What is meant by book...

We were given the task to find 5 books, that to us we find interesting and different. We literally had to judge a book by its cover. I thought that the most interesting books around at the moment are books designed for children. These books tend to be brightly coloured, big, interesting to touch, interactive and fun to read. They do this in order to engage a child and completely focus their attention on the book.

So i decided to raid my nieces/nephews little libraries and find out what designers are doing today. I think the most interesting book i found was the hungry caterpillar book. I used to love this book as a child and now that its interactive if i were a child i would never be able to put it down. I also looked at comic books, as i am doing a project on them currently i took photos of the outside and inside, it just shows a different layout and a different way of telling a story. Below show the examples of the books that i found.

What If... Part 2

With the next part of the brief we were told to go back to our original research and boards and then begin some new, fresh research on the weaknesses that had popped up in the critical analysis.

We knew our general idea was good, but we were lacking the key information and what point we really truely wanted to get across. So we went our separate ways and started our own research.

The areas i was going to look into more specifically were whether graffiti walls truly work and what older people actually thought about graffiti. I decided the easiest and quickest way to establish whether graffiti walls really worked was to post the question on a graffiti forum, this worked really well. I got a lot of responses, mostly from people in America where they had designated graffiti walls.

The general consensus was that the walls worked, only if they were monitored and if the area was checked out before to see if people would actually use it in an effective way. another idea that popped up was the idea of people having permits to do it, this gave a restriction and if there was anything that went on the walls that was vandalism they would know who did it.

Once i had gathered my research for that problem i then went on to create a questionnaire that was directed to the older generation, i then went and asked 30 people what they thought about the idea of graffiti, the age range varying from 35 to 90. This actually worked out really well as i spoke to my aunty who works as the head of a state school in Manchester, and she actually did a graffiti wall at school to direct the youths creativity in a more controlled manner and she said that at first it was hard to get them interested but once she started doing competitions to create a piece for the wall every term and then get the youths to help each other and create the winning piece they responded to that very well.

Once this research was done and we had re-grouped we then began to generate ideas for the invitation to the event, we decided upon doing a small wallet fold out poster. this poster would have all the information on it needed to get the youths interested and it would show everything on it that we wanted the youths to be interested in.

The next step was to put a small presentation together to show the groups again, below shows our boards and the new concepts/ideas that we came up with as well as the example of the fold out we would create.

What If... Part 1

For the next part of the brief we had to develop some boards that would clearly state our intention and where our ideas had come from to help tackle the problem. Once the boards were done we then had t present them to other groups in order to get some feedback on what other people thought of our idea.

What we learned from these crits was very useful, we realised that instead of focusing on the problem and the best way to tackle it we had all become a little too focused on what they final resolution and were becoming to ambitious with it. We needed to reign it in a little bit and focus more on tackling the problem in the most effective way and if we were going to hold an event in a hypothetical situation we had to make sure that it could really happen so therefore we had to make sure the audience would receive it well and that the point of the event was very clear and not just some graffiti event. It needed to have a purpose.

Another problem was that in a way we seemed to be promoting the idea of graffiti and that it is acceptable, which to a certain extent we were but it was coming across that we wanted it in a controlled manner, this was a problem we were seriously going to have to tackle, because as we later realised youths may find graffiti 'fun' and 'cool' but adults might not, we needed to research this further.

We needed to make it clear that the event was more of a sideline to getting the youths that are interested in graffiti, just generally more interested in art. We wanted it to be a stepping stone into channeling their creativity into some more successful, and would later possibly help them build a career for themselves.

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.

Once we had done this and reconvened. We had established our Problem, evidence and what we intended to do for our crit on friday.

The Problem:

Vandalism in Leeds - Specifically Little London

The Evidence:

Research related to statistics, and crimes.

What we intend to do:

An event. graffiti workshops.

Visual Language - Photography

With this weeks visual language we were looking at taking photographs to establish the relation of format and frame. We were split into two's and had to wander around college and look for anything circular. We had to set some rules so that the photographs would have some consistency, we decided to have the circle set in the bottom left hand corner. Below are a set of 25 images that i chose to be the best.