Laurel's SCAD Blog

The most profound thing I’ve learned about myself in this class is to be more aware of my unhealthy design habits: whether that means jumping to the computer before sketching, not taking time to fully engage my design process, or being overly hard on myself due to my perfectionist disposition. I’ve learned that in order to create a sense of disruptive wonder, you often have to think about things in a totally new way, challenging not only cliches and stereotypes but the very method you have of working. I’ve learned to try to foster a way of “thinking wrong” as we talked about, and I’ve started to approach my design problems from many different angles. Perhaps most of all, I’ve learned to be less afraid of brainstorming; to get as many ideas out and on paper as I can so that I can start seeing patterns and sifting through the “ugly.” My perspective on the practice of design has changed in that I view it now more, now than ever, as a journey. This journey is filled with winding roads and dead ends and beautiful, unexpected waterfalls along the way. One thing I’ve also really enjoyed is the amount of time that we spend on each project. Working over a project over the course of a few weeks not only challenges you to stay on task, but helps you to appreciate every stage of development, not just the finished product.

I really enjoyed how in Project A, we had to find commonalities between totally unrelated words. This was helpful to me in that I was able to think about words through not only their literal meaning, but in historical context, in puns, and in relationship to larger cultural issues. I never thought I’d see a connection between coffee and drones, but alas, there was! That project also opened my eyes to social issues I wasn’t as educated on. Starting my own twitter profile and gaining followers was challenging, but very rewarding. I’ve been amazed that as the weeks have progressed, I’ve continued to acquire more interest in the project. The immediacy and relevance of social media is definitely something I want to explore more in the future as it relates to design. Lastly, the interaction online among my classmates has been, as always, really engaging and rewarding. Before I started the eLearning program, I feared that the online platform would not foster the kind of camaraderie that you get when you see people face to face. I’m happy to report that I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the quality and amount of feedback we get from each other and the professor. All of our busy lives coupled with the time differences between us sometimes make it difficult to connect quickly, but there are still usually plenty of opportunities to have great critiques. I look forward to growing in my creative process even further, as I know this is a lifelong journey.

In the video we watched this week, Malcolm McLaren describes a “moment of performance” as the result of a “karaoke culture,” where people are more concerned with creating a temporary spectacle than fostering lasting change that comes from an authentic noble pursuit.¹ The media seems to be saturated with instant stars whose talents and ideas are fleeting and disposable. McLaren points out that few people are willing to go through the real struggles of the creative process. He goes on to describe how this lack of investment frees them of all responsibility for their work. If one trick doesn’t work, they simply move on to another.

I think one of the biggest things I took away from the video involves this idea of risk. The more I invest in my creative process, both from an idea and time standpoint, the greater fear I have of failure. As a result, I tend to make design decisions based on what’s worked in the past, and therefore it is hard to foster a moment of disruptive wonder. At my job, I measure my success by how much of something I designed can sell. At school, I find it tempting to constantly check my grades. This idea of quantifying your risk, the results, and your investment can quickly become over calculated. As soon as I begin to doubt, I have the tendency to abandon an idea. I think this really cuts my creative process short because often I am unwilling to walk through the valley of failure. This is something I’ve really been challenged to confront this week after watching the video.

I came across a great article in Print magazine that highlights what the author believes to be the five stages of ideation. The illustration and explanation can be seen below:

Stage 1: Possibility

You’re coming up with all the easy stuff. You might have some interesting starter ideas, but really, you probably have nothing. It feels like fun, free-range exploration. You’re probably saying to yourself, “Here’s a cool idea. Here’s another one. And another. Man, I’m pretty good.”

Stage 2: Doubt

As you begin to look at your ideas more closely, you realize, um… they’re actually not that great. Doubt sets in and uncertainty set in. You might become defensive, and start questioning the process, and yourself.

Stage 3: Agony

The most grueling of all steps in the creative process, this stage is a red-blooded struggle. Nothing seems to work. Your co-workers get stressed by the perceived lack of progress. You worry that you’ll be exposed as a hack. Ughhh. Suddenly, the whole project seriously sucks.

Stage 4: Epiphany

You’ve done it! You’ve just invented a big, new idea. With a burst of energy and relief, your breakthrough has happened.

