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INFOGRAPHICS OF FOOD

The first ‘drafts’ of our infographics, before Shervin combined them into one cohesive infographic. Photo taken from @whygottakillmyvibe

Group 20′s final infographic, done by Ara, Jenny, Jooyee, Sam and Shervin.

The infographic gives everyone a quick overview about the food we had at the FOOD event, especially since not everyone might have gotten to eat (and therefore known about) all the different fruits that were purchased as not all the fruits were prepared in the same amount of time or even at same time.

It shows how many of each type of fruit was purchased along with how many grams of dietary fiber it contained, the origins of the fruit, the amount of time it took to prepare one of each type of fruit and the most popular (most purchased) fruit.

As my infographic was a GIF, it didn't quite fit into the infographic as a whole, so the origins section was reduced to just some simple, colour-coded location markers on a map, and my GIF would stand separately.

FOOD EVENT!

After hanging out for a bit at Alumni Courtyard, getting a bunch of free stuff from people, we headed over to Queen Victoria Market to buy our fruits. The walk there was kind of hilarious, we were basically like a herd of sheep, not really knowing where we are but just following the crowd. At one point we were at a traffic light and it turned green but no one crossed (either they didn’t know where to go or weren’t paying attention) and people at the back had to yell at the front to cross. We got a lot of stares and I even heard a random pedestrian “tsk” us but it was fun.

At the market, we pooled our money and bought:

- 1 pineapple - 1 pomegranate - 1 blood orange - 1 punnet of blueberries - 1 punnet of strawberries - $3 worth of grapes

Our team was going to document the event by collecting as much data as we could, and turn them into infographics. We counted the number and types of fruit as people brought them in from the market, and doing so, we inadvertently ended up sorting the fruits nicely on the bench.

Photo taken from @mirandajing

As the preparation team started cutting up the fruits, we started recording the amount of time it took for them to prepare each type of fruit. We tried our best to stealthily record the time so we wouldn’t have to interrupt them.

Photos and videos taken with the snapchat filter

After we recorded all the different fruits, we could finally start eating! The foldable bowls (?) were really cute, although it reminded me of those conical cups you get in waiting rooms - annoyingly impossible to put down. We ended up using the GMT phone stands to hold them on the table.

To the left of the salad tarp was a little station (by group 14?) where you could leave your fingerprint. Mine’s the purple cat at the bottom right hand corner. I think it was a really cool way for everyone to leave their mark on the event. I really liked this one, it reminded me of when I was a kid and I’d cover my finger in pencil lead, stamp it on my homework and doodle on it (was that not a normal thing to do?)

Finally, after everyone was done eating, we counted the amount of leftover (uncut) fruits before they were given out.

After we were done, we hung out at the long table and finished up out fruit salads, took selfies and played around with our free stuff. I really liked the environmental design of the event - it was very casual and relaxed, and made me think way back to Week 5 when we imagined the outcome of our Meet in a Nice Place activity if the ambience of restaurant was more formal (not good). One issue I had with it though was that the long table divided the room, making it a little awkward for one half of the room to socialise with the other.

Photo taken from @whygottakillmyvibe

We also flipped through the really cute recipe book that unfortunately I didn’t contribute to because I’m bad at cooking and any recipes I know are stolen off the internet.

I never would have though that counting fruit could get so stressful, but it kind of did, and we got through it! Yay group 20!

STRATEGY STREAM (WEEKS 1-4)

This stream seemed pretty straightforward for me as I’ve done a lot of similar projects when I was getting my Diploma in Mass Communication in Singapore. Hearing about SWOT and PESTLE again was so weird.

I chose Canon as my company, and focussed on their photography equipment.

Part A - Research

As Canon is quite a large company with many products, it was hard to find business and creative objectives that were specific to their cameras. But then I realized that even though it wasn’t camera related, what I found were still their objectives as a whole company.

Business Objectives

Business Strategies (from Canon’s Website)

Vision and Mission from Canon AU

Vision: Simple advanced solutions freeing people to live their dreams and lead enriched lives at home and at work.

