Tasks
This week we want you to identify a theme or issue that relates to your locality and present your findings on the Ideas Wall, prior to the design phase.
- Research and discover issues that relate to your locality and post them on the Ideas Wall. Direct engagement and potential collaboration is encouraged to engage with relevant local communities to identify issues.
- Distil your research to identify one issue you would like to resolve and reveal through a visual outcome.
- Write a short 200-word project brief that reports on the issue to be solved.
- Design and produce a visual summary to contextualise your issue and project brief. Your summary can be a digital, print or moving image, but it must be succinct, to enable third-party viewers to quickly understand the requirements, needs and challenges.
Research and discover issues that relate to your locality and post them on the Ideas Wall. Direct engagement and potential collaboration is encouraged to engage with relevant local communities to identify issues.
Right now, we’re in the middle of social lockdown for the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s a new way of living where we are restricted from our usual spaces of work and play and our house/flats/rooms fulfil the purposes that whole cities previously did. We won’t see friends and family for months, and yet, we’re never more connected. Conferencing programmes such as Zoom have seen huge growth from companies and social groups alike, social media is awash with lockdown challenges, and thank god for companies that can deliver essentials to vulnerable people.
Artillery CIC, based in Walthamstow, was set up in 2003 by the founders of the E17 Art Trail and “has been creating, curating and commissioning projects and festivals that celebrate and engage with the Waltham Forest’s diverse and dynamic artistic and creative community.” Over the lockdown, Laura and Morag from Artillery have been organising meetings online to engage local people with their programme and to support artists, many of whom might not have any other income, through this time.
I went to one of these Zoom meetings to meet with people and to hear their stories. It was very informal, and most of the meeting we were talking about who we were and in what position we were in. From a choirmaster, to circus skills teacher, to organisers of Amdram, to art teachers now teaching online, there was a wide range of people involved in the arts in different ways.
Some people were trying to make a living, and questioning how was it possible to teach circus skills remotely, one teacher was reeling from the full-on-ness of teaching online, whilst the choirmaster was trying to keep their community together.
Distill your research to identify one issue you would like to resolve and reveal through a visual outcome.
Everyone is exploring technology to keep their communities together and we informally swapped ideas about different platforms that worked well for us. What was apparent that we all had a wealth of experience in our own sectors and reminded me of a project that I set up at work where people shared their skills to teach one another about the publishing business and printing.
I would like to add a bit of formality to this and suggest that the local community can come together to teach other simple skills at first online, and then in person that
There’s an issue of pay, which was brought up by Richard in one of our tutorials: people in the arts are often asked to do things for free and are taken for granted. How could a project take this into account and teach people skills in a way that is non-exploitative?
Write a short 200-word project brief that reports on the issue to be solved. Design and produce a visual summary to contextualise your issue and project brief. Your summary can be a digital, print or moving image, but it must be succinct, to enable third party viewers to quickly understand the requirements, needs and challenges.
Ideas Wall
Anna Robinette 