Introduction Design

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What is design?

I finished my first post saying that I would come back to this question, so here I am. I still don't think I have an answer to this question. I couldn't explain what it is to someone who's never experienced it, and I think that would be my definition. Design is something you need to experience. Self Assessment It was suggested we take the time to check our journal against the provided CRA and give ourselves a mark. Even after reading the CRA I'm not so sure where I would land. I've tried to explore design through different mediums, and I've tried to be insightful and consistent with me reflections on lectures. I think there's a clear thought process when it came the assignment work. But all of these things are subjective, I know what I meant. I don't know if someone else reading this will infer the same idea. It's like design project 1 all over again. So I'm not so sure. I think I'll just call it somewhere between a 5 and a 6. I'm probably way off.

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Peer Assessment - Project 2. This is pretty close to our Welcome to 2042 concept. I think it actually works really well, it makes me wish we had tried to develop the concept a little bit thoroughly ourselves. I really like the satirical approach to the concept, and the use of black comedy. It makes for a much more entertaining video. The way they've spliced themselves into these still images really compliments the theme of the video. It's like a futuristic propaganda film. My only issue is that there doesn't seem to be much focus on one aspect of the future, it's more of a general introduction to a stereotypical science fiction future.

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Peer Assessment - Project 1.

New Beginnings Out of the three posters I picked to assess, this is the only one I needed to read the description of to get some idea of what it was trying to convey (However, that should probably be chalked up to my average analytical skills). It was only after reading the groups description of their work that I began to understand the embryotic shape of the artefact, and make the association between the birds nest in the flowchart and the patchwork frame of the display. I needed to be explained to me that these were representations of life. I’m not sure I really see the connection between lightness and life either, but I don’t know whether that’s just me, or if the artefact is unclear. I actually asked one of my housemates to have a look at the poster, and they said thought of the shape as a representation of consistency. That the circle doesn’t end. There is a small gap between two points in the object, so I’m not sure how thoroughly they examined it. But I guess the two ideas could be linked. That life is consistent, life begets life. I think the actual poster itself would benefit from a short passage about the object, rather than just a few words associated with the projects theme. Feather Throne

I like the theory behind this concept, the idea of something light holding up something heavy. It’s an interesting idea. When I see a feather I definitely associate the image with lightness. I’ve been conditioned since a young age through the saying “Light as a feather” to make that association.  I remember during our discussion with the tutor, being told that using literal objects could pose a problem. Literal objects can have different meanings to different people. So I wonder if everyone who looks at this statue would make the same association I did, or if the original message would be lost in translation. I don’t mind the presentation of the project either; it has clear annotations of the materials being used for the display. There is a map clearly indicating where the sculpture would be placed, which (In my understanding) was an aspect we were asked to consider. With the addition of the short description the concept becomes clear. Overall I think it’s a well presented concept. It just might be a bit to literal.

Lightness/Weightlessness

I like this design a lot. I don’t know whether that’s because it’s presented on a really well thought out poster, or because I think it actually accurately represents lightness. The inverted sizing gives the display a real sense of weightlessness, as if the cubes are floating out of the ground. I really like the idea of using the cube shapes; their empty appearance almost reinforces their weightlessness. The presentation of the display on the poster is impressive as well. I remember it being mentioned, to our group, that you should include some sort of display of your work-flow, but I feel like cluttering this poster with images would take away from its impact. I think the display really speaks volumes about itself without any needed explanation. With just their short description there it leaves the reader free to interpret the actual design. This is definitely the kind of presentation I feel my group should have aimed to achieve. I don’t think our design had the same level of clarity however. We definitely spent far too long on the actual development of our concept, rather than fleshing out ideas about how we would present our idea.

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Lecture - Feedback.

Our feedback oriented lecture was cancelled. If I'm completely honest, I'm a little bit relieved. I wasn't particularly nervous about either of our works, I think they stand pretty well on their own. But I wasn't really proud of them either. The workshop week really has me conflicted. It would have been nice to hear some student feedback.