Stage 5: Finesse

Now you’re crafting the raw idea to be more strategic and purposeful. Your skill and training really begins to shine through, as you hone and refine your concept into the best possible execution. Now you gain momentum with focused, purposeful engagement. The goal is in sight.²

 

 

At the end of the article, she encourages designers and clients to allow for enough time and space to, “embrace the struggle of the Agony.” I know some of my classmates are having a hard time understanding the idea that design always has to be a struggle, but I think this article sums it up well. I really believe that anything worth creating will make you, at some point, want to quit. It should be hard and humbling because that’s how you learn to filter out the bad ideas, and keep the good ones. It’s only then that we can embrace failure, as McLaren proclaims, and truly embark on a noble pursuit.

[1] Malcolm McLaren, “Reflections on Learning” (2009), Video.

[2]Hogshead, Sally. “The 5 Stages of Your Creative Process.” Print, 2012.

The project we are working on about fairy tales is fascinating to me because it’s been all about story. Narratives make up so much of our daily lives, from the books we read our children to the shows we watch on TV; stories are how we discover the world around us. They have a powerful role in our lives to define gender roles, help us overcome conflict, and show us who the heroes are. And almost every story has a “moral” to it. The moral is what we are supposed to gain from the journey of the characters; what lesson it illustrates. The moral of The Beauty and the Beast is that true beauty comes from within. Cinderella makes us fight for the underdog, proving that magic can happen even to the most ordinary of people. Romeo and Juliet teaches us that love is more powerful than hate.

As designers, we are often helping to create a narrative through our work. Whether it is with an advertising campaign, the creation of a brand, or building a user-friendly website, we are taking our audience on a journey. In this journey, we often make assertions of right and wrong, good and better, and beneficial and useless. Most of our audience, unlike young children, have already formed opinions about what they believe politically and culturally. We have the unique opportunity, though, to confront stereotypes, challenge misinformation, and reform behavior.

The videos this week were a fascinating look at how designers can reflect on, engage with, and retell stories using technology in the light of cultural context. I was extremely engaged by the last video, in which Taryn Simon explained the powerful role of setting in her photographs. A few of us discussed on the message boards the importance of editing in revealing information. Even in a photograph, which many to believe is a means to “record” an event  (not to retell it), we have the opportunity to focus in on a certain element of a story. We are freezing a moment in time and manipulating the viewer into seeing what we see. We cannot lose sight of our role as designers to create meaning with what we present, whether that meaning is intentional or not.

The fairy tale I have chosen to “retell” through my project is The Princess and the Pea. Some may say that the simplest lesson to be learned from this story is that it’s the little things that matter in the end. As a designer, my job is to be intentional about communication. I have an ethical responsibility to tell a story with dignity and respect. I have to at all times consider my audience, and make sure I always look out for the little things. Like punctuation in a letter, a typeface,  color, photograph or shape has the power to change meaning. I was reminded of that by this letter I came across, punctuated differently in two instances:

Dear John:
I want a man who knows what love is all about. You are generous, kind, thoughtful. People who are not like you admit to being useless and inferior. You have ruined me for other men. I yearn for you. I have no feelings whatsoever when we’re apart. I can be forever happy–will you let me be yours?
Gloria

Dear John:
I want a man who knows what love is. All about you are generous, kind, thoughtful people, who are not like you. Admit to being useless and inferior. You have ruined me. For other men, I yearn. For you, I have no feelings whatsoever. When we’re apart, I can be forever happy. Will you let me be?
Yours, Gloria¹

Designers are not always the author of our stories. We do, however, have the unique opportunity to punctuate it. Sometimes, that can make all the difference.

[1] “The Importance Of “Correct Punctuation”.” Accessed February 24, 2013. http://cmgm.stanford.edu/~lkozar/punctuation.html.

Kelli Anderson provides innovative examples of challenging the design status quo in her lecture, “Disruptive Wonder for a Change.” She takes very ordinary artifacts: a Christmas card, a wedding invitation, and a newspaper, and gives them new life by questioning their purpose, the materials she uses to create them, and their social relevance. While I am familiar with challenging the design process in order to break away from our heuristic biases, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it engaged quite like Anderson does it in this video.

I watch a lot of cooking competition shows, and there almost always seems to be one challenge where the contestants are asked to “deconstruct” a classic dish. This is usually a staple, something everyone is familiar with, like chicken pot pie, for example. They often use most, if not all of the original ingredients in the dish, but they find a new way to present it that is exciting and unexpected. This seems to be at the heart of what Anderson is suggesting. The parts and pieces of what she wants to communicate stay the same, but she bends the materials and context to repurpose the message and give it new life.

