Narrative Design

We began the lecture by looking into different ways of establishing a narrative. We looked at the most basic form , Freytags prymid , which involves all stories consisting of Exposition , rising action , Climax , falling action and a denouement.

"A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end."- Aristotle, Poetics

This simplistic layout shows what a story should contain , this is a linear approach to story telling. Majority of stores are told this way as they all result in a positive outcome which will satisfy a mass audience.

We then looked at exposition which consists of setting the scene and content for the chosen piece of work. Exposition within narratives stands for ' The insertion of important background information within a story' When a background story is given it is called the establishing shot. a famous example of an establishing shot is the opening of StarWars which quickly establishes the audience with information that they need to know about what has happened prior to the film they are about to watch.

Further into the lecture we looked at why narrative was an essential part of any story. Narratives can be a written or spoken account of events. As designers we should be able to visually narrate a series of events that successfully explain what is happening to a wide audience.

To support this we looked into the story of TOMS shoe company. This shoe company would donate a pair of their shoes to children living in poverty every time you purchased any. This story was then created in a video to visually communicate with the public and give them an insight into what the company do. The narrative was created to emotionally attach the audience to the company as it gives an establishing shot into what the company is about and what their plans for the future are.

We ended with a list of questions to trigger our mind when designing using story telling:

'What do we  want the story to tell?' 

'What is the issue?'

'What will be the events/ moments?'

'Who are the characters?'

Unlocking Innovation

We began the seminar by looking at a quote from Albert Einstien. "what is 5+5? , Now , What two numbers make 10" This quote shows that you can think around a problem by using a different perspective but still get the same answer , this also shows that a wider range of answers can be created from just a simple question. This relates to this mornings lecture on perception.

Our task was to design something that could be flipped , for example writing that can be read backwards or even M.C Escher's Sky and water piece and how we can simply shift one for to another using basic techniques such as pattern , colour , type or imagery. another example is how a piece of type saying hot could transform into the word cold in 9 steps.

Guest Lecture - Territory Studio

At first i wasn't sure what this lecture would be about as it was more based around 3D design. However I can say that this lecture was one of the most interesting and inspiring lectures so far this year. I feel that the main reason it was inspiring as it showed that there is possibility to work for huge company and on worldwide projects. In this case Territory Studios have worked on many visual projects such as The Avengers , Prometheus and The Martian. 

I found Territory studios work interesting as they design graphics for computer screens that are used within films. They create hundreds of animations and stills that are filled with statistics and facts that help tell stories within the films that could not be told by objects or characters , Below is an example from the film The Avengers : Age of Ultron

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Marvel's Avengers: Age of Ultron UI Reel from Territory/a> on Vimeo.
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All images and video belong to : http://www.territorystudio.com/work/motion/

Style

What is style?

A particular procedure by which something is done; a manner or way

A distinctive appearance, typically determined by the principles according to which something is designed.

We watched a video of Cornel West who elaborates on clothing and style from his point of view. he focuses more specifically on the style of clothing , clothes are not just clothes in their style , they reflect a persons characteristics and personality. the way people dress reflects who they are and how they live as a person.

can there be content without style? How can something be created without it having a certain style. if somebody decided to wear a bin bag it would still be a certain style although it assent what most people would chose to wear.

We then looked at Marcel Breuer who was a Hungarian architect and Furniture designer. We looked at one specific chair names the Cesca chair where Breuer changed the generic style of how people would expect a chair to be built by swapping out parts and re-defining its style.

Styles fade in and out , they work on intensities and the styles will fluctuate , they're constantly moving and changing and evolving with the way we live.

Perception or Illusion

In this lecture we specifically looked at Perception or illusion , we started off the lecture by looking at  an image of a lamp post in the dark , we then discussed what triggers in our memory it could fire and what we could relate it to , for example , a walk home after a night out. Images like this help develop a deep sense of self awareness and allows us to perceive things differently , this of which will come in handy when designing in the future as it involves looking at a theme from a different perspective.

