GDE730 W6 | Lecture Review

Interdisciplinary Insights – New Approaches and Creative Partnerships

This week’s lecture included a conversation with Louize Harries, an interdisciplinary designer with a background in fashion and textiles.

LOUIZE HARRIES

Hefin Jones began his service design career in university. He enjoyed the collaborative nature and immersion possibilities when working with people in their communities. He used his project Cosmic Colliery to engage a community in Wales around the fictional notion of reimagining a closed-down coal mine into an astronaut training facility. His work immersed him into this community, spending long periods of time in conversations with young people, former coal miners, families, youth center directors and operators, local governments.

By using fiction, Jones hope was to allow for deeper, more meaningful conversations around how the community could think differently about its culture, history, networks, relationships, and practices. What made this project most successful was Jones’ willingness to allow for space for long and meandering conversations to take place. To provide room for people to imagine and engage in dialogue. He expressed the necessity to listen, and not bring your own biases about the project into the foreground.

A take away for Jones was the projects opportunity to engage the marginal voices, in this case, the youth of the community — unable to vote — and finding ways to create agency and advocacy on their behalf.

His advice for service designers starting out is to prioritize listening, leaving bias out as much as possible, having a responsibility to the subjects and subject community and to be willing to allow for variances and evolution to take place within and beyond the project.

REFERENCE:

TYPE Talk, Andy Altmann (2012) Dinner for One? (Links to an external site.), [online]. [Accessed 11 April 2019].

LYNfabrikken Aarhus Denmark, (2012) Lecture with Troika (Links to an external site.), [online]. [Accessed 11 April 2019].

Open Cell https://opencell.webflow.io/ (Links to an external site.) 4. OffShore Studio Migrant Journal http://www.offshorestudio.ch/ (Links to an external site.) 5. TED, Anab Jain(2017) Why we need to imagine different futures (Links to an external site.),[online video]. [Accessed 11 June 2019]

Falmouth University (2020). Interdisciplinary Insights – New Approaches and Creative Partnerships | Lecture. Studio and Entrepreneurship GDE730 20/21 Part-Time Study Block S2 (Falmouth, UK: Falmouth University)

GDE720 W6 | Workshop Challenge

FINDING A STORY

This week’s challenge had us to exploring how to research and define a topic that reveals a new insight and critical understanding of visual culture, myth or story in your area via the following outputs

  1. Research and find two possible stories that reflect a viewpoint of your own town, city or locale.

  2. Create one image to represent both initial story concepts, using a variety of methods, which must be original and not sourced from the Internet or a third party.

  3. Present two short proposals with title, original image and a short 100-word synopsis (elevator pitch) about the concept of your article. Please note, we will provide a prepared Keynote slide template for you to present your findings.

The two directions I chose were:

  1. Beyond the Big Five: The Unaccounted Women of the San Francisco Psychedelic Design Era 

    • When history is reflected upon with regard to the psychedelic design movement of 1960s San Francisco, we notoriously only hear about the Big Five: Rick Griffin, Alton Kelley, Victor Moscoso, Stanley Mouse, and Wes Wilson. 

      While these men made a huge impact on this fundamental period of design, the are all men.  The contributions of women artists of this experiential and experimental era of design are rarely, if ever, mentioned. 

      Where are the women? Did they just sew flowers into each other's hair. NO.

      This research project is aimed to shed light on the contributions of women artists of the San Francisco psychedelic design movement of the 1960s. 

  2. Through the Lens of Protest: A Photo-documentary of Freedom of Speech in San Francisco 

    • For more than six decades, the Bay Area has been the epicenter of protest movements like no other region in the United States.

      Free speech rights. The Vietnam War. Racial injustice. The nuclear bomb. U.S. policy in Central America. Wars in the Middle East. The AIDS crisis. Economic inequities. Police brutality. Animal rights. Women’s rights. Climate Change. Even the war on plastic.

      The Bay Area has a special place as one of dissent and free speech. And the coverage of this dissent through the photographer's lens tells the story. This research showcases the decades of protests in San Francisco via the contributions of documentary photographer.

My final piece can be found below:

REFERENCE:

Falmouth University (2018). Visual Written Communication - Research and Curate | Lecture. History and Futures GDE720 19/20 Part-Time Study Block S2 (Falmouth, UK: Falmouth University)

Lupton, E. and Miller, A., (1996) Design, Writing, Research: Writing on Graphic Design. New York: Kiosk Books

Robson, C., (2002) Real world research: A resource for social scientists and practitioner researchers. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

Louisiana Channel (1916) Irma Boom: A Tribute to Coco Chanel, [online video]. Available at https://vimeo.com/142852186.

GDE740 W6 | Workshop Challenge

THE CHALLENGE

  1. Develop a strategy and project plan for your selected project brief.

  2. Utilise a variety of visual and written methods to support a full and innovative rationale for your project development.

  3. Create and record a five slide Keynote presentation to outline the rationale behind the strategy and project plan of your selected project brief.

STRATEGY PRESENTATION



REFERENCE