Genealogies Week 5: Finalisation and Preparation for Presentation

Genealogies Week 5

Finalising my idea:

This is the fifth and final week for the genealogies project. With the formative deadline being on Friday 27th (before midnight) it's time to put my concept into fruition and prepare for presentation. Although it is only a formative assessment I am rather anxious about ensuring that all of my work is up to date and ready for submission. After all, for this year I do intend on keeping up with the workload and having some solid idea and concepts to bring to the table and present in comparison to my first year, after how bad it went from a personal standpoint.

To begin with, out of all of my briefs and projects the one I will be focusing on primarily is my genealogies project. seeing that I hit a bit of a dead end regarding the polystyrene idea in the previous week, I decided that instead of trying to make the polystyrene idea work and presentable, I would much rather work on the original idea which was about redesigning every day objects to portray a level of discomfort and frustration. This would be achieved  through tweaking with the viewers mental and conceptual model, interrupting the viewers conceptualisation of the functionality of the object. A huge inspiration for this concept is the by architect and designer Katerina Kamprani, her website showcasing examples of this concept alongside one of her lectures back in 2014 provided me with a basic understanding as to why we feel uncomfortable when viewing the objects. 

The requirements for the brief of the submission is to created a PDF document containing 4 pages containing the key stages of my idea development, those stages consist of.

Page 1 Object and original narrative: For this page I will discuss about my object of choice and briefly discuss the narrative about 'designing the uncomfortable' i will talk about my inspiration and showcase some examples by Katerina

Page 2 Expand Narrative: This is self explanatory, for this page I will expand on the narrative explaining why we feel uncomfortable, anxious and frustrated when we look at these items. this will include brief explanations to mental and conceptual models, as well as affordances within design and how they link to this concept.

Page 3 Final Concept: This page will be explaining and showcasing my own final interpretations on this concept. I will be using Photoshop as my primary software to create these designs with the possible addition of 3d modelling using Cinema4d. As a presentable outcome I decided to showcase these in article format for my personal magazine project which I started creating in the first year of university.    

Page 4 Visual Communication: 

Page 5 Additional Content: this page is an additional page that i will be including to the presentation explaining the polystyrene idea that I had, briefly explaining process with and why i didn't continue with it for this project.

Group Crit Session:

During Tuesday's workshop myself and a couple of other students gathered to create a group critique, this session provided some extra additional insight regarding how I can complete and submit the project. Overall the Crit session was good, the feedback about the concept and narrative aspect was positive the main issue is actually having a presentable physical outcome to submit for the formative and to present on the assessment day. I decided to follow up with my idea of creating an article for my magazine 'Pathetic Aesthetic' and after the critique session I intend on designing and printing a physical copy I can showcase at the presentation. An interesting idea that was suggested during the session was that I edited the kerning, spacing and font of the body of text and titling within the article to pay homage to the whole 'designing the uncomfortable' the edits would have to be rather subtle, I feel like when editing with the body of text like this, there is a fine line where if I did it too excessive the design of the article would just look bad instead of conveying the feeling of discomfort. 

Designing the Article for Magazine Outcome:

Below is an example of a mockup double page spread I created in the first year, for my Pathetic Aesthetic magazine. The magazine originally had a strict colour scheme of black white and yellow, since then however my art style and colour scheme has changed to a more toned down dark and light grey combined with a magenta colour. For the design I want to keep the same style as the original, it featured a rather grungy, cyberpunk appearance with bold blocky font so each page stood out. Each page also featured similar assets that resembled a glitchy aesthetic so I intend on incorporating this style to the article for this project, I feel like . Seeing that the image below was a mockup the body of text is only place holder text, however for the article I will be reforming all the research and theory I have obtained these past couple of weeks and implement it into my magazine.

To begin with I created some simple sketches in my sketchbook of possible layouts for the double page spread. I liked the idea of making the design of the text and layout have an uncomfortable vibe to it, one thing I took into consideration is how I could make the double page spread feel uncomfortable to look at without the design looking overall bad. Below are some screen shots of the layout sketches. 

(insert the rest of the damn project ya idiot!)