Fourth Year: Image for Degree Show

Being under a bit of pressure to get the project to a certain state of completion for a hand in this Friday is no easy task. We have to submit what our project is and an image of it to DJCAD so they can prepare a booklet/website/mobile application for the degree show.

With having problems with the paint, I have had to mock mine up quickly and then photoshop it to how I would have really wanted it. It isn’t the most elegant of solutions but it should suffice for this particular deadline. My ‘one great image’ hand in will be taken again but it will basically be the same as the one shown below.

 

Here is the before:

Here is the after:

University: Things to Look Out For If You Go To Art School.

I know there are already so many posts out there telling you what to do and what not to do when you go to university, one of which I even had a part in writing (here, but to most things, not all is what it seems. There are general annoyances which on the face of it may seem obvious but you don’t really expect them to happen to you. They do and you will get annoyed. Whilst quite a lot of this will share many of the same points made in the one I linked to, but there are some other ones I am going to reference.

So without further ado, I shall begin:

• Don’t take anybody for granted as doing this means you are not developing your own skills for independence and for sourcing information or materials yourself.
• Always be aware of other people taking you for granted, but if you are aware of it, try and remove their dependance on you. It isn’t good for you and it will only hold you back.
• Be careful as to who you show your work to, especially if it is online. Art school is rife of a minority of people who are going to copy what you are doing. Whilst the majority of people are legit and would only like to see what you have done to give you criticism, there are others who will take what you have done and try and blag it as their own and will do so in various levels of “copying”. If you are asked for help, try not to show definitively what you have done as it may come back to bite you later on.
• Keep a close eye on the work you post online. Some websites have clauses in their usage when you sign up to them where you basically say they can use your work without permission. Most of the popular sites are ok, but be wary. If you do upload anything, remember to resize it and try and put a watermark on it. The same sort of thing works with videos etc. I know I don’t really put watermarks on things at the moment, but as I am fast approaching graduation, I am going to start making an effort when uploading to the likes of flickr.
• Don’t let your ego get in the way. Art school is one of the places where you are most likely to get any commissioned work if you keep a good online presence. HOWEVER, for those that do get a piece of paid work from outside of their studies, there is a chance that some of them will rub it in your face. I have managed to keep a hold of the sporadic pieces that I have done for Top Gear magazine so much that very little people know about them. Yes I will mention it occasionally on the likes of Twitter, but that is only because there are a handful of people who are interested and would like to know. Keep everything understated and you will be good.
• If you have an interest in something, don’t go on about it all the time. All this does is annoy people. This is an obvious one, but it is one that people tend to ignore themselves. Personally, I keep tight lipped most of the time unless I am questioned about it. A different view to this is to try and not get drawn into other peoples conversations if they are talking about something you know about, unless you can provide a good enough reason to chime in.
• Try and avoid lending your supplies to others. It isn’t fair on you to lend your things unless they reciprocate the gesture later on. This is an extension of the comment above about not letting anybody take advantage of you, but it has a deeper thought to it. You will likely be on a limited budget at University, and spending too much on supplies such as Spray Mount or pens will only eat away at your bank account.
• Don’t go to art school expecting never to write anything again. There will come a time when you need to do a written piece such as a dissertation and if you want to become self employed when you leave, you will only have to write more! Blogging is good in a way, but unless you get readers to comment on what you have written, you won’t know if what you have written makes sense, is grammatically correct and is just plain good.
• Keep a look out for lectures from guests. Just because you are in art school does not mean you do not have to do any lectures, in art school they are can be quite important. Visiting lecturers are good because they can give you an outside opinion, often from the viewpoint of industry, as to what your course or another course in your school is really like, and this can give everything much more depth.
• Make sure nobody invades your personal space. If you are working in the studio or in the library, one of the worst things and most annoying things that anybody could do is to invade your personal space. In short it makes you feel confined, especially if they aren’t even doing any work and are just mucking about on the internet or on Facebook…
• Try and do work or projects that you will enjoy. This is much easier than other courses because you are given briefs and in most cases you can really put your stamp on it. Making sure you are enjoying yourself is one of the main things about art school, if you don’t, you won’t get anywhere.

I hope you didn’t get bored reading this, and I hope it didn’t seem too negative. Sometimes things need to be said in order for it to become apparent. On the whole, art school is enjoyable and you will meet some wonderful people. This is definitely not a definitive list, but it is a start.

Fourth Year: Week 9 Summary

Week 9. The official start of Phase 1. This phase will take us up to the start of week 1 or 2 in Semester 2. I’ll have to think of a better way of naming the summaries by that point. With Phase 0 out the way, we can get on with our projects and everything becomes a lot more personal with the way we are going to work and the projects we are going to do. I am sure I will go into that in more detail in later posts so on I go with the summary.