I am certainly open to disruptive wonder, but I don’t always invite it the way I should. When I open Illustrator and set the artboard to 3.5 x 2 inches, I make a decision about what I believe a business card is. It may be a perfectly reasonable and appropriate decision, but it is not the only option out there. In fact, I did a little research and I came across a site with some very creative solutions for business cards. You can check them out here:
http://creativecriminals.com/compilations/creative-business-cards/. One of my favorites was this one, designed for a house painting company:

One reason I think that I find it challenging to engage in “disruptive wonder” is that I’ve been essentially designing in the same medium for most of my career. When I design a tee shirt, I know for one, that it is a tee shirt, and secondly, that I can’t design larger than a 12 x 16 rectangle. I know that the design must be less than 8 or 9 colors, and that it has to be printed in ink, and that it must able to withstand 400 degree heat. Sometimes our materials will provide inevitable and unavoidable boundaries. This is the nature of living in a physical world.

That doesn’t mean, however, that we can’t question the way we go about communicating the message. After all, Anderson still made a wedding invitation with classic materials, like paper and vellum, but was able to transform it into an experience. She does this first by questioning what is at the heart of the message. What makes her friends unique? What is exciting about their story? Second, she asks how the materials can support this story she is trying to tell. She doesn’t show off simply for the sake of being flashy, but rather it supports her overall communicative goals. What really makes this design work is the narrative it tells: a story of meeting, love, learning, making music and growing old together.

The three words of focus for my Exploration A were coffee, drone and arrest. After making lists and brainstorming on the related words, I began to draw out my mind maps. I started by drawing three separate maps (one for each word). I then took what I thought to be the more meaningful themes and made a mind map across two pages in my sketchbook incorporating all three words in one map.

I was really surprised to find that there were connections that I completely did not expect. As I moved on towards different explorations on these connections, I kind of got stuck on the aspect of the coffee cup, especially as it relates to environmental waste. Though excess and waste connected somewhat with arrest and drone, the three words weren’t as unified in my initial design ideas as they needed to be. They were instead focused more on getting people to recognize that paper coffee cups were bad for the environment and that they should instead choose a ceramic mug at popular coffee shops like Starbucks.

At the urging of my classmates and professor, I went back to square one and redrew my mind map with the bigger picture in mind. Once I did this, I found a connection with each word to the idea of “necessary evils.” Americans have grown accustomed to accepting injustice if we believe it to be a byproduct of our acquisition of wealth or maintaining the status quo of our comfortable lives. Pollution is a “necessary evil” of convenience. Innocent lives lost are a “necessary evil” of war. Crime is a “necessary evil” of poverty. From the waste of paper cups at Starbucks to the racial imbalance in our prison population, there are things going on in our world that we simply cannot sit back and allow to continue. My aim was to set up a social media outlet where I could connect with others who share these views and bring awareness to social justice issues. Twitter seemed to be the most appropriate venue for this, so I set up a @notallevils account where I have been tweeting images, quotes and retweeting thoughts of others on some of the issues I discovered in my mind maps.

Overall, I was really happy with the branding of my campaign, and I think it captured the essence of what I was trying to communicate. The time constraints have made it difficult to gain too much momentum as far as an audience goes, but I’ve managed to acquire over 30 followers in less than a week. Many of these I gained through following almost 300 others. As far as social media goes, starting the initial wave is definitely the hardest part. Companies and non-profits usually spend hours upon hours every day for months developing online relationships and responding quickly to comments and inquiries. Long term, I would like to encourage others to use the hashtag #notallevils when talking about injustices they see. The hope is that instead of blind acceptance, people would start to question our role in creating or aiding these social problems.

One thing I think I could have done better was refine my individual posts a little more. There are places where I wish I could have spent a little more time on the details, but at the same time, I wanted to make sure I had quantity as well as quality. In the temporary world of online media, frequency of posts is also important.

I made stickers that have the logo and a QR code that goes to the twitter site. I would have liked to have been able to spread those around town a little more. I love the idea of people being intrigued by the icon and scanning the code to find out more. This would provide an easy route to connect and share with a larger base of people. This type of campaign reminds me of the Occupy movement or the Andre the Giant Obey stickers. If done properly, it can have a lot of traction.

I would have also liked to provide an avenue for for people to connect with organizations that are already in place and who are fighting these injustices. Perhaps if the site were to grow, the tweets could be linked to websites where people could go and donate or volunteer. It could be a hub for information, photos, videos, facts, and links.

