QUESTIONING DESIGN

For a one day design project I was given a folded A5 leaflet brief entitled Questioning Design. It was an extract taken from the book 'What is a designer' by Norman Potter.

In the leaflet there were I think 25 questions, each a short task but one which required quite a degree of thought about questioning what role design plays in the everyday. I was drawn to a question asking me to evaluate the difference between sincerity and honesty in my work. I found the idea really interesting that there was a difference between the two as they appear so similar. I have had my work referred to as honest and sincere in the past so was keen to investigate a little deeper into my practice to define the two.

I spent quite a while just thinking about how you approach design and what would make it one or the other. I made tables and lists which categorized the implications of each word,helping me grasp more of a definition and applying those to myself.  What seemed prevalent was that honesty refers to and is gauged more at the conception point of an idea. Sincerity seemed to lie more post conception, when the design in in motion how does one sincerely achieve the honest concept.

This can be flipped on it head though; if the concept is dishonest, this may or may not be apparent to the consumer/viewer in the final work, so when it comes to the execution of an idea the dishonest concept can be performed sincerely.

Equally, an honest concept may be designed insincerely, this will be more apparent to the audience than the last example because it is visible in the way it's designed/carried out.

A mouthful...

So, now I had the definitions fairly clear I had to come up with a design response which adequately answered the question at hand. It would have been really nice if I was able to create an object which, without words totally answered the question. For me that would have been the ideal.

I may still work on this piece because I think its a pretty interesting subject.

However, in the time I had a written piece was all that could really be managed. (As I write this with hindsight I am dying to design an object that answers the question!)
What I did was to take the original leaflet and replicate it exactly, removing from it everything which didn't apply to my question. So I kept the title, removed all the questions until mine, No. 19, then my answer to the question underneath in exactly the same way the original was laid out. Then kept a couple of paragraphs on the last page. The expanses of white space reinforce the idea because they look so starkly blank. They work particularly well next to each other. I set out to echo the idea of sincerity & honesty in the way I designed the book, function informing the form .

What I achieved in the end was I realize almost there. I think it's a good little piece and one I'm proud of. But what I've actually produced is an honest and sincere piece of graphics containing an answer to the question. What might of been interesting would be to do exactly the same, but think about how to make the design insincere; thus truly answering the question in the objects design as well as having a written explanation contained.

Maybe if I just wrote bullshit and dressed it up sincerely that would give a better answer..

NEW BONES: A COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES AND POETRY

New Bones was a poetry zine made in an edition of 100, 

distributed for free by being left in library books during April 2012. The curator of the project contacted me to design the cover. I love working on projects with a raw nature; real and lo fi design work is enjoyable and rewarding. On this project I thought I knew pretty much what the cover was going to look like. I was asked to do something illustrative and I knew it wasn’t going to be taxing. However when I sat down to do the work I read through some of the content in order to get a feel for what it was I was designing. 

A particular poem totally engaged me in a way I am not always affected by amateur poetry. I instantly felt that the cover I had planned to do would undermine the work and felt extreme pressure now to achieve a visual image for something which had so impressed me.

How do you go about giving visual identity to good writing?

Anything too literal and it is almost a mockery of the content.

I decided that what it most needed to be was intriguing. Hint at something but give nothing away. Other points I decided it needed to have were: being striking, edgy, crudely produced and not detract from the content. I started by drawing a silhouette of a bone. This was then blown up and right down several times on a photocopier to degrade and roughen the edges. Typography was arranged by hand on the copy bed to find an engaging composition. I wanted to split the cover two-tone to give it a dynamic abstract quality.

Parts of the design were cut off and re- arranged to fragment the cover and the whole thing was then copied over and over until it had the right look. I wanted to avoid it looking obvious or safe but something that looked under-designed and effortless. I think the whole thing looks very authentic to the zine aesthetic, and suits the content by being mature yet rebellious as student writers usually are. It doesn't look intellectual but just the right amount of serious.

RED ROOM STUDIO PBLICATION

We wanted to design a zine on the the subject of the random/out of control/chance. We decided the format would be A2, so opening out as and A1 spread. This would avoid producing the old cliche small A5 zine witch we wanted to avoid and would give some great impact as a piece of work, giving content the maximum amount of space and sizing.

There were 6 people contributing to the zine and i was collaborating on a piece with another guy so that made 5 spreads of work. This was the official explanation for the piece of work I did for the publication:

"In an effort to remove control over the outcome of a photographic series, the participants entered a period of 5 days in which receiving an SMS message was a trigger to immediately take a picture of whatever was directly in front of them.

At 00:00 Saturday 5/11/11 both participants started the process with identical cameras bought at the same store and continued until the exposures were finished."

 For our section of the project we wanted to randomly generate and layout a set of photographic imagery. To create this we would each purchase the same disposable camera including 39 pre-loaded negatives from the same shop. Starting and finishing at the exact same hour of the same day we would take a photograph every time we received a text message. It was one of the only truly random anomalies we could both rely on to use as a control by which to base our timing of photos. For a week woe would each have the camera on our person at all times. At the vibration of the text alert the camera was immediately taken our and a photo taken directly ahead of us. The idea was to put zero thought into it, to try and remove the mind and artist as much as possible and just snap straight ahead. between the timing and the execution we would basically have a controlled photography experiment and have generated a bank of 78 totally random images.