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Workshop Day 3 - Reflection.

I'm still in two minds about our video. I can't help but feel we didn't put in the effort with the story. We lacked any real narrative or character development, and sort of just covered it up with facts about fossil fuels. The video looked impressive, but I feel like we missed the point of the exercise a little. I'm pretty happy with the work we produced, but I think I just imagined there would be more of a story to our work. I think just using information to fill time feels a little like the easy way out.  We worked pretty well as a team this time around, organising work-flow and having already explored alternative concepts in case any of our ideas fell apart. I remember saying to the other people in my group that this is as much about teamwork as it is about the content we produce. I hope I was right.

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Workshop Day 3 - Design Project 2. Cont'd

We met with the tutor, and things didn't go as exactly as we imagined. Cameron preferred the museum approach. He felt it had a better scope to it, that it would be a better example of the way things were and how they had changed. He was right, the museum plot definitely had a clearer narrative structure and obvious ways for each member of the group to be a part of the story. It really should have been the obvious choice. We talked a little bit about what we wanted to do, but there wasn't much need for discussion. We knew what we were going to present.

After our brief discussion was over and with our premises decided, we set out to work. We broke the work into three areas. Animation, research and editing. Keiko did an amazing job on the animation, and splicing the youtube clips into the video. I thought this would be most taxing part of the process, but it was finished as quickly as it began. The research was much the same, an hour on youtube and we had all our reference materials. With the skeleton of visual side of the presentation complete, we set about writing our script. It was only 4 minutes worth of dialogue, so it took us no time at all to complete. The only part of creating the actual video that posed a problem was recording the dialogue. We hadn't thought of this before hand, and suffered because of it. We actually ended up recording it with my phone, which produced some pretty poor quality audio. Either way, the work was done, we had our presentation.  

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Workshop Day 3 - Design Project 2.

A couple of us had met up during the day on Wednesday to discuss our ideas for the Future Echoes project. We decided upon a theme to focus on, renewable energy, and a couple of back up ideas. We didn't get a whole lot of time to prep during the day, so we decided that we would create a group on facebook and post any new ideas, or questions on there. We were trying to quell any organisational problems we experienced on Tuesday. It worked to some extent, when we all arrived on Thursday we had a pretty clear idea of where we wanted the story to go. We had already decided that the work was going to be animated, that it was going to focus on renewable energy and that we would source some videos from youtube to help illustrate our points. The only thing we hadn't decided upon was a story. I came up with two pretty simple premises before our meeting with the tutor. Plot 1) A father and daughter travel to a museum in 2042. The little girl is looking through some displays, and finds a piece of coal. She ask's her father what it is. The dad explains to her about how things were back in 2012. Pollution, global warming, strip mining. He tells her that people had to make choices, that the world depended on it.

It didn't take to long to sketch out a short story board, and to outline a time frame. We then started discussing our second plot. Plot 2)  Welcome to 2042. People from different ages have been frozen, and are now waking up in 2042. They are welcomed by an automated video presentation. This display explains to them what's changed since they were last around. It's concept is pretty similar to plot 1, but we felt there was a greater entertainment value with this plot. It could be satirical, it could poke fun at the way people always think the future is going to be so vastly different to the world we're a part of. We were pretty excited by this design, and by what the tutor might think.  

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Workshop Day 2 - Reflection.

This day was pretty strenuous. When we hit the 2:30 mark and had basically only a rough idea of our final project, I can only describe that as a seriously unpleasant experience. I think we could have really managed our time better. We had a pretty solid idea by the end of the day, but it was betrayed by our sloppy presentation. We didn't give ourselves enough time to do the poster justice. Here's to hoping for better things in project 2.

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Workshop Day 2 - Design Project 1 - Cont'd

With our initial concept out the window, we had to start from scratch. We had some other less developed ideas to work off, but none of them really worked with the theme we had decided to run with. That theme was security. So we decided it would be easiest to modify the box, the one idea we had with a consistent theme. We took the idea of the box and expanded it. We thought that perhaps if someone could be inside that box, they wouldn't need a message to understand what it was about. The idea was a little vague though, and after a short discussion we decided the most effect way to explain something is to show you. We needed to contrast to be the known and unknown. This is where the origins of, what I have been referring to at the creepy room. That was it's working title, I don't think it ever had a proper name. If it did, I clearly didn't care for it. 