Perception - We looked at how the human eye is a form of perception , this is because we see every reflection of light upside down , however our brain knows to flip it the right way up. Below is a basic diagram of how the eye sees reflections of light and processes them:

We then moved onto looking at colourblind tests as they showed us that everybody minds perceive colours in different ways depending on the cells that are present in their brain. Personally i am rather colourblind especially to Reds and Greens , however other students struggled with these tests even though they do not class themselves as colourblind.

Further into the lecture we started to look at optical illusions and how our eyes can be tricked into thinking things are happening when they are not , the illusion below looks as if it is moving even though it is stationary. This happens because of the contrast in colours and our eyes are attempting to sort the colours out.

We then looked at the dinosaur illusion. This illusion involves a dinosaurs head that looks as if it is looking at you from whatever angle you look at it from. This looks like this as we have learnt as human that facial features sick out and that there is no other option for the face to go. As you can see in the video the illusion is created from inward folds with card.

Into the Darkness

In this mornings lecture we watched Fear[s] of the Dark, the film is a 2 tone animated film that was released in 2008 and premiered at the Roma Film Festival. The structure of the film is that it is cut into 5 short stories that make up the whole film. The part that we specifically looked at involved a character that gets stranded in a blizzard and retreats to an abandon cabin , where we see the struggles of paranoia set in and mentally challenge him. i particularly like the film as each section focuses on different drawing styles or ways of animating , similar to the film 'Waking life'. The section we looked at was made up of harsh black and white shading with various textures.

Abstracts and Infos

At the start of this Seminar we began with a recap of key words from the last session , as a group we came up with :

Objective - (of a person or their judgement) not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts.

Contingency - a future event or circumstance which is possible but cannot be predicted with certainty.

History - the study of past events, particularly in human affairs.

Subjective - based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions.

Fabrication - the action or process of manufacturing or inventing something.

Perspective - the art of representing three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional surface so as to give the right impression of their height, width, depth, and position in relation to each other.

Preconceived - (of an idea or opinion) formed before having the evidence for its truth or usefulness.

As a task we were split into 6 groups the were each given 20 seconds of the film Withnail & I to analyse and produce a sentence about , these sentences would then all be collected together and turned into well structured paragraph. The sentence we produced was "a scuffle between two characters which is solved by panicked compromise."

Problem Solving / Design & Communication

In this seminar we looked at how information can be presented via infographics. I was excited to be part of this seminar as i haven't learnt about infographics before and i would like to explore them more as my studio project involves them massively. I was inspired to look into inforgraphics by David McCandles who published the books : Information is beautiful and Knowledge is beautiful. These books display information about the world in a graphic manner that are very athletically pleasing and  also very detailed in i the information that they provide us with.

We then started by looking at student work that mapped different pieces of information. For example One student mapped relationships within her life and and created a coloured grid (similar to the tube map by harry beck) that showed positive and negative points about relationships with different family members. 

Our task was to create our own infographic that mapped information that we were interested in or personal to us. We had multiple subjects that we could chose from. I chose to plot music on a graph depending on the year it was created and how much i enjoyed the album. 

I chose to create my infographic similar to a scattergraph , where the points on the X and Y axis depended on weather i enjoyed the music and what year it was created . When i finished plotting the points i will use a straight line to determine weather the graph has A positive correlation , proving there is a link between the year the music was created and how much i enjoyed it.

Message & Meaning

"The difference between poetry and practical messages is that the latter are successful only when we correctly infer the intention." - Michael Rock 

In this lecture we learnt looked into Message and meaning , how it can be portrayed to and audience and the different ways it can come across to different people around the world and also that all pieces of design aren't made just for the sake of it , that there is always a meaning behind work and there is always a message it has to portray. We looked at specific designers such as Anthony Burrill who uses large type to portray powerful messages and studios such as Kurzgesagt studios that use infographics to communicate themes that people don't normally know about such as : what is light?

Message - a verbal, written, or recorded communication sent to or left for a recipient who cannot be contacted directly.

Meaning- Meaning is what the source or sender expresses , communicates or conveys in their message to the observer or receiver , and what the receiver infers from the current context.

Send (Encode)- This means translating information into a message in the form of symbols that represent ideas or concepts.

