What did I do this week? A quick summary!
To do next week:
As part of the project, I need to think about how am I going to show my work in my Studio Practice PDF. What is suitable? What is possible in the pandemic? I am sure this will develop over time and change, so I am starting to record it.
I’ve mentioned the Lettering and Lightbox project run by Rendezvous Project several times, and I think this a good place to start. They had several outcomes: an exhibition at the Nunnery Gallery, a booklet containing photos and interviews and a map of typography practices in the area.
I would love to do an exhibtion as a way to shawcase my project so far and to get people interested in contributing to a bigger, funded project. I would host it at The Mills community space or the Vestry House museum, free to visit, and show the images of typography, an interactive map of the area, and quotes from interviews:
It would serve as a showcase of work I have done and promotion for future projects. It is a very big outcome though, for which I don’t think I can accomplish in the time or my budget.
I could see if I could develop an online gallery in some way.
A bit like an artist’s book, this outcome would show a wide range of content, from the photos and interviews to a fold out map.
Graphically, the book could look like mockups I made for the previous module, but developed further, or start from scratch.
Now if I was being incredibly ambitious, i could create a VR experience where people can see information whilst they are walking around Walthamstow, kind of like my Filo’type idea. This is THE DREAM, but I’m not sure it’s attainable right now, because I would have to pay developers. This could definitely something that I could work into a larger project, like the Ex-Warner Project run by Rendezvous:
I like breaking things down by using post-it notes and laying it out. To work out how I was going to structure my workshops, I used this technique and video-ed it. Here’s a video of it:
I’ve spent some time drawing glyph forms fom inspiration I’ve found around Walthamstow. These are my sources images:
From there, I outlined the shapes I wanted and created some letterforms:
I’d like to go further and make a typeface inspired like this, but it’s not a top priority right now. These examples can be used for workshops to show participants how they can approach their tasks.
As part of my research, I’d like to send people out to conduct an area survey of sorts where they take photos of typography in the E17 postcode that interest them. As a break from the screen, I decided to conduct an area survey to address the tasks I would ask participants to do and what questions might come up.
In the E17 postcode there are three commercial hubs: the famous high street that is the longest in Europe, Wood Street and the Village. On a run last night, I ran along Wood Street and would like to go back, but decided to go to the Village today. For an Area Survey, I don’t expect participants to cover these areas, but thought that people would be drawn to those areas and where the typography would be intended to lure people/customers in.
I set myself a few rules:
https://www.strava.com/activities/4241676639/embed/091b62a1317824e183f584fa864a9968ed54399e
At first I wanted to take photos of everything, to record every piece of type. This was not possible, and with lots of people around I felt self-conscious and intrusive. I started to edit, and pick what I thought was interesting, thus following my own bias. On my own, I can never portray a nuanced account of typography in Walthamstow and participants from other backgrounds are essential to see what I overlook.
An hour is about right to capture a wide range of typography in about two miles without being too physically taxing or time-consuming. The area and demographics change significantly between streets and this can be captured in this hour.
I’d like the participants to take as many photos as they can, before choosing their favourite five, like our geo-type challenge. This means that they are exerting their insight and curatorial bias and many things can be told from that.
Although I can’t read other scripts apart from Latin, I’d like participants to feel free to record all and any scripts they find.
Once they have submitted photos, I would like them to answer some questions, some of which I have drafted below:
Looking at your photos, did you start to favour certain types of typography? Can you guess why that might have been?
Did you stick to a rough route, or did you let yourself wander?
What drew you off your expected route?
Did you find the typography you were expecting?
What surprised you?
What do you think the typography tells you about the area you surveyed?
What would you like to see more of?
I cam across this paper when I was researching for my Artefact submission in GDE720, and I was interested in its inclusion of multi-script type design. I’ve since delved deeper into it to see how it has approached its subject and what research methodologies it has used. It makes some great points about typography, and my project would sit in an adjacent spot to it. As such I have used as a springboard for my own research, rather than quoting from it too heavily.
This has been a great help for looking at how MA papers are structured and what they include, from interviews and chapters to research methodologies. I’d like my outcome to be more based on how to run a project, though it is very useful from a research standpoint. Of particular interest to me was:
Continuing on from last week, I shall further define and pull together my project based on these tasks:
Susanna recommended that I keep organised, and especially as this project is progressing I need to show this. I also want it to be outward facing to show the examiners what I’ve done, so I feel this blog is a good word processor to record things in, pull information from and draft submissions before refining my words in InDesign.