More a less, a person would walk through the middle of this structure and they would experience, first hand, the effects of lightness as form of security. The first dark room was to be filled with intimidating shapes, or things that at least seemed intimidating when shadowed. The second half of the building would be open, and light. It would have the same objects, but the light would render them harmless. There is a couple of obvious flaws with this idea. The design is ridiculously complicated. It's probably the perfect example of what Gavin Sade was talking about in his lecture. We completely overcomplicated what was meant to be a simple display. I also personally felt the idea was still to literal. Someone might like being in the dark, they might find the objects we placed in there none threatening. There were to many variables.  So we cut back, we simplified. Our final design was as simple as things could get. It still played on the idea of security, but was more along the lines of familiarity. It was a simple wooden frame, one that we would place to the side of one of the already existing paths in the gardens. The idea was that people would be drawn to the frame, that they would pass through them rather than just walking along the dimly lit path. It was the same principle, but scaled down. There was still the presence of light and dark, there was still this idea that you should have to pass through them. With this design, it became a choice. We weren't forcing anyone's hand. Ultimately, that leads to a much better experience. We were contrasting these two points, just not so bluntly.  

This is a flow chart I wrote up post our submission of the project. I think it illustrates pretty well where our ideas originated from. Where there is a theme present and where there isn't. It probably doesn't a much better job explaining then any of my ranting can.

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Workshop Day 2 - Design Project 1.

We'd already spent about an hour on day 1 discussing some basic ideas for our first design project. None of them really came to fruition however, they were unrealistic and had no real theme to their design. They did provide a starting point for discussion on day 2 though, and probably saved us some time when it came to fleshing out a working concept.

The box on the left of that image is actually the design we wanted to submit. It wasn't until Cameron, our tutor, pointed out some flaws in the idea that we finally relented. Looking at the design now, I can definitely see the flaws. Unless you interact with that design exactly as we intended, there's any number of meanings you could reach. It's not in anyway visually appealing, too. The main problem though was that it was incredibly literal. The idea was that you open the box and use light to read a message placed in the bottom. We were actually just telling people our theme, they didn't have to infer anything.

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Workshop Day 1 - Final Exercise.

This was, to me anyway, was about understanding your environment. We split up into pairs. One person would close their eyes and lead the other person around the park. The person with their eyes closed then had to try and draw where they think they had been. This exercise put me in mind of trust falls, it was all I could think about while I was being lead blind around the park. I'm not really sure what this exercise was about, maybe trying it was to get us to try utilise sense other than sight. Or, perhaps, it was just a bonding exercise. Our group definitely had something to joke about when we all got back from our walks. 

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Workshop Day 1 - Second Group Exercises.

These exercises left me a little bit bitter. I had built up some confidence during the first couple of exercises, so I was eager to give these a try. The idea started out simply enough. We were asked to draw a leaf. This process went through a couple of different stages. Draw the leaf without it's veins, with it's veins, draw the space between the veins. It was all about de-constructing an object. Looking at all the parts that make it whole, all the parts that make it a leaf.  

It was the exercise that came next that left me a little concerned. This exercise played more on the idea of free thinking, of designing representations of words. We were to express an idea without drawing literal depictions of that idea. I wasn't great at this. Doing this on my own I definitely got to caught up in thinking about how I was going to get my point across. I couldn't just let my mind go and draw what I thought those words meant. I had to be literal about it. This image, if I'm remembering correctly, was meant to represent greed. My idea was that the circles represent people, and that even though they look they same there's these larger, greedier, circles taking up excessive amounts of space. This is a perfect example of why I need outside influences to help me flesh out my ideas.

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Workshop Day 1 - First Group Exercises.

