practical peer review 2 and project reflection

I Found this peer review session hard to engage with as not many other students attended and I only got one set of feed back from the session

questions raised:

what exact age range are you looking at

- this is an understandable point of confusion and perhaps something I need to specify as so far I have been using a childlike mode of image making to appeal to a younger audience but also in a sense to give the work a feeling of excitement and engagement that could appeal to all

better investigation of political posters

- visual investigation has been focused on children's outcomes as I'm am trying to break away from traditional protest posters at this point

more varied slogans

- this is a good point and I aim to brainstorm more individual slogans, I have however made the decision to keep all slogans positive based on the positive outlook shown by the children's outcomes

is it for children or by children

- this question came up in the previous peer review, it is both 'the two final results are the posters which will either work directly with children, or my own body of work and protest posters I have created which will focus on communicating effectively to children specifically'

focus question

- This will come with more development on my essay and a tutor led tutorial

practical reflection so far

I have been struggling with colour currently in the practical developments and feel my work is starting to stagnate,  the screen printed outcomes pictured below (1) are quite successful visually but I know that they're not capturing the same level of imagination and playfulness in the children's work. I aim to really push myself now to use every colour available to me, just as the children did, and worry less about my text being on one line and more about expressing my message the work started to
really become exciting. I want to create an explosion of excitement and visual intrigue which would be more successful at drawing a younger audience in. I am starting to make the decision to be more abstract with letter forms and experimental with colour (2) and perhaps move to focusing only on personifying typography and using playful letter forms rather than images of flowers/suns etc.

1

2 

research - sustainability symposium

joanna boehnert;

The Anthropocene is a proposed epoch dating from the commencement of significant human impact on the Earth's geology and ecosystems, including, but not limited to, anthropogenic climate change. As of August 2016, neither the International Commission on Stratigraphy nor the International Union of Geological Sciences has yet officially approved the term as a recognised subdivision of geological time
the human epoch - the antropocine
anthropocene - what is occurring
capitalocene - why is this occurring
ecocene - what would we like to occur
econopoly by ecolabs 2011
design/ecology/poitics
social/environmental/mental - we need all three combined to combat climate change, our failure to do this stunts efforts to address environmental problems
etho-political articulation - used the three ecologies
ecocene design - expanded conceptions of design that are working with greater problems and can have transformational impacts
design activism - design practice that is aligned with social movements and activist movements, you cant appropriate the idea of activism without using specific activist methods and not actually working with the community. its not enough to just create aesthetic social design without the genuine movements.
climate camp movement
'we are not fighting for nature we are nature defending ourselves'

eating mothers - milk matters, sally sutherland

a collection of critical design experiments
exploring human and non human milk
activist and feminist role that provokes discussion
uk has lowest rate of breastfeeding in the word
hyper-normalisation of dairy industry is the polar opposite of human milk
design has the power to mediate a conversation in a non aggressive way

sustainability in design education;

embedding sustainability in design education
lack of design projects addressing systemic change in business involving stakeholders
up-cycling based business has the potential to be financially sustainable  yet is still considered as a niche practice
up-cycling needs to be scaled up (in which niche practice becomes a mainstream practice)
tax benefits for up-cycling companies

socially engaged projects in art school curriculum - gavin parry

education and creative benefits in external facing projects
framework for students to shift their thinking from self reflective to social engagement
key to student development and self understanding
socially engaged practice is any art form that involves people and communities in
embed themselves within the communities in which they work
enriches student specialism and maximises employability friendly attributes
an engaged partnership doesn't necessarily involve compromise students were encouraged to take creative risks and have an active stake in the project

reciprocity for sustainable social design - gary barker

leeds creative timebank - exchange skills and abilities, sustainability of the creative sector
taking pride in the value of our contributions to others, 180 members
ethical creative community
local exchange trading schemes, mutual aid trading networks
lewis hydes the gift - gift giving to create trust and build up a different type of capital based on mutual reciprocity
working alternative yo a failing cash-based economy and value system
non hierarrchical
creative speed dating

practical work - screen print options

research - Telling Stories using Children’s Visual Language

file:///Users/md264092/Desktop/Telling_Stories_Using_Childrens_Visual_L.pdf

Adapting drawings that emphasize on stories with visuals that resembles children‟s drawing make these picture books more suitable to their target audience.

analyze how present day illustrators managed to adapt this distinctive visual language and how to read their drawings using children‟s visual language, by looking through their works.