Mission: Canon Australia and New Zealand are market leading suppliers of consumer and business imaging solutions. We are a Canon Oceania team committed to our customers’ ongoing satisfaction through the empowerment and development of our staff. To be the preferred supplier we will be easy to deal with and provide quality, value for money products and services. To ensure success for all stakeholders we will deliver profitability, growth, job fulfilment and have a positive impact on the community.

Objectives for 2013 from Canon Sustainability Report 2012

- Growth in sales and net profit - Invest for the future in New HQ and Third Party Logistics project - Further develop Canon MDS and business services - Develop new markets including eye care and small products - Strengthen Canon brand value through new campaign - Continue focus on variable cost structure

Creative Objectives

“In response to the market conditions we maintained tight control on costs while continuing to focus on our strategy of enriching the experiences of our customers, becoming a services organisation and working with our business and retail partners to create mutual growth.”

“In the consumer field we continued our strategy of inspiring people to do more with their images, improving our service to our Professional Photo and Video customers and working with our partners to create a better consumer experience and mutual growth. In addition to continued and significant price action to help our retail partners offer great value locally, our partners appreciate the non-price benefits they receive including investments to drive category value through advertising campaigns, online and in-store promotions and joint business planning and training. Through our retail and online channels we provide our customers with the security of knowing the products are genuine, that they comply with local safety regulations and have local manufacturer warranty support. Increasingly we are providing services such as Canon Academy skills courses and photoPICO output options through these channels to help people extend their imaging experience. In addition our end to end imaging range allows us to offer services such as Canon Corporate Rewards Program to our business customers.”

Part B - Design Strategy

This part was a little harder, I had to use my own knowledge of cameras as the answers to the questions weren’t something very easily found online. Sure you could find lots of debates about Canon vs. Nikon, but it would almost always be specific to just two specific cameras, and anything that wasn’t were mostly just personal opinion. But being a ‘photographer’ for a few years now, I know about the current photography trends, equipment, complaints etc, so it was still manageable. Chris was really helpful with helping me figure out some of these, pointing out things that I couldn’t see because I was too familiar with the brand.

1. Existing problems and ongoing challenges

Competition – Mainly Nikon, other competitors include Sony (DSLR), Fujifilm and Olympus (Mirrorless), other lens/ accessories manufacturers (Tamron, Sigma, Yongnuo)

Social changes – More people* are going for smaller cameras (compact, mirrorless, phone cameras) and ‘action’ cameras (GoPro, drone cameras, etc)

*These people mostly being Instagrammers, bloggers, ‘social media influencers’, etc. which therefore encourages their followers to do the same

2. Current benefits and successes to be leveraged (used to advantage) Many professional photographers use Canon equipment. It’s more ‘mainstream’ e.g. Coke vs Pepsi. They’re a big, established, well known company, reliable etc. “Reflecting our customers’ trust in the brand, Canon was rated the tenth most trusted Aussie Brand by Y&R Brands.”

3. Unmet client/ customer needs Those looking for mirrorless cameras will likely go for Fujifilm or Olympus, not Canon. New customers will be looking for different (maybe cheaper) options as Canon is more ‘premium’.

4. Changing client/ customer behaviours and attitudes Many more casual/ travel/ lifestyle/ Instagram photographers are getting smaller cameras (mirrorless/ compact cam/ iPhone).

More people are always using their phones – point and click only, don’t take photography that seriously because it’ll just go onto Social Media. “Canon’s research shows that consumers are increasingly moving online”

5. Emerging ideas and trends More people are getting into photography/ vlogging/ making videos because of Instagram, YouTube etc. But “growth in creative photography has seen interchangeable lens camera sales increasing”

6. Opportunities to differentiate Products are made in Japan (vs made in China etc.). More professional choice for photography. Wide range of cameras and lenses to choose from for a variety of experience levels (compared to the new mirrorless cameras etc. which tend to only have a few lenses). Even if buying a Canon mirrorless, adapters are available to use any Canon lens.