 We then looked into the work of Antony Burrill. His work was produced to display large messages that will either spark questions or produce motivation within the audiences mind. Burrill uses bold type and block colours that stand out clearly to anyone who can see the images. Burrill specialises in type and layout design using traditional ways such as printing blocks to add a more hand produced aesthetic to his work.

Kurzgesagt studio's produce informational videos that educate an audience through playful and colourful animations. Kurzgesagt focus on informing an audience on subjects that most wouldn't know much information about , most of these subjects are science related or questions that are not normally looked into without certain interest. The video we specifically looked at was "What is light?" , this video is included below. 

 

Genealogy Continued

In this Seminar we continued looking at Genealogy. Instead of looking into future Genealogy we looked at what a Genealogist is and what type of work they do. This seminar we didn't have any specific activities to complete however we had a range of videos that will be referenced below.

"The Genealogist examines the Preconceived and questions the phenomenon that we tend to feel is without history." 

We learnt that genealogists question the rules of items what already exist. We looked into objects or items that would have been classed as no history , we highlighted: Goodness , Badness , Punishment , Madness and sexuality. we looked into these to see if the mind could create a sense of history for these objects and see if you can go back to the beginning and re-create them. 

The Guardians point of view advert shows that a story or an object can be re-created or misinterpreted depending on how you look at it. Similar to how Genealogies work. 

Influence and Behaviour

Behaviour - the way in which one acts or conducts oneself, especially towards others.

Influence - the capacity to have an effect on the character, development, or behaviour of someone or something, or the effect itself.

In this lecture we discussed how Behaviour and Influences can effect peoples work in different ways , ways we identified that could effect you in every day life were:

-Political
-Psychological 
-Personal 
-Cultural
-Social 
-Informational

We started by looking at Edward Bernays who was a pioneer in public relations (propaganda). Sigmund Freud (Phycologist) was Bernays uncle therefore allowing Bernays to have a psychological insight into his propaganda techniques , allowing him to adapt them to suit mass audience. he later published the propaganda book (1928)

"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country." - Edward Bernays (Propaganda 1928)


Wolff Olins - http://www.wolffolins.com 

"We didn't want the logo to be the Houses of Parliament with a hurdler going over them and a brush stroke"

Wieden and Kennedy - Were assigned to create a campaign for Nike during the time of the 2012 Olympics. They focused on more of a cultural aspect for the campaign titled:  "find your greatness". The campaign didn't focus on the athletes but focused on key people in different environments to as they couldn't use any branding to do with the 2012 olympics. Focusing on the people associated and involved with the olympics was a way to unite the audience that couldn't make it to the olympics or were watching abroad and to show that they can be involved in the sports just as much as the athletes can.

FCB inferno - The company used the stats of  The London 2012 Olympics to create the "This Girl Can" campaign. This campaign focuses specifically on motivating the women of Britain to partake in sporting activities as there is 2 million less women than men that partake in regular exercise. But there is a huge opportunity that between the age of 14-40 75% of girls/ Women want to exercise more.

Red Bull energy drinks are a good example of Deception within industry. 'gives you wings' is Red Bulls famous slogan , claiming that the 'Wings' improve your performance. A $15 lawsuit was filed against Red Bull to say that there statement isn't true and they eventually lost , resulting in you been able to reclaim $15 back on Red Bull products if you still have the receipt. 

Typography Seminar

This seminar consisted of each person in the session being given 3 post-it-notes and given the task to design a typeface for the 3 letters we were assigned. I feel that typography is one of my weak points within my studies therefore it would be good to get a different perspective of what everyone else think of it and how they approach the typography task.

The letters i were given were Q R and S , it took me a while to establish an idea for these but eventually i settled on creating the letters out of basic shapes instead of drawing some kind of funky 3D text. i tried my best to make the 3 letters easy to read but detailed in the style they were produced. 

As you can see above my 3 letters flow into each other by one part of the shape being present in the other letters. If i was to improve this design i would make the pieces of each letter slightly bigger as they were quite small and flimsy and took a while to arrange correctly.

After everybody finished their pieces we arranged them into a typography alphabet which displayed the different designs to the rest of the session , i felt that this was useful as i would be able to take inspiration from this.

