Week 22: reassessing aims

Plans for this week

• This week is the big week for the critical report! I’ve got a lot done so far, and am very happy with the project, but I just have these little parts that I need to do before I set it into Indesign.
• I’ve asked Anne-Maria Geals to take a look my glyphs that I’ve designed, but scheduled this for after the deadline. She has created some great typefaces and worked with Bruno Maag, so she will be an amazing person to get feedback from. She’s such a lovely person giving up so much time.
• My partnership with Forest School will hopefully yield some submissions that I can include on my website and analyse for my critical report.

project Aims

I’m taking a look through old blog posts at my previous work on this project and assessing how far I have come. In Week 4, I planned for my formative assessment, the outcome of which is here. More interesting is when I started planning the difference between this MA project as a testing phase and a more detailed Stowe Framework I could do later. The original is here.

THEN

I’ve already established that I need to scale down this project, and make it a testing phase for a project that is run as a full-scale project. I made a table that breaks down the elements of the project and how I can achieve them.

STOWE FRAMEWORK “AT LARGE”	MA LEVEL
What do I want to do?	How can I test this?
Photo walks with adults	Small walks with a few people doing it independently with survey at end
Adults asked to look for typography they like	Small select group of adults
Target wide demographics to reflect Walthamstow	Make sure people are varied, but a smaller number
Adult asked to design glyph for themselves	This could be possible, but it will have to be independent rather than in a workshop and I would have to get more feedback about what went well and what needs improving
Area Survey photo walks	Go around myself to take photos like in GDE720
Photo competition	Could this launch the beginning of the full project and be formed from feedback?
Talks online with local typography experts such as archives, Bracey, Angry Dan	Interview them myself and publish. Ask them to design type/glyph/describe their favourite piece of type

NOW

It is heartening to see that what I achieved has broadly followed my plan: I have designed and published a range of workshops that people can take part in. Some of them are the same, for example the Area Survey walks, and some have been changed, such as glyph designing, as a result of the pandemic. I have jettisoned some ideas, such as the photo competition, for this stage as it felt like the project was becoming too broad.

I would have liked to reach more people with my workshops and am disappointed that I have not got more responses so far. It is hard to distinguish between the shortcomings of the workshops I designed and what is down to the pandemic. I’m going to do a more thorough review later in the project.

Reflection

It’s hard to put into words what the pandemic has done to everyone, and to see how it has affected my project has been tiring. I am excited about this project just feels like bad timing. It’s not what the people of Walthamstow need right now. I feel constrained by deadlines of the course and would ideally push it back until September to be able to get out into the world and engage with people in libraries and museums that are opening up as of today.

Next week

I will be free to concentrate fully on the outputs, and my plans are to:

• design more glyphs
• so that I can experiment with distorting them
• ensure that the type map is working because I’m not happy with it as is

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Week 7: Ethics Review

Feedback from Susanna

After seeking further advice from Falmouth and my line manager please see the info below.

* this is particularly for Anna, Alice N and Alice M but could apply to others.

If you are going to be working with community and social groups or those deemed as vulnerable (children, elderly, those with disability or illness)

• you should have a standard DBS check that you can seek yourselves (or equivalent if in another country)
• Seek specialist advice from experts/ people who work in these areas but don’t have vulnerabilities themselves such as
  • Local voluntary services
  • Charities
  • Professors/ experts in health/ medicine
  • Social services
  • Local council
• Consider the use of service design tools to remotely record – a cultural probe – set of questions, mobile devices that people use to record their day for example so you are not first hand collecting with vulnerable groups
• Adhere to local rules and legislation
• Create a focus group of experts from relevant areas to maintain regular checks and advice as your project progresses and checks every stage of delivery/ interaction to ensure the correct procedures are followed and documented.

So all of your ethics approval forms are good to go – but you must ensure you follow the above throughout your projects and communicate with Stuart and I regarding development.

Some of your consent forms will need adjusting once you have gained expert advice from the focus group/ experts in your field of investigation, as will some of your methods for gathering your research and user testing your work.

Great – this is really helpful. I need to change my forms slightly and write up my Workshops and send those over to Stuart and Susanna

Week 4: designing formative assessment

This week I helped Alice Neve to master Indesign as she felt that she needed a few tips and tricks to help her. It was incredibly satisfying to be able to help someone take the next step and ease their burden. Yes, there are tutorials over the internet, but I gave her a quick look over the features that she would be able to use rather than her grabbing various bitsI think she will use this as a springboard to further her skills.

Rethinking for MA Level

I’ve already established that I need to scale down this project, and make it a testing phase for a project that is run as a full-scale project. I made a table that breaks down the elements of the project and how I can achieve them.

STOWE FRAMEWORK “AT LARGE”	MA LEVEL
What do I want to do?	How can I test this?
Photo walks with adults	Small walks with a few people doing it independently with survey at end
Adults asked to look for typography they like	Small select group of adults
Target wide demographics to reflect Walthamstow	Make sure people are varied, but a smaller number
Adult asked to design glyph for themselves	This could be possible, but it will have to be independent rather than in a workshop and I would have to get more feedback about what went well and what needs improving
Area Survey photo walks	Go around myself to take photos like in GDE720
Photo competition	Could this launch the beginning of the full project and be formed from feedback?
Talks online with local typography experts such as archives, Bracey, Angry Dan	Interview them myself and publish. Ask them to design type/glyph/describe their favourite piece of type

Change the outcomes

My outcomes will therefore differ and be like so:

• Map of interesting typography
• Interviews with people from community about typography and social history
  • Chris Bracey and family
  • Angry Dan
  • Archivist
  • Show Owner – St James Street and other end of High Street
  • Graphic design student
  • Someone not artsy minded at all
• Ask them to contribute by designing glyphs
• Cyanotypes of found typography?

Formative Assessment

So, presentation week this week! I feel like I have overall graphic style nailed down, and a lot of the words written out that describe the project. I start from an old document:

• 

• 

… and then develop it. I add in a more structured design.

The time has also developed from my first submission …

… to a timeline taking into account the new process and resources needed.

I found the Ethical Review PDF difficult to handle, with not enough spaces for my answers, so I recreated it in Indesign (and passed a blank around the group. From this …

… to this

… to this:

Rather spiffy, eh?