Part C - Design Touchpoints

As a Canon user I knew about the various different ways people can come into contact with the brand.

Sources:

http://global.canon/en/vision/philosophy.html http://global.canon/en/vision/strategies.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Inc.#Sponsorships http://www.canon.com.au/~/media/About-Canon/Sustainability-and-Environment/Sustainability%20Reports/2013/SR2012-SummaryReport.aspx

WEEK 8 SOUP KITCHEN

We met up with groups 12 and 16 at the soup kitchen to properly discuss our ideas and see if we could collaborate on anything. However each group had already changed their ideas from the ones presented so we decided not to work together as we were now all doing unrelated things. We agreed to keep each other updated though, in case any collaboration opportunities came up in the future.

We spent the rest of the soup kitchen thinking of questions we could ask that the physical data representation could respond to. We spoke to Andy and he suggested we decide if we wanted it to be an objective (fact) or subjective (opinion) data representation. We couldn’t decide so we came up with a few.

Objective:

- nutrition (calorie count, separation of food category) - cost - how much waste we’re wasting (recyclable/compostable by colour) - comparing raw to used to waste - weighing the volume of food wasted

Subjective:

- personal taste: how good the food was - fruit or vegetable - the happiness of each individual through the event - how successful the event was

We also discussed some possible materials for the installation:

- Plastic bottles - Food Waste - Fruit Waste - Plastic boxes - Cardboard - Clear container - Clear sheets

Tristan then came over to ask us where our installation would be placed during the event. We wanted it to be at a more obvious location so that everyone could see it but not too close to the salad table (because the installation would be full of... waste) so we thought that it would be good to place it near the sitting area so everyone could easily throw away their waste.

WEEK 7

This week we learnt about tools we could use to manage the complex and fluid problems of the FOOD event, and they were the Agile SCRUM for teamwork and the MoSCoW method for task evaluation.

We also learnt about the waterfall model, which would be useful for smaller projects within the FOOD event, such as creating a logo as the end result is definite unlike the event.

The agile scrum is basically the waterfall model of discover > design > develop > test but done faster, more frequently and without the need for it to be in that sequence. MoSCoW was a way for us to remember what our priorities are in order to guide any future changes or ideas.

The food we would be having was also finally finalised (kind of) - we would be buying ingredients from Queen Victoria Market to make either a fruit or vegetable salad.

We went on to search for groups that we could collaborate with and approached groups 12 and 16. As group 16 was in Tuesday’s class, we set up a Facebook group so it would be easy for us to discuss and exchange ideas.

THE ORIGIN OF OUR FOOD

This is the infographic I came up with to show the origin of our food.

It was harder than I thought to find out the origins of the fruits. While I had intended to include the exact country, I had to settle for a general area or the most agreed on country.

I had initially wanted to make it look like an airline network map, but some of the locations were too close together, making the overlaps cover certain locations. This also made it difficult to clearly and nicely label the locations, so I thought having the information in layers would be a good idea, and that’s why I made it an animated GIF.

WEEK 9

This week, we were making rapid prototypes. Andy showed us a video of this guy who made kitchen tool prototypes out of the things he could find around him. He also mentioned that cigarette boxes were probably one of the most commonly used material for a rapid prototype.

Hearing about this, I remembered all the times I used cereal boxes to create something, and the stacks and piles of random material I kept in my room (much to my mother’s disapproval) just in case I needed it to make something with, so while the term ‘rapid prototype’ was new to me, the concept definitely wasn’t.

However, our group needed something sturdy, waterproof and preferably transparent to hold the food waste, so my stockpile of cardboard wouldn’t be of much help (and not just because they were in Singapore haha). We told Andy about our issues with rapid prototyping and he said that in our case it would probably be better to go out and source the actual containers for the event instead.

So, we would each find different containers (things that we could repurpose, to avoid more waste) and then meet at Ara’s place to see what worked best. Sam would get some cardboard boxes and clear plastic sheets from Costco, Ara would see what she could find at a second hand hardware store in Brunswick and Jooyee would buy some fruits from Queen Victoria Market for us to eat and see what waste we would get. I was going to bring some glass bottles I had, like pasta sauce jars and alcohol bottles (but I forgot to... they were too small anyway).