Urbanised - Film

In this lecture, we were shown Urbanised (2011) a documentary film by Gary Hustwit. The productions message was to "change people's ideas about something that already exists", and to show the use of architecture and how it can be adapted to suit the rapid development of population and culture within the modern world.

The film began with a voice over, stating: 'everything we see has been designed and planned'. we were then presented with several unique locations; Copenhagen, New York, Chile, Brazil, Detroit, Brighton, Cape Town, Stuttgart and New Orleans.These were all key locations where architecture had influenced the place and created significant new change to the location. For example in New Orleans houses were severely affected by Hurricane Katrina, so a lot of the land that was being built upon had no set plans, as this was originally not meant to be un-occupied land the city allowed  architectures to have a lot of fun with the plans, because there was no requirement to be met or no specific way how any structure should look.

Below are some of the notes i made during the film: 

Convergence

This lecture focused specifically on Convergence. "the process or state of converging". Convergence means is to change something or to make it a little different.

We were given a mixture of answers/opinions of what convergence was from different people. Here are some of the statements that were said:

"Convergence is an ambiguous term used by various disciplines to describe and analyse processes of change toward uniformity or union. Its application in the communications sector, often referred to as media convergence, also encompasses valuable approaches and insights to describe, characterise and understand the digital creative economy." - Media Convergence, Michael Latzer.

"Convergence is a ‘cooperation’ and cross-promotion." - Grant, Wilkinson.

"Convergence is doing journalism and telling stories in the most appropriate medium." - Quinn.

Reflective Writing

This Seminar on reflective writing was lead by Amanda Tinker. We looked into a variety of topics in this session, including:

• What is reflection?
• How and where does it happen?
• Models of reflective learning.
• Reflective writing examples.
• Process and practise of reflection.

First of all we discussed what reflection was. It is an ongoing process of thinking about your development in relation to your work, a personal  review of your work as your project unfolds and a way to gain new perspectives on you and your work.

Amanda then discussed reflecting before taking action on your project and went on to talk about how weighing up different courses of action before deciding what we should finally do.
This can be doing things such as thinking on my feet and reflecting on split second ideas and decisions. Amanda then went on to say that we could ask many questions such as:

"What can i do to improve things?" 

and 

"How can I make use of what I have learned?"

As a task, we were given lumps of text on the screen and asked to decide whether on not they were examples of a useful reflective account. The first one we looked at didn't stand out as much. It was very simplistic and had poor sentence structure. We looked at how the different texts could vary. The second was laid out completely differently by using lists which changed the effectiveness of the reflective strategy. The final example was a rather detailed list,which gave a detailed and careful summary of all points .

Summon and The Library

The Library can be a scary thing!

In this seminar we were made to all take out a book that was relevant to certain movements within graphic design. The book I Picked was: Keith Haring - Heaven and Hell. I picked this book , not only because Keith Haring is one of my favourite artists but because he was a pioneer within Pop Art too. Keith had a very unique and simplistic style that is recognisable  by a wide audience. Even though Haring was an active artist at the time of Andy Warhol he still stood out from the crowd as one of the more recognisable artists within New York at the time. Harings art was more about portraying messages about situations occurring in New York at the time where as Warhol just produced colourful and Vibrant images. 

Below are examples of Keith Harings work within the book:

Keith Haring - 1958 - 1990

History of Graphic Design and Animation

This Lecture gave us a brief history on Graphic Design and Animation and the stages that they went through for example Pop Art/ Pop Culture stages through to Minimalism design. And for Animation , Stop Motion through to Computer Animation.

I found this lecture very interesting and useful as it gave me ideas in how to work in  multiple different styles and an insight into different techniques that had been used to establish the backbone of Graphic Design.

The Designer who stood out to me the most was Peter Saville , He was most active with his work around the 70's-90's. He was part of the significant creative team for Factory Records , The record label that pioneered music and rave culture in Manchester. I instantly picked up on Saville's style as it was very relevant to my project ideas of mapping music and Peter Saville was an expert in visualising sound. 