Children love to draw. And by looking to their drawings, we could see that somehow the children‟s drawings are different than the adults. By their intuition, somehow they manage to invent various methods which are unique. They do not emphasize on the aesthetics value of their drawing, but more on the communication aspect.

Even though children‟s drawing would not fit the aesthetics values judged by adults, the drawing itself is full of stories. Through 1207 their drawing, they would naturally emphasize on how to deliver stories to others. Primadi Tabrani, professor from ITB, Indonesia, described this phenomenon as children‟s visual language. This creates a unique method of telling stories visually which is could be applied by adults as well.

According to Tabrani, the way children see and draw is related with their development and integration of senses, imagination, nerves and reflexes, and the way of thinking. When they are drawing, intuitively the children would integrate their emotion, experiment, expression and creation,

They do not only draw what they see, but as a result of collaboration between all of their senses, thoughts and imagination that is expressed through the drawing. The process of drawing is more important than the drawing itself [3]. Therefore, children‟s drawing is not merely to capture scenery but it also captures the mood, the story and the children‟s expression within.

Children‟s drawing along with pre-historic primitive painting, traditional drawing and avant-garde artists stands within the Space-Time-Plane (STP) [4]. The STP system is a visual system that could represent multiple angles, multiple distances and multiple moments within one picture. It captures not only what is being drawn as one still picture but as a sequence which consists of several scenes that moves in the time and space. The picture became a sequence since it had a time dimension and can consist of several scenes. Therefore, it does not only describe what images of what objects are drawn but it can tell a story and an expression, it becomes a visual language, just like word language [5]. The STP system is different with the other system what Tabrani called Naturalistic-PerspectiveMoment opname (NPM). The NPM System works like a camera, introduced by Western domination and the accelerated process of globalization [6]. It captures nature as it is, drawn from one particular angle, one particular distance and one particular time, producing a descriptive picture in one, single scene [7]

(see Figure 1). Figure 1. Drawings using the STP System (left) and NPM System (right). Note that in the picture on the left, that in one drawing; it does not only represent the scenery of a house and its environment but also what is inside the house as well. Source: Tabrani (1993); Ahmad (2006)

Since the children‟s drawing used the STP system, to read the message within we could use the vocabulary of the STP system which related to the way to draw a picture. Tabrani called the way to draw a picture as Image Way [8]. There are many modes in Image Way, which several of them are:
1. The layering image: an image in the background layer happens earlier, while an image in the foreground layer happens later. In each layer, every image has a chronological time and place according to „the way to see‟ the picture.
2. Multiple objects to represent sequence: in each layer, an object can be drawn more than once. If an object is drawn with dynamic and expressive contour, this means that the object is a moving object and the picture describes its movement in sequence.
3. Size to describe the role of an object: If an object is important, then it will be drawn bigger than the surrounding.
4. Characteristic view: if an object is important to be recognize, than it will be drawn from the most characteristic view.
5. The X-ray view: if an important object is placed inside another object, then the outer object would be drawn as a transparent one.
6. Dream time: a mixing of various scenes from different time and space in one scene in order to tell the story related to all of them. It can happen anytime, everywhere.
7. Outer space: objects are drawn as seem they are flying in the sky in various positions, even upside down.

Since the children have their own unique way in telling stories, so when we create medium for them it is safe to use their own language as the main method of communication.