I am also going to be using Zotero to keep a record of formal references.
Report outline / plan is to be refined, and logistics of running your studio, practice based project must be defined (project management) as two A4 text documents
Experimental work and testing for your Studio Practice should be clearly presented and peer reviewed by a relevant external critic of your finding (creative directors, design studios, writers, journalists from within or beyond the subject), as befits the needs of the area of your proposal.
So, I hope that I’ll be able to get feedback from Artillery Arts, who run sessions in Walthamstow and are behind the wildly popular E17 Art trail. I’ve been waiting for a response from them for a while, and they have just replied to say that they have just managed to receive funding that will allow them to work again. I’ve arranged a 1-2-1 with them on 8th November, and need to get work to them before this to get feedback.
In addition to the case study presentation you need to provide an A4 written draft literature review that has academic integrity, a bibliography, a clear structure and role of appropriate histories and theories that contextualise and support your idea.
I’m starting to pull together references for my literature review and am starting with Alison Barnes, above, and with two references I found for my Artefact submission last term:
Or if you are writing a business orientated essay / report, make sure you integrate relevant market intel and data to support the positioning and viability of your project.
I want to get a test of a photo walk done before Week 8 as I think it will allow me to reflect on my methodology before presenting it. I’m hoping to get my flatmate Jess, who is not involved in typography and has English as her second language, involved as she answered my consumer research for the artefact and indicated that she would like to hear more about it.
Talking about that list, it’s probably time that I email the list of people who wanted to stay informed, and ask if they would like to be involved any further too.
I am trying to figure out how to academically describe my research methods. I started with planning out workshop ideas using post-it notes.
Alistair Hall of We Made This and I are going to have a chat week of November 8th, and I have got in touch with Joe again to see if he will help.
In our tutorial, Stuart suggested that he could put me in contact with a type designer called Maria Geals, who designed a typeface for her final MA project that “inspired by, and designed for, Wales and the Welsh to help facilitate the use of the declining language. Its aesthetics are culturally expressive yet practical and include the full set of glyphs required for bilingual typesetting. It is designed for long, immersive reading in both print and screen-based media.” (Quoted from here)
He also suggested that I look for people working at the Eye Magazine who specialise in typography writing, and I will do so.
I have also contacted the Bishopsgate Institute, Waltham Forest Archive and St Bride’s Foundation to see if I can chat to one of their archivists about typography and place.
By the end of this week you should be able to:
On this course I keep referring to Faber Futures, first as a local practice in Contemporary Futures and then a couple of weeks ago when we looked at mission statements. Why do I keep on coming back to it? It’s an amazing project that uses genetic and biological solutions to dye fabrics in a sustainable way.
For the project, Coelicolor, featured above, Faber Futures worked in collaboration with Professor John Ward and his synthetic biology lab at University College London’s Department of Biochemical Engineering, They discovered that unique interactions between S. coelicolor and protein fibres could yield a colourfast finish without the use of chemicals – and with significantly reduced water usage compared to current industrial dyeing methods.
From there, Faber Futures went on to create the first DNA labelled specimen in the Forbes Pigment Collection. Working in collaboration with Michael Napolitano, a design engineer at Ginkgo Bioworks, Faber Futures “has explored emerging DNA-based data storage techniques to encode a contextual explanation of the project, the organism’s complete genome, and information about its potential applications, including textile dyeing.”
Design, I think, is all about imagination about new ways to show the world around us, real or speculative.
I would argue that all jobs are creative in their own way: creative with words, with numbers, with colours, with strategy; and all roles require that people think in novel combinations of these creativities. We can do things as we did before, but without that spark between flints in a cave, that spark of understanding of our place in the sky, we would not have progressed as a species. Everyone is creative and uses their imagination to different purposes and extents.
Sometimes, imagination isn’t enough to realise an idea. A sketch is the start and designers won’t have all the skills to being their idea to life. They reach out to other people with different skills to help them, whether on a small scale like printers to display their work, a traditional illustrator/designer pairing, or a more radical collaboration called Interdisciplinary collaborations.
Human knowledge is one huge ocean that gradually we have put up (shifting) boundaries between disciplines. It can be enough to swim around with the rest of the water in the same pond, but to make truly startling innovations, we need to jump into other ponds. Is that enough analogy?
Faber Futures could not have progressed with their projects without the collaboration of scientists who were able to contribute their expertise and knowledge to further the projects. Would the scientists have thought of these possibilities on their own? Maybe, maybe not. Would Faber Futures have been able to do this without them? Maybe, if they had retrained as in that field to great expense and time cost. The collaboration brought their skills together that would not have been as possible otherwise.