These exercises were all about interacting with your environment, to me it was about drawing influence from your surroundings. I enjoyed this exercise much more than I did the others. I feel like I'm most creative when drawing inspiration from an external source, whether that's another person or my surrounding environment. This is the first exercise I remember doing.  We were asked to trace an interesting shadow, then to try find and emphasise any objects we found in the tracing. I flipped the book around, and within moments I seen a face staring back at me. This group of exercises continued along this path of thinking, asking us to samples of different textures around us. It was relatively simple, I felt like I understood what I was doing. I didn't have to think to much about these tasks, I was comfortable with these tasks.  

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Workshop Day 1 - An Introduction.

This day was pretty grounded in the exploration of our approach to design. It was there to give us a basis for how to explore and share ideas during our actual project work. The day began with Glenn addressing our group. We worked through some pretty basic exercises. Writing our address while singing happy birthday and taking an object in the park and drawing it several different ways.  I think these were really to just push us out the door, to get us thinking. There was one particular exercise that catered to this idea. We has to draw a pig, and depending on what we drew or where it was drawn on our page, this pig meant different means. However, I remember Glenn asking if anyone had drawn anything that wasn't a literal representation of the farm land animal. This was definitely setting a tone for the days to come.   (Unfortunately, I don't actually have any of my sketches that I did during these morning exercises.) After our introduction, we were instructed to split into numbered groups and set out to begin some new exercises. I don't remember the exact order we preformed these exercises, so I'm going to split them up here.

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Lecture - Week 6.

It was comforting to hear Michael speak about there being no wrong way to approach your blog. I had some concerns that my reflections were to shallow, but I guess if there's no wrong, I'll just have to wait and see. I keep attending these lectures hoping that they will spark something inside of me that will lead to some furiously enlightening reflection, but it doesn't seem to be the case. I think I've spent far to much time trying to collect information on how to approach our design projects, rather than letting myself get caught up in the actual discussion about design. There actually was a lot of discussion during this lecture about our design projects, and how next week will actually work. It should prove to be an interesting week. 

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This was a suggestion by Michael. Find two different chairs that share some similar design qualities, and then reflect on those qualities. I had a bit of trouble finding two designs that I felt shared enough common qualities for me to make a link. So I feel like my annotations are a little vague, and guess that’s why. The two chairs I decided upon where designed by Svilen Gamolov and Judson Beaumont (Top and bottom images respectively). Although obviously entirely different approaches to the design of a chair, I feel like they both have an emphasis on negative space. Gamolov’s appears like a much more formal approach and Beaumont’s more chaotic. This idea of chaos is more about how you would use that space; nothing could really fill that space completely. You could never utilise all of that space. Whenever I try to imagine it being used I have these images of objects being forced to fit in there however they can, and then to remove them it’s like a playing a game of jenga. My strong emphasis on the importance of chaos makes me feel like Ian Malcolm. That's not something I get to say very often. I’m not sure if it’s the curved arms, but I can’t look at Beaumont’s design and not think of Disney. I actually had a look for some of his other work (which you can see here, http://www.straightlinedesigns.com/sobey.html), and a lot of seems like it would fit right in to Disney’s adaptation of Alice in Wonderland. 

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Lazaros Kastanis – Project Workflow

There were definitely some interesting concepts discussed throughout the lecture, the ‘Precinct Planner’ for example. The concept of a game engine powering a complex 3D design tool used to assist, explore, plan and test design decisions for complex built form within urban projects. It was really impressive. I would definitely have to say the part of the lecture I found the most useful was the discussion of the production process, particularly the briefing. The briefing is all about sorting out your design before you begin work on it. Deadlines, milestones, guidelines for work-flow; the scope of the project is clearly defined during this stage. If I remember correctly, Michael also spoke a lot about the design process during his portion of the lecture. About convergent and divergent thinking and the importance of exploring each concept you come up with in some depth, about coming full circle on your ideas.

Outside of some solid ideas about where to begin when it comes to our projects, I didn't really come up with much. I feel like I was a little out of focus this week.