Shervin and I also went to Ikea to try find suitable ready-made containers. Our criteria:

- transparent - sturdy - large/ tall - waterproof - not too expensive

Transparent, sturdy, large/tall, waterproof, not too expensive. Basically too small.

Transparent, sturdy, large/tall, waterproof, not too expensive.

Transparent, sturdy, large/tall, waterproof, not too expensive. But not the best looking. We bought it anyway though.

We also found a container that fit all the criteria (a glass vase) but it was like $40 each and we’d need at least three, so I didn’t even bother snapping a photo.

When we got to Ara’s place, we started trying to make our cardboard boxes more waterproof so that the fruit waste juices wouldn’t make it mushy and useless.

We lined the cardboard box with white plastic to make it waterproof and also look more presentable and replaced the front with a clear plastic.

It seemed like now the cardboard box was transparent, sturdy, large/tall, waterproof and not too expensive, but to be sure, we put it to the test.

The plastic bottles went in fine.

And the food waste didn’t soak through to Ara’s carpet.

But, we realized that on a larger scale, with more fruit waste, the box probably wouldn’t be sturdy enough, waterproof or not. So the winner was still the large Ikea container.

CRAFT STREAM (WEEKS 9-12)

Exquisite Corpse

From left to right: My head, upper torso, lower torso-legs and legs–feet

Not gonna lie, I already thought the whole concept of an exquisite corpse was really weird (although really cool in a macabre kind of way), but now we were supposed to create one using random cutouts from what seemed to be a collection of old interior design magazines. So I was really confused at first, were we supposed to find human-looking parts? Create a human from furniture? And we weren’t allowed to see what the person before us had done.

But, once I got into it, it was really fun, and seeing the final ‘corpses’ was really interesting. I also felt weirdly happy that my sections got paired with other sections that I thought were really cool, and that I never would have thought of doing (e.g. the “this is not a torso” one and the beak-faced guy).

My mandala

We were supposed to crete a mandala that was kind of personal to us, so I tried to make one in the shape of a cat, but the food just didn’t want to cooperate. So after trying for a while, I gave up and decided to just make it pretty.

The rest of the class had some pretty cool looking mandalas though, I especially liked Ziwen’s - it was a Chinese lion/ dragon looking thing and it was so cool, I have no idea how she managed it.

Concept inspiration – a necklace that I have (the other side shows a normal crow) and sculptures by Jason Freeny

First sketches + testing out the techniques and styles I wanted to use

I was inspired by a brass necklace that I bought in Bangkok a few years ago, which is of a crow, cut in half, with it’s skeleton showing. I initially wanted to show different parts of the body’s internal systems (respiratory, circulatory, digestive, muscular and skeletal) with the silhouette of animals [sketch 3] but I found it difficult to line them up. I also wanted the systems to be from different animals, to create one creature made up of animals we eat, but Georgia suggested it might be better to keep it in a human form [sketch 1]. I then remembered that an artist known as Freeny did something similar, but with children’s toys, and that one of them was a Barbie doll (human!... kind of). So I tried to keep the figure a human internally, but with animal bodies/ skins, with a similar cutout effect as Freeny’s [sketch 2]. However I decided against it as I didn’t really like that I’d only see half a skeleton. I wanted it to be more like how an x-ray would look.

I also wanted to hand draw my exquisite corpse, in the style of old medical drawings, but after trying it out, I discovered that I’m really bad at it. Keeping in mind that it would be printed on wood, I didn’t think that my x-ray concept would work, so I mashed a few of my ideas together and decided on a human skeleton above different commonly eaten animal bodies, in ‘cute’, bright colours.