• Monday: Studio day. The first day of phase 1. Our first task was to have decided which of the three briefs we were wanting to take forward into the next phase and then to update the brief board that was presented on Ideas Day so it incorporated better what we wanted to do. We were also asked to come up with a personalised phase 1. We weren’t told specifics of what needed to be included, but we know that Phase 2 is the making of the project. On top of that, taking into consideration that we will likely have at least two weeks off for Christmas also needed to be factored in to the timetable we made ourselves.
• Tuesday: Studio day. We were continuing on with updating the board and the plan for Phase 1. I had got these pretty much finished on the Monday, so I spent quite a lot of Tuesday planning out what I was wanting to do for the ideas and I started doing some research. I am going to be doing another 100 ideas and should hopefully get them finished by the end of week 10. Towards the end of the day, work slowed down and as I was considering heading back to my flat, I was cornered by my dissertation advisor who wanted to speak to me then instead of our agreed Wednesday morning, so that was an hour well spent instead of doing nothing!
• Wednesday. Despite the fact I was meant to have a meeting with my dissertation advisor in the morning but it was changed on the Tuesday, I carried on with dissertation work. With less than a month until hand in, it is taking up most of my attention at the moment, unlike others who I have only found out, who have only started writing it. In the afternoon/early evening I got further feedback on my dissertation from my dad, who gave me some more things to do on it. But the more people who read it over the better.
• Thursday: I didn’t really do much work on this day but I was on my feet for a very long time. In the morning I went in to help someone use the laser cutter which acted well as a refresher on how to use it. I am planning on going in to use it sometime before Christmas but I can’t remember for the life of me, what I was wanting to do. The rest of the day consisted of quickly going into town, and back to the flat before heading out quickly yet again. By the time I got in and sat down to attempt to do some more work on my dissertation, I was too tired so I sat and caught up on TV that I had missed over the past week.
• Friday: Not a lot happened. It was spent mostly making the changes to the dissertation that I had been advised to and starting to put ideas down on paper for my 100 ideas. Highly uninteresting I know, but at least I am not getting the feeling that I am falling behind.

There you go. Week 9. Mainly an uninteresting week, but it has been a week that more has been achieved than I would have thought. The next week will be crucial in hitting the ground running in Phase 1 so I can make good progress before December is on top of us.

Fourth Year: Summarising Area with a Picture

On Monday we were asked to summarise our chosen area with an image along with a haiku. This was for the following day so we didn’t have long to do this. I enrolled the help of a friend studying at Abertay University to be in the photo.

It basically shows someone with a split personality and how colour can change someone.

#193 Designing Interactions: A Review of Sorts

My writing for my dissertation was done in a somewhat unorthodox manner and one which I know my adviser will not be too chuffed about to say the least, but I think it works. Instead of going straight into reading books and taking time to read through numerous ones before I put pen to paper, or in the case nowadays, fingers to keyboard, I took my proposal, which was already aiming straight and true in the direction that I was wanting to write about, took parts of it, and in a way, expanded them. Alongside, I would use all the internet based references found in the proposal along with others that I had bookmarked along the way, and wrote what I could call a first draft. Six thousand plus words in about a week, or if it is compressed into time of writing, about four days.

Now that the first draft is written using about fifty percent of the material I was hoping to use (alongside a rudimentary email based interview with a lecturer on Automotive design at Coventry University) I have started to read all the physical material that I hope to fully cement details and information in my writing. For most of the books, it is not the first time I have read them. For my proposal drafts, I read certain chapters of books in order to harvest the information I needed there and then, and it was more often than not, information regarding to the topic I was reading. Now, when I am going through the books again, I am reading it all, cover to cover, even if the information is not directly related to what I am writing about.

The first book that I have fully completed, and made basic notes about/from, is Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge. It is not an easy book to start with either at almost eight hundred pages. It is a retrospective of interacting with computers from the early days of Douglas Engelbart working at the Stanford Research Institute where he invented the computer mouse, leading through the process in the eighties of the creation of the subject of Interaction Design, right up until modern day technology and beyond. It details many different designers and showcases a lot of varied pieces of work that have in one way or another influenced the face of interaction design and even design in general.

Whilst there were small mentions about vehicles scattered throughout the book, the parts which I found most interesting were in the early chapters of the book. The early days of humans interacting with machines. It was in these chapters that I ended up making most notes about. The notes were, I should point out, basically a page number, where on the page the piece of information was that I found interesting, and a quick note to jog my memory when I look through them. Even though these chapters do not relate directly to what I am writing about, or even relate at all, I can make comparisons. Comparisons using examples that people can relate to themselves was a hint that I was told would help make my final dissertation stand out against everyone else’s.

One of the chapters I found least influential as I read through the book, and this came as a surprise to me, as I was very tempted to skip this chapter completely was about the future interactions, or to give it the name in the book: Futures and Alternative Nows. I couldn’t really connect to the information that was written on the page. Some of the designers interviewed spoke about projects that I couldn’t find interesting even if I tried, and I am being honest there. Even though I know who they are, as in I have had exposure to some of their work previously, I couldn’t help fell that their work was, in my opinion, going in a direction that I didn’t believe in. I am saying this even though they were not designers who design products to go on sale, but instead, designers who produce things for the purpose of being in an exhibition and to get people thinking.

Reading this book highlights many problems that are wrong with so many products today in terms of user interfaces or physical design as a result. It lets you wonder what the future will be like without obviously pointing out that computers will be squeezed into everything. The thought crossed my mind many times as I read this, that the Product Design course I am on really should be an Interaction Design course or dare I say it, an electronics course. Looking back over my previous three years, it is clear that an emphasis has been on electronics and less about design. You will get marked down for electronics not working and not so much marked up for justifying design decisions made along the way.

To end on a positive, I feel that reading this book will evidently help me in my final year on my main project as well as my dissertation, not only by providing some insightful information about different products, their history and problems encountered, but just the sheer amount of knowledge it provides. It isn’t an encyclopaedia type book, or glossary so it isn’t quite one that you could just have on your shelf and look up when needed but it is useful nonetheless.

#159 DJCAD Degree Show

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