This would be laid out on a grid spanning across two pages, with the time, date and text message written beneath it documenting its authenticity.

The cover was of fun as we like to try and have good humor in our work. The studio pre existed as 'The Red Room' and focussed solely on corporate work, when we inherited it from last years 3rd years and totally changed how it was run and what it produced. We took down the sign witch stated ONLY 3RD YEAR STUDENTS and invited people from across the years to join and work with us. Anyway from the name and authoritarian way it was ran we went with a red army communist leader aesthetic theme. This features a cover which is totally written in chinese and has a large photograph of Chairman Mau making it look like a government issue handbook or propaganda brochure. 

Inspiration was taken from this little piece of packaging design:

UEL LECTURE POSTER SERIES

Last year the second year guest speaker series had some real nice posters advertising each event, Designed by Stephen Barratt. Unfortunately these wern't happening this year so we decided we they should come from us. So we designed a couple posters to promote the lectures.

The first was Jonathan Barnbrook.

We had decided that the poster series would feature imagery or tye which was our reaction to the designer or their work, giving an overall aesthetic which should reflect them but not just feature their work or what they're famous for. More we wanted to visually hint or sum them up. For the Barnbrook one we wanted to get his very rebellious, anti establishment nature, very gothic almost religious approach to typography across in the poster. Inside the album art for David Bowie's 'Heathen' album which Barnbrook designed, was featured an image of a vandalized 17th century painting in 1985. We felt this kinda visual language would work pretty well and like the scope for vandalized religious iconography which we thought would chime very well with the Barnbrook's imagery.

Next I searched through florence renaissance art books for some suitable religious imagery. Finding some pictures depicting saints and angels I made photocopies and then created an etching plate in the print room. This was inked up and put through the press. The resulting prints I proceeded to splash corrosive acid and make cutting marks with a blade. this was to simulate the vandalism which took place upon the rembrandt in 1985. Below is one of the copies before it was vandalised:

So we now had the artwork for the poster with the date time and name underneath. But we wanted to do something by way of branding which we could then roll out across all the poster series. something which gave all of the information which wouldn't change each week (so "the University of East London guest lecturer series") . We decided that if a screen was made up with this branding in the shape and style of a stamp this could be printed over the top of the plain B/W print (we have no money..) in colour. Thus injecting colour and making the the poster more interesting than a 1 tone digital print. They would be printed in a random nature across the poster, each week would have a different colour and the stamp would be printed across corresponding to which number lecture it was. The barnbrook was the third so it has three. (this version doesn't because its just the digital copy, I will update...)

The next lecture was given by Tom Klinkowstein. We remembered him from last year having also done a days workshop with him on top of the lecture. The thing that most stuck in mind about him was his way with words and fantastical statements. We were going to make a typographic poster. We trawled through his twitter feed and narrowed down relevant quotes to a few before deciding upon 'I am interested in the everyday - but the everyday of a distant future time.'

This would be split between two posters by the natural break. That way you would read one poster which cut off mid sentence, walk down the hall and be confronted with the other fragment of text, emphasizing the point.

We liked it. And he liked it. Enough to re post it over the internet and having it re printed and applied at another university in the states. so that was a success. When he visited he stopped in to thank Joe and I and interestingly didn't remember actually saying the phrase.

SELF INITIATED PROJECT

For my self initiated project I collaborated with another student, Joseph Pleass. We were interested in wether the internets replication of an image changes its effect or experience.

The entire project is summed up from conception through to execution, in a booklet we co-wrote and designed so I will not go into much detail on here. But this is a brief outline of what we designed.

We designed and curated an installation in the AVI gallery space which set out to act as an almost scientific experiment investigating into what impact having images of artwork on the internet had on ones experience of the work. It was a visualization of an concept really, using a replica gallery space as a vehicle to translate the idea to the viewer and conduct the experiment.

(screen printing quick response codes)

The piece borders upon an art installation because of its very broad subject matter which encompasses more than just designing surface graphics. However we felt the piece remains definitely within the design sphere and felt we shouldn't be constricted by what may or may not be when to came to a potent idea. We wanted to do something deeper than just a rebrand or corporate identity.

Here are some pages from my sketchbook and following that are some images of the final installation in situ.

(I don't know why this image won't rotate!)

It was conceived and prepared in a week. Put up in a day, and occupied the space for a week. The installation proved interesting across all disciplines of the AVI building, actually uniting courses and years alike over intrigue into what it involved. This made us really happy because the AVI should be run more that way and unfortunately there is a great deal of segregation.

It was common for people to get really excited about the idea after we had explained the concept and had an extremely good reception which was great to see. It felt good meeting people from Fine art and Architecture for example who had previously seen no real merit in the importance of design, and being able to convince them in one piece, the relevance of design in society.