Final Exquisite Corpse

I wanted to create a final product that showed people you literally are what you eat. However, instead of using the actual food products that we eat (e.g. chicken drumsticks and steaks) I wanted to depict the animals they come from, to remind viewers of the source of our food. I also wanted to humanize our food in the sense that these animals are living things, just as we are. I chose the most commonly eaten animals – chicken, lamb, cow and fish, with a human skeleton going across all four sections to represent that we are all essentially the same.

WEEKS 11 & 12

This will be a very long post as many many changes were made.

tl;dr - we’ve shifted from Activate to Document, and will no longer be dealing with food waste.

This week the class walked through the event together, from the buying of the ingredients to what to do with the waste in order to figure out what still needed to be done. Each team also started to refine their ideas, preparing them for execution on the actual day.

Some of our refinements:

- each cup would represent one person (number of cups = number of people) - by ‘waste’ we mean inedible organic stuff (e.g. peels, rinds, stems and seeds)

We tried to think of ways to:

1. stably stack the cups

While we initially wanted to stack the cups to make a tower, the method required using something (we thought of a piece of hard plastic) in-between each row, which would end up as more unnecessary waste. Although we liked that a single tower of cups would be a good physical bar graph (as the bottom ones would all be filled with waste while the top would be empty)

Thinking back to when we saw a group of students stacking empty plastic cups into a triangle (pyramid?) after some beer event at Alumni Courtyard, we figured that could be a good way to do it. The next problem would be preventing any toppling over (they almost managed to complete the triangle but it collapsed) and we thought putting it against a wall (to prevent wind) would be a good solution. We also figured that if it still wouldn’t work, we could use blue tack or some tape as a last resort.

2. make the installation interactive

As for making it interactive, since each cup would be representing one person at the food event, we thought it would be fun for everyone to stack their own cups onto the pyramid. Each person would bring their cup, fill it with waste (that we would have collected during the preparation) and place it. Once the waste runs out, we would just let the rest stack the empty cups at the top. It would then be really easy to see and count the amount of waste.

3. inform them about what we’re intending to do (keep the cups!)

We figured we could just post it on the Facebook group, but seeing as not everyone has Facebook (and not everyone might see it in time) we thought it would be a good idea to make a sticker to paste on each cup with the instructions. However we realized two things: 1) it would be expensive to produce and 2) it may make the cups not compostable. So, we thought we could just have a poster/ signboard informing people what to do at the drink station (where they would be getting the cups from).

However, after speaking to Andy, we found out that every other team was trying to stay away from using plastic, so he suggested that we think of something else. Despite the cups being compostable and the fact that the drinks team would be using the cups before we do, it just didn’t really sit well with what everyone else was doing. The drinks team would now be using the teacups Andy brought during the first Soup Kitchen.

So, we had to scrap everything we’d just discussed and think of a new way to visually and physically represent how much waste we produced.

We came up with three ways to show the food vs. waste data:

1. tarp

Since the salad was going to be made on a tarp, we could photograph the salad once it’s been made and then on another similar tarp, photograph the waste from the production. It would then just serve as a visual representation, with the tarp being the scale reference.

2. weight

Additionally, we could weigh all the fruits before they get cut up and prepared and then weigh the waste to find out the percentage of it we’re actually eating. We were thinking we cold gather everyone around at each weighing or something.

3. boxes

We would photograph all the boxes full of fruits once they get to the Alumni Courtyard from Queen Victoria Market, save the boxes/ crates, and then fill them up with waste at the end and photograph it again in a similar arrangement. This way, we would have the boxes as reference to how much of the fruit we are actually consuming, and we wouldn’t have any additional waste. However we also heard from Andy that there was a team making tote bags that they would use to transport the fruit, so this idea might not work.

But basically a lot of problems kept coming up if we wanted to use the actual physical waste, so, with Andy’s approval, we decided against it.

And we’ve finally arrived at what we’ll actually be doing during the food event: our team will be collecting as much data as we can from the event and make infographics about them. We would be collecting some basic info that we can then find patterns in.

For example, from something simple like the number of each fruit we could find out which fruit was the most popular and how many colours were in the fruit salad.