… I found it harder to engage with than other weeks but here are my thoughts.
The lecture started with a recap of Bauhaus, a school of design that allowed students to pass between and over the disciplines as they studied to create an overall experience rather than a specialism. I’m sure some people leaned to one interest or another, and being educated together in the same schools would have fostered collaborations.
With Dr Ian Medway and Katie Mae Boyd, Louize Harries created a project that borrowed inspiration from apocryphal crises with a drone that rained red when the air pollution in the area breached the EU air quality limits. This was a proof of concept project, rather than a fully realised project, and has a similar aim to Anub Jain’s air-quality presentation for the UAE energy board.
Drones are becoming a popular way for designers to explore large 3D areas and can provide many functions. Still, drones are not ubiquitous and to navigate the legal frameworks and immense physical space with humans and other 3D objects would require a whole other set of people well versed in these subjects. For the drone-vigilante project “The Night Watchmen” by Anub Jain that tracked and monitored people around an area, it was the consideration of what kind of society would allow a piece of equipment to be used in this way? The suggestion that this is what the combination of drone and facial recognition technology could do is enough for us to decide whether we want to transform into a society that sanctions this. For Harries’ drone project, to create a fleet of drones that would rain red would be extremely difficult and unpopular with the people it rained upon. The concept was evidence to show the world we are living in now and to draw attention to the issue, a call to action to change.
Referring to a different project of Jain’s, she has stated that because the world seems to be moving too fast and we are experiencing a disconnect with our future. For the air-quality presentation to the UAE energy board, she wanted to bring the reality of poor quality air into a concrete example.. Most of us know that using more cars and unsustainable energy sources will result in poor air quality, but how many of us truly understand this? Jain created flasks of air simulated to match potential airs in the future. By breathing in the noxious air, a bridge was built between the disconnect of the future and now.
Side note: since the pandemic of Covid-19, lockdowns across the world have drastically reduced traffic in cities and meant that people can experience the effect that poor vs good air quality can have. Mountains can be seen from cities that hadn’t seen the ranges for generations, the air felt cleaner to breathe. I hope that it serves as a starting point from which we can start discussions and change our actions.
To be honest, I didn’t connect with the rest of the projects and videos,. I tried! There must be many more examples of projects and maybe they will come through in my workshop challenge. What did strike me, though, is the necessity of collaborations between designers and any other discipline to spark an idea of a new future, to challenge the knowledge and the skills to bring it to life.
To start off this week, I went on a mission to the local library to see what they had on the local area. Here is what I picked up:
I know that Vestry House Museum, a former workhouse in the area, holds a vast archive of local history, and so I have made an appointment to go there next Saturday (it was too late to go yesterday).
Looking through the books that I picked up, I found some interesting information that could go on to form the basis of my article:
Today, I went on a “structured wander” around the area. My first place to visit was The Mills”, a community centre by St James Street. They have a space for children, sports activities, a lending library, and an exhibition by local artists.
They have a sewing group on Thursdays that I might start to attend so that I can get to know more people in the area.
I picked up a copy of the local paper, the Walthamstow Echo, whose front page covers the maternity cover for the MP Stella Creasey. The area is very artistic, and murals can be seen everywhere, here are some I saw today:
And look at the purple silver sparkly house!
Near my house, the railway bridge has been painted with William Morris-esque patterns by the local primary school, as well as some amazing yarn bombing on the bollards. There’s a soldier, a snowman, a Tardis. I’m not sure if they are associated with the primary school, but they definitely brighten up the area!
Next up was the Pump House Museum. Originally a pump house, obviously, for Thames Water and Sewage, it has been listed and converted into a museum displaying fire brigade history, transport history and local inventions.
The first duplicator for offices was developed in Walthamstow, saving typists hours of time copying documents.
Next up was a walk around the Wetlands. I wanted to go to the Copper Mill Pump House on the Wetlands but it was closed thanks to the storms over the weekend.
Since the development of the water treatment works and the local ordnances to prevent industry polluting the rivers, the Wetlands have been established as a centre to protect and regenerate the wildlife in the area. Look how clean the water is! You can also fish here.
The Wetlands gave me a great view over London…
With the water treatment plant in the foreground, you can see the economic hubs in the background, Isle of Dogs (Canary Wharf) to the left and the City on the right.
I didn’t realise how close Alexandra Palace was either.
