differently to people that don’t?

_Break the composition rules – Golden 1/3s. Chop off heads etc.

_
Historical & Cultural differences about perspective (1 point perspective v 3 point perspective – Hockney, Renaissance)

_
Amateur photos – captured random moments, holiday snaps etc, can we make them mean something with cropping?

_
How much does cropping an image alter it’s meaning? Ask range of people if they can identify story of picture, or do they put their own spin on it? Can we influence what people see with words? Juxtaposition, make meaning/sense of something from nonsense??

_
The camera never lies (yes it does, can see more than the eyes 3° focus range) Do people believe photography is telling the truth today? Retouching etc.

_What is the role of photography today compared to 100+ years ago?

1.1.2 Context

The second part of the brief is context. For this we have to:
explore the cultural contexts surrounding the object and to critically examine its uses as a representation, sign, symbol, icon or metaphor.

How can you present a new critical perspective to something very familiar and challenge assumptions concerning it using design methodologies?

How can you use it to generate insightful, novel, unpredictable, communicable ideas?

Squares found in the environment

The first thing to do for 1.1.2 Context was go out and about with my camera and look for squares out there in the world!


Plane: singular/flat surface


Void 1: hole/frame/window


Void 2: empty/the square that isn't there


Order: grid/tile/net


Colour 1: yellow squares


Colour 2:red/orange/brown/green/blue

I have categorised these based on the formal attributes.

Rhythm & Order in colour

By adding colour these patterns begin to feel very De Stijl.

Rhythm & Order III

This shows 3 of the possibilities. 1, 2 x 3 and 3 x 3. All patterns are made from exactly the same elements and in exactly the same way, on the same grid, but look very different!