However we’re also exploring the option of getting more complex data such as which fruit travelled the furthest to get to us (not just “from QVM” but maybe the origin of the fruit etc.)

How are we going to collect this data? We haven’t figured it all out yet, but to find out how many of each fruit there are, each one of us will stalk one member of the preparation team and count how many of each fruit they’re preparing as they prepare it. We’ll then collate all our results and see what other info we can get.

#core2639

WEEK 10

We told Andy about our idea of stacking several of the clear IKEA storage boxes so our installation would still be able to get the height that we wanted, but with the added benefit of it being modular and therefore more manageable than one giant container. Also it was hard to find such a tall, giant container, and making one didn’t go so well. But on the other hand, using several smaller containers would also mean wasting several smaller containers, because we really would have no use for them after the event.

He also asked us what we were going to do with the food waste after we’ve collected it and used it in our installation, and suggested we turn it into compost.

It was something that I had considered, but just thought it would be too much work and the process itself is pretty long, as it takes quite some time for the food to break down. In essence would have to maintain a pile of rubbish for weeks (during the holiday) until it would be of any use.

I still thought it was a good idea though, and figured we could also plant the seeds from the fruits we would be eating and then use the rotten corpses of their parents (the compost made from the rest of the fruit salad waste) to fertilize it and have a little fruit garden on campus.

Having the ‘campus fruit garden’ was partly inspired by the Edible Garden City project in Singapore, where they’re trying to grow food at under-utilized spaces like rooftops and sidewalks. However in our project, not only would we be growing our own food, we would be growing food from our waste.

I thought the corner of the Alumni Courtyard would be a good place to keep it, as there’s currently some kind of garden there anyway, but apparently it belongs to Greening RMIT so we can’t mess with it. Elana also mentioned that it would be hard to get RMIT to allow us to put anything there anyway.

We spoke to Elana’s group, who’s planning the logistics of everything, including waste disposal. They found out that Queen Victoria Market had a ‘worm farm’ which is basically a bunch of composting bins, so they were planning on sending the organic waste there.

So we scratched the fruit garden idea and went back to our visual/ physical data representation idea. Jenny had the idea to fill paper cups with the waste and then stack it the way shops sometimes stack soap and shampoo bottles; with a piece of clear, hard plastic between each layer.

We thought it was a good idea, as the cups would be an easy way of measuring the amount waste (just count the number of cups) and we could use the cups to hold drinks (if any) or the fruit salad (although we found out there’s a team working on making invitations that fold into a bowl) during the event - so the waste would become a container for the waste. Paper cups made sense as it would be biodegradable and therefore we wouldn’t need to dump the contents of it out before sending it to the worm farm, but we didn’t like that we wouldn’t be able to see the actual waste inside.

However, after a little bit of research, we found these clear, compostable cups. We found out that Ziwen’s group would be making drinks, so we spoke to them and they were fine with using these cups for the event.

The plan now is to use the cups during the event for drinks, then after all the eating and drinking we would fill them up with any waste, stack them for our installation and then send it all over to QVM for composting.

FUTURES STREAM (WEEKS 5-8)

Week 1

There was a class activity where everyone answers a few questions - things like “what’s your favourite song?” and “what’s something everyone seems to love but you hate” - and then Peter would read the answers out to the class, and we would have to try and guess whose answers they were. It felt very awkward to openly judge people, but mainly what gave them away was the sheepish look they had when their answers were read out.

We were told to choose a song that was important to us, and share it with someone we were paired with at random. I was paired with Marie. Neither one of us had chosen a song yet, so we agreed to meet on Friday to discuss it.

Apparently everyone has to present something at some point throughout the remaining three weeks, and of course as luck would have it, I was to present the next week.

Week 2

Return Brief

The song Marie chose was “Let’s Get Retarded” by the Black Eyed Peas, also known as “Let’s Get it Started”.

Marie loved singing and rapping to the song, acting like she was a rap star. She used to listen to it when she 10 and living in London, with her best friend - a Danish girl named Laura - at her (Laura’s) place, from a Black Eyed Peas CD (Elephunk) that she (Marie) would bring over. They would sing, rap and dance to it and had a lot of fun.