This part of London is very suburban, with most buildings being residential or low-rise industrial. So, where tall buildings are developed they are very visible. They are mostly residential blocks built next to the transport stations: Walthamstow, Blackhorse Road and Tottenhale, see the images below:
Following the transport link, the borough is trying to encourage people to cycle more, building Quiet Cycle routes and measuring their usage:
From the research I have done so far, the common themes I have seen are arts and craft and transport, both through the centuries. Why is this? More research will reveal…
Links to follow up:
http://www.walthamstowmemories.net/html/losttrades.html
https://walthamforestecho.co.uk/the-mums-who-made-homework-pay/
To see my general research, please go to my CRJ post for this week.
Research and find two possible stories that reflect a viewpoint of your own town, city or locale.
After posting initial ideas on the wall, Stuart and Syed helped me to narrow it down to two: the history of London Rubber Company and the brand Durex, and the legacy of the Olympic games in Waltham Forest.
London Rubber Company
Olympic Legacy
The winning bid for the Olympic and Paralympic Games 2012 was
In comparison to other cities
[TBD]
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.
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.
Running is the way in which I process my thoughts and allow myself to open up to new ideas and how to share them. Many a workshop challenge has been conceived and developed on my feet, with the environment outside my bubble intruding to spark my inspiration. My project is a play based on a recent run, comprising of three acts (lap) and scenes as each kilometre marker. As I process the project and my recent research of the printing in Walthamstow, I recall my stream of consciousness with lyrics and sounds from race officials interjecting, with the narratives interacting as they do in my mind.
Collaborate through group discussions on the Ideas Wall.
Research strategies and project plans used by agencies to reach a global audience. Share your findings on the Ideas Wall and elaborate in your blog.
Although this is not a joined strategy (that I can find), the extended opening hours of museums and cultural institutions seen in London has echoed around the world. In Moscow, opening hours extending beyond 6pm have long been considered normal, with some institutions regularly open until 10pm. The first documented late night opening was Night of the Arts in Helsinki, Finland, in 1989.
In London, museums such as the Tate, Science Museum, V&A and Natural History Museum regularly open their gallery doors once a month to allow adults to explore after work and without children. That the days don’t clash indicate that there has been collaboration between the institutions but not a project plan put forward as you might expect.
Often, each night revolves around a certain theme to give each night a focus and to keep the size manageable. Guests are not allowed free range around the museum, and only certain galleries are open to contain the spread of visitors. The main tickets are free, with some reasonably priced VIP tickets with added perks on top to skip queues.
With a growing young population of teetotal young people, and a number who want their social life not to revolve around drinking alcohol, the Lates offer an experience where alcohol is available but not the main focus, where art and culture blend to form an educational and entertaining experience. Music is a key point, with silent discos and DJs being offered at most venues.
I can’t find figures about the increase of visitors that have resulted from Lates nights, however, given that the Science Museum attracts 4,000 people to each of its Lates, it could be far to say that they are reaching young adults who are otherwise on employment when the museum is open.
Lates are offered around the world from US, Mexico, Australia, Russia, Finland and are now seen as an integral part of museum strategy to increase reach, diversify visitors and become community hubs.
Musee de Louvre in Paris, Europe’s most visited museum, paired up with AirBnb to offer two people an overnight stay in a custom-built pyramid within the famous pyramids and a bespoke tour of the museum.
Given the trend for experiences over possessions, the collaboration works as advertising for both institution and Airbnb to encourage travellers to seek out new experiences that are usually available to leaders of state and celebrities. It shows Airbnb as a company that is global and local and the service to use for an intimate travel experience whilst the Louvre is seen as more accessible to everyday visitors: if you can sleep there, you can be comfortable there.
This experience is part of a series of experiences and concerts to be won through airBnb.
Distill your research to develop your own strategy and project plan for the selected project brief. Write a draft of your strategy and project plan and post it to your blog.
The different methods that John Stack showed us in the tutorial were fascinating, and I plan to map them out to see if there is a gap between what has been considered already.
My main aim is to build a narrative around the images and to allow viewers of the collections to build their own too. The Chrome extension that the Science Museum has developed to show the beauty of randomness.
I would also like to place the items in historical and social context. What memories do people have of the items? What were they produced at the same time as? What similarities are there with other disciplines? How does it fit into human history?
Communicate the rationale for your strategy and project plan to be delivered through a five slide Keynote presentation. Record yourself outlining the rationale over five Keynote slides and upload the presentation to your blog.
Anna Robinette 