design practice: What If... Brief

With this brief we had to take 100 photographs that we broke down into different catagories across a studio session.

Below shows examples of my photographs.

We then had to come up with a theme that related to our photographs. I cam up with urban movement for mine. We were then split into groups with other peoples themes that related to our own. In my group we had:

Urban Movement

Urban Culture

Relationships

Middle East

British

Animal, Mineral or Vegetable.

From this we then had to decipher a running theme - after some discussion we settles on ‘Urban decay’ this encompassed everything we wanted to look are. We then went off and started researching - looking at crime statistics, vandalism and criminal date for Leeds. While researching this I came across the worst affected areas in Leeds suffering from vandalism, graffiti and crime.

We had a group discussion about what we wanted to tackle and established we wanted whatever our solution would be to be aimed at 12-16 year olds and tackling graffiti and vandalism, we also decided to focus on one o the worst affected areas because Leeds is such a big city that it would be too hard to come up with something to cure each area - instead if we focused on one and established something that would work there then maybe me it transferrable to different areas so that we take on each area one at a time. This would give it a more personal appeal and we could cater each event to the local communities needs. We decided that the area we would look at was Little London, this was in easy walking distance for us to collect research and establish an event theoretically.

Below shows some of my early research:

Once we worked out the area we wanted to base our project on we went to the Little London and took pictures of the place too see how bad it actually is. When we were looking around there was nobody there, it just seemed desolate and everyone had just decided to stay inside. I felt constantly on edge while walking around and the general surroundings made you feel so depressed. the only of splashes of colour round the place was the random graffiti dotted on walls, doors and lamps. Below show a few photographs taken from around the area.

After we looked at the area we decided to design a questionnaire to ask people in Little London and around it to establish what they though about vandalism and what they thought about graffiti. This meant that we could see what the key problems were and work around them to generate a solution. I also rang the people at Little Londons’ Action Community Center to see what their thoughts on the idea of holding a graffiti workshop event would be and whether they thought the area/community would benefit from it and whether people would actually show up. Below show examples of the questionnaire and what happened in the phone conversation.