At this point, I’m picturing two young girls jumping around a fancy London flat rapping like they think they’re so cool (with lots of hand gestures and making weird rap faces), dressed all gangsta or like Fergie in the music video for “Let’s Get it Started” though she did say that she’d never seen the music video before today.

This song was her introduction to hip hop, and now she loves it. She thought she was really good at rapping, but after listening to it now, she realised that she doesn’t actually know all the lyrics, nor did she probably understand them, because it’s actually kind of offensive and probably kind of inappropriate for children, but she just thought it sounded cool. She wasn’t really paying attention to the lyrics, though she knew it was about having a good time from lyrics like “let's get cuckoo in here”

I found the part about not understanding the lyrics really funny because it reminded me of times when I was a kid when I’d start singing a song that was kind of inappropriate in front of my parents, but I had no idea. Such childhood innocence.

Still likes and listens to the Black Eyed Peas. Listening to it makes her feel nostalgic and happy, because it’s basically about letting loose and having a good time (just ignore the offensive words) and it’s really funny to think about it now.

Week 3

I really liked the contrast between hip-hop stereotypes and the image of two young white girls in London.

It’s by no means wrong, and I’m definitely not trying to encourage judging books by their covers, which is why I thought it would be a nice idea to create a sort of ‘personality x-ray vision’ where you can see who a person “really is” or just to open people’s minds to thinking that anyone could like anything, regardless of how they present themselves.

I took inspiration from Snapchat filters, drawing stereotypical ‘hip-hop’ accessories onto a piece of clear plastic, that could then be placed onto anyone’s face.

Week 4

I wanted to photograph the artefact on a painting of Queen Elizabeth in a museum as I wanted to make the contrast really obvious – with the Queen (and museums) being really proper and hip-hop being more ‘trashy’ – as well as to tie it back to Marie’s memories with the song in London. I also wanted to make it cartoonish, to make an otherwise serious person seem “retarded”, as the song goes.

Unfortunately however, I couldn’t find one.

In the end I decided that it was more important to show the contrast between “fancy” and ”hip-hop” so I took a photo of the artefact in front of a very classic looking lady, framed in an ornate gold frame at the National Gallery of Victoria.

PHYSICAL INFOGRAPHICS

Examples of physical infographics (analog infographics?)

A really good Pinterest board of physical data representation, with things like using cut up pie to make pie charts. A pie pie chart: https://au.pinterest.com/LinaKharsun/аналоговая-инфографика/

Listicle of “Real Life Infographics” http://www.galaxyninja.com/2013/12/21-best-real-life-infographics/ My favourite from that was this one:

A designer’s mockup “Real Life Infographics”: http://laurenvenell.com/i-want-to-do-this-forever/

Grill’d does a thing where customers place a bottle cap into one of 3 jars, each representing a different charity. At the end, the charity with the most bottle caps gets the most money (1st: $300, 2nd and 3rd: $100 each). The purpose may not be quite relevant to our idea but it has a similar visual.

PHYSICAL & VISUAL DATA/ STATISTICS

These are all Buzzfeed videos

WEEK 8

After seeing what the other teams had come up with and discussing with groups 12 and 16, we decided that what our group was planning wouldn’t be enough of a contribution to the overall Food Project.

Shervin found an interactive installation by Stefan Sagmeister where, after viewing an exhibition called “The Happy Show”, they would rate their happiness by taking a gumball from one of the ten numbered (and very tall) gumball machines. In the end, the gumball machines made up a bar graph of people’s happiness.