Below are examples of his work and website:  

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglD-PklgSS-zprRaNM-WsbhwnmtQJFf7NvAKKBLomJcN2L0HonlTeRQAASAnIojbUsJ_pj9hXOhWJx42LpiBGS9YYb5EvXMDMQMpbPpO2lwbv3Yqxl-namuAD6YbwFgBlqn4Wr2B8uHVAD/s1600/Rplot.png

http://www.thisisfivethings.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/FAC_51_Hacienda_Poster_by_WaskoGM.png

http://petersaville.info

Approaches to Research - 20 Questions

In this seminar we were asked to get into pairs and ask each other 20 questions about a specific object. This task was particularly entertaining and also acted as an ice breaker to the seminar as many of us hadn't developed specific friend groups and links with other students yet. For this task i chose to work with Jack Pomfret.

The aim of the task was to show us how to dig deeper for information about something and show how you would word your questions in order to do this. However unlike a typical 20 questions we had to write the questions before we had even thought of the object , this was to show us what our original ways of gaining research were like and how (after the task) they could be improved on to get the best result.

some of my questions included;

-"is it an object?"

-"Does it require a power source of some kind?"

-"is it currently present within this room?"

To my surprise the questions i had drafted before had actually worked , as i managed to guess my partners object. However the strange thing was that we both picked the same object - An Ethernet cable port , something of which i would have never thought someone else would have picked. 

Could this be that we have the same thought process when researching?

Or do great minds think alike?

ha ha 

How to have an idea

In this lecture we looked at How to have an idea and how an idea can be composed. This was done to help us start to produce Ideas for our 'Sense of Place' project.

 The aim of researching into various fields is to communicate ideas through images, words and layouts. We also talked about how through the next few weeks each week would have an aim and a topic to focus our work on so that we have a wide spread of research for our concertina book. These were not there to follow exactly but more so to trigger our mind into producing alternative ideas but still be there to help us if we were struggling. personally i would like to stay away from these guidelines as i feel they may limit my thought process if i play it safe. This will help me to gather multiple ideas and responses to each topic and begin to create our my idea for the sense of place project.

Once i did this my end goal is to produce a number of ideas for the brief I have been given. I discussed how doing this can be one of the hardest parts of a project as my mind needs to settle into thinking about the brief and how it can tackle it. I feel that the best way to start off my ideas is to indulge myself in various forms of research such as Books , Exhibitions and Social Media.

He then began to discuss what can happen when the ideas don't come to us also known as writers block or creative block. During this time we should come up with a set of approaches and techniques that are already in place so that when this happens we have some sort of solution.

Idea: "a thought or suggestion as to a possible course of action".

Finally we looked at how we can find ideas. He discussed questions and ideas on the topic such as:

- How will you create an entry point into your topic?

- Is there something that intrigues you that can start a direction or train of thought, a discussion, an argument, an investigation to propel the thought process? 

- Is there a problem or an issue that needs to be identified before thinking?

Then he discussed way we can do this and get ideas out in the open:

- Attribute lists 

- Mind maps

- Synetics

- Moodboards

- Brainstorming

- Brain-writing

- Brain-drawing

- Timelines

- Genealogy 

- Sketching

- Storyboards

Future Genealogies

What if Shoes ate Humans? - Future Genealogie

"A line of descent traced continuously from an ancestor."

In this first seminar we looked into what Genealogies were and how designers use them to motivate their creative thought processes. Richard gave us examples of previous scenarios such as "what if Dinosaurs were still alive" where we produced ideas as a whole seminar group. 

Later into the session we split off into smaller groups and produced ur own ideas (as shown above). Our groups idea was "what if shoes ate humans". we produced various ideas such as Cages , Muzzles , Training sessions and Rehab. from these ideas we then realised we could adapt these to all types of media , this included;

-Posters

-TV advertisements

-Radio Adverts

-Animations

Although the session was not about creating these products it showed how easily it got us thinking about creating the different products relating to our idea.

Post it notes mind map - Sense of Place

Above is another example of Genealogies , this time we used Post-it-notes to relate words to Place , this mind map was created to motivate and generate ideas relating to our sense of place project. The words i picked to add to the map were Safety , Music and Structure. All these words make me define a place that is or could be personal to me. 

Below is a time-lapse video of the mind map taking shape and becoming the finished product.