To check out the progress and follow along, check out https://twitter.com/NotAllEvils.

What an appropriate title for this unit! It seems that many of my classmates, myself included, have found ourselves going back to the drawing board. We have each showed our shares of pretty and some ugly as well. Although I have to admit this at first seemed like a symptom of failure, I realize now that it is really just process at work. In order to confront our heuristic biases and normal ways of achieving solutions, we sometimes have to walk through the difficult task of forming ideas and throwing them away. I didn’t realize how attached I was to looking at literal solutions to solving problems in design. Maybe I’ve watched too many episodes of Madmen or I’ve just been communicating in the corporate world for too long, but I constantly find myself trying to force clever taglines for my solutions. Sometimes as designers, our goal will not be to “sell” but rather to “speak.” I am trying now to take a step back and see more meaningful connections between my three words “coffee,” “drone,” and “arrest.” This project is particularly challenging because of the broadness of it and because of the short time limit to execute the final product. I’m sure I’m not alone among my classmates in that in my profession I often have much clearer outlines of what is expected of me in regard to both content and media. This project, however, is wide open! The amazing thing is that though our words seem like they couldn’t be more different than each other, many of us are exploring the same themes. Some are confronting gender issues, while others are addressing poverty or environmental concerns.

I’m happier with my ideas the second time around, though I haven’t finished fleshing them out visually yet. Who knows, I may end up back at the drawing board again before I achieve my “pretty.” I love reading through the dialogue on the discussion board. Everyone is really passionate about their projects, and you can tell simply by the number of posts! Even when I read comments on others’ works, it is causing me to think about my own work in a new way. In the end, our ideas will have to communicate to a broader audience, and this group is a perfect test for that. It’s also reassuring to see that we’re all in the same boat, navigating these challenges together.

Confronting my heuristic biases has been a major objective of mine in the past week as I’ve worked to further develop the associations from our three words.  I think the most challenging part of this task is that the visual aspect of designing has taken a back seat to exploring the literal meaning of the words and what they represent. It’s easier to think about these objects in a linear way, listing synonyms and popular contextual elements. Finding how these things intersect and planning for those commonalities has challenged my process at its core. One of my biggest roadblocks is that I tend to jump to the end stage of a final visual form. I rush immediately into thinking about size, color and medium before I fully develop my ideas conceptually. I’m not a disciplined sketcher, and SCAD has really been challenging me in that area.

I misunderstood the directions at first and worked on three separate visual maps of each of the words. After I had done this, the thought of trying to find ways to tie them together seemed really forced. I mean, after all, what does being arrested have to do with drinking coffee, or even worse, a drone? However, once I started to look at these concepts all on the same page, I discovered how many crossovers there really were! The human mind is an amazing thing, and it’s great how we can pull new things from both or spoken language and our visual one.  I am still struggling on refining my visual map and making sure the arrows connect in all the ways I want them to. Finding the unexpected even in objects we interact with every day seems to be the subject a lot of what we’re reading, and one of the main ideas behind this project. I look forward to see how things continue to take shape as we play and discover new things.

This word association portion of this project has been exciting and challenging in a few different ways. I’m not sure I’ve done these long lists since my creative writing class in high school! I remember back then, we’d start off each class with the teacher holding up an object, and we’d write as much as we could for a minute or two while she timed us. The first time we did it, I had 6 or 7 words. By the end of the class, I was having to flip my sheet of paper over from writing so much. We’d get extra points if we were able to make a leap in our list, like jumping form a word that sounds the same but means two different things (i.e. bear vs. bare). During part 2, the pressure of the clock ticking in Blackboard added some extra anxiety. I found myself wanting to edit my list and not just type everything that comes to mind. I wonder if I had written them on paper if that would have made it easier to be “free.”

Adding to our classmate’s lists felt sort of the same to me, but came a little easier since we had a defined amount of words (10-20) and no time limit to complete the task. With both parts of the project, I had a hard time venturing from the expected synonyms of the word. I tried to force myself to take a step back from the thing as an object and view it within the context of how we use it in culture. I found it easier to make connections that were based on actions: for example, one of my classmate’s words was iPhone. I tried to list things that I would do with that phone, like call or text. It’s amazing how many different ways we can use one device! I’m excited to see how this project evolves, and how our collaboration can challenge and expand our creative processes.