We then went on to discuss how we could integrate this idea of visual statistics into our initial idea of food stamping. Here’s what we came up with:

have everyone rate how satisfied they were with the food project by stamping a piece of waste onto a number (very similar Sagmeister’s installation)

have everyone rate their satisfaction, but with different colours representing different levels (e.g. 1 is blue and 10 is red), but they can stamp it anywhere they like on the installation, so at the end we would be able to see the general consensus based on the most prominent colour

However, after speaking with Andy, we realised that we didn’t have to stick to print making, but rather the idea of using food waste as a tool. With that in mind, I thought of a few different ideas:

create a ‘rainbow’ out of the food waste by either sticking it directly onto a template or by filling transparent tubes with waste in the colours of the rainbow

fill one container (or transparent tube or whatever works) with the food before we eat it, and measure the level. Then, throughout the event, fill it up again with the waste, to show how much of the food isn’t being consumed. Or maybe weigh it, since generally the waste would be in smaller pieces and therefore may take up significantly less space in the tube anyway.

sort the waste into different containers based on some other factor like maybe recyclable/ compostable etc to see how much waste we’re ‘wasting

The end product would still be a visual representation of statistics, just without the pretty/ arty element of stamping, but could be equally as interesting.

Our new MSCW would probably be something more like this:

Must: be interactive, let everyone leave their mark, represent a statistic, use waste as a tool/ medium

Should: be colourful

Could: include other visuals

Will not: be an individual activity

After more discussion with groups 12 and 16, it seems we probably won’t be working with them anymore, though I think we’ll still be meeting on Friday to discuss and maybe see where their ideas could fit into ours or vice versa.

FOOD STAMPING INSPIRATION

WEEK 6

This week was presentation week!

As our group was discussing food wastage, we came up with a simple and affordable concept of using food stamping or painting to make prints and patterns. We called it wastextile.

FOOD STAMPING EXPERIMENT

We went over to Sam’s house to find out what food, paint and surface would produce the best pattern results.

Before going over, we each had to find some fruits and veggies that we thought would make a nice pattern when stamped. In the end we had corn, peppers, leafy vegetables, beetroot and cabbage, to name a few.

Some food, such as the chillies and peppers, had to be cut up for it to be able to produce any interesting prints.

We also brought over different types of paint and inks. We had acrylic paint, fabric paint and stamp pads. We also tried using the natural colour from the fruits and vegetables (e.g. the beetroot) as ink.

As for the surfaces we would be stamping on, we had paper of different weights and colours, fabric, tissue paper and clear plastic sheets.

We even tested out different ways of applying colour to the food, for example using brushes, dipping it into paint, pressing it onto the stamp pads and just using our fingers.

Stamping a chilli with a stamp pad. We learnt that with more ‘watery’ foods such as this, we needed to dry off the part we wanted to stamp in order for the paint to stick.

Stamping a leaf with three different coloured paints.

We also tried rolling the food instead of just stamping it. Here Jenny has rolled and stamped some corn, producing two very different results.

Experimenting with metallic paint with the end of a cucumber.

Making a repetitive pattern with just one food item (chilli), with different colours.

Stamping cabbage onto canvas. We realized that with certain foods (such as this one) we needed to have a soft surface under what we were printing on for the print to show up nicely.

Making a flower out of an orange peel.

At the end of the day we filled Sam’s entire kitchen counter with all the prints that we made. Some turned out better than others, and we found that while some food prints worked well together to make a nice pattern, others didn’t. Colour choice was also very important. For example, gold prints on black paper ended up looking much nicer than a mix of colours on white.

Overall, these were the results of our experimentation:

Mediums

Acrylic paint works best and prints out the strongest colours on every medium.

Fabric paint is watery and only prints well on fabric.

Stamp pad is less messy, however, difficult for every ingredient to absorb the ink, especially for ingredients that are damp.

Stamp pad took the shortest time to dry, followed by acrylic paint, and lastly fabric paint.

Trying various folding methods on papers help with framing the artwork and achieving creative effects.

Ingredients

Carving and exploring different angles of each ingredient allows us to further explore and create interesting prints.

Capsicum peppers, cabbage, carved potatoes, chilli, strawberries, orange peels, leaves, vegetable ends and corn produced the best prints.

The lines on the leaves are best printed using acrylic paint, as fabric paint causes smudging and it is too faint on stamp pads.

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