Week 6: Interdisciplinary Insights – New Approaches and Creative Partnerships

Weekly Learning Objectives

By the end of this week you should be able to:

Research and analyse how interdisciplinary collaboration can form exciting partnerships in graphic design;
Research and analyse new genres of design specialism;
Identify a discipline and specialist who could help you to reflect from a dynamically opposing position on a specific problem;
Find, manage and record your cross-disciplinary discussion in relation to the specific problem;
Manage your independent learning effectively.

Week 6: Lecture – Podcast with Louize Harries

Lecture Introduction

Susanna and Louize Harries explore interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary insights, new approaches and creative partnerships.

Listen to the lecture below. Make notes in your research journal, reflect upon these ideas, and use them as a springboard into your own investigations. Use the Ideas Wall freely to discuss, ask questions and share ideas.

Enjoy the lecture.

Louize Harries

Fashion Design – Textiles

Material Futures

Influences: Black Mountain College, California

After Bauhaus was closed a lot of people left there and went here. ‘Committed to Interdisciplinary Practice’

Bachmeier Fuller – Furore systems theorist, author of ‘Space Ship Planet Earth’ spoke then about issues we still have now.

Saw his purpose as doing good for society.

Interest, connected and brining everyone together.

Drone Project:

With Katy Maidboyed (Check) as an entry to the Bio-design challenge.

Designers with science. Theme was the anthropocy (?). Made the subject for there’s the air quality in London. A reactionary piece to the illegal levels of air pollution. Set visually (air pollution is invisible) with all the science to back up what they are saying.

Designed drone which triggered red rainfall wherever the pollution levels went above the EU legal limits. Pollution due to diesel immersions in the city, PM is below 2.5 so it’s so small it can get into a persons bloodstream.

Seen as a ‘ticking time bomb’, certain areas of the city were so affected that it would start to cause birth defects.

Found out who the air quality manager was. Elliot Treehorn, from LA. Was in charge of bringing down the levels of emissions in LA, pointed out his role was one of the oldest rolls in London, a role since ‘London began’ in the 1200’s. The policy is ‘on the back burner because it needs the public to push it forward so the more the public get behind it, the more important it will become.
This gave them their approach.

A drone, made as a protest peeve, would go out and cause red rain – in reference to a biblical plague – to be visually noticeable.

Research – how would you make rain? How would you make it red? Looked into science. Rain isn’t a reaction, it’s caused by ‘bio-precipitation’ – leaf litter and moulds go up into the air causing it to rain. Dr Sans from Montana was so convinced that this was the reason it rained that he chartered a plane and went into the clouds capturing samples from the air/clouds proving the theory.

Not just a colab project for the sake of it – there’s a real drive and an interest in the project from those involved.

Everything they came up with had to have a proof of concept – synthetic biology dept in the Imperial College London checked and conformed their data. Different for the science people, they had a change from their daily tasks and so a new enthusiasm.

Idea that they could illustrate what the scientists came up with rather than just publishing a paper with their results, academic papers become obscured.

Tell the story using graphic design, makes things more transparent and easier to understand by the public, bringing more interest. Put information on forums, joined the drone club, spoke to people who use drones for crop dusting. Met a startup business which used algorithms and data into drone flight – useful to Amazon who want drones to provide deliveries in London.
This meant finding out lost of unexpected new information.

Creating the red rain: some places in India have a red rain plague every three years, this was found by the university of Glamorgan to be from an algae on lichen found in Scotland which travels across by the wind and by the time it develops, it causes the red rain.

Made the subject as simple as possible to enable other parties to easily understand, although no public audience until Sept 2019. Into London Design Week, brought in a lot of interest.

Gov. Policy Lab/Design Against Crime

Research
Service design
Speculative Thinking
Design for practical areas

“Good graphics makes your life so easy”

Trust in an environment brings better solutions. Design solutions have to come from more than just one person, broader communities bring more answers and solutions.

Talk to the people who will use your design.

My Subconcious Shopper

Looking at the amount of fabric/clothing which the UK shows away. Long complicated process to recycle clothing in order to make new clothing so it either goes to landfill or get sent to another country to use or get rid of for us.

After Bauhaus was closed a lot of people left there and went here. ‘Committed to Interdisciplinary Practice’

Bachmeier Fuller – Furore systems theorist, author of ‘Space Ship Planet Earth’ spoke then about issues we still have now.

Saw his purpose as doing good for society.

Interest, connected and brining everyone together.

Seen as a ‘ticking time bomb’, certain areas of the city were so affected that it would start to cause birth defects.

Consumption is the cause.

Neuro-marketing – ‘wire them up’ and take biometric responses from reactions to advertising or products, subconsciously. Data is recorded and then used by brands. The end product was EEG headsets aimed at children to record neural data to self-market. Aiming it at children looked into the exposure to technology via channels like YouTube, etc. and their ways of breaching advertising rules, and Alexa for children, phones aimed at children…
Simple interest in ‘what do we think about this’ coming to a natural conclusionas a design debate.

Joined a neuro-hack group and a neuro-hack closed website to find these communities for research. Partnered up with programmer of BCI’s (Brain Controlled Interface) to produce a simplified program to decipher reactions from EEG’s. Found a bio-ethicist who wrote a government whitepaper on neural rights and the human right. Spoke about the ethics of using this kind of data and where it will go.

Design-wise, could this become a fashion accessory for kids? Wearing headsets as a child is exciting and gives a feeling of ‘dressing up’. Avoided making the products look too medical and got children to try them on and ask what type of headgear children would be happy wearing, showed them different materials to choose from and approached product designers for their views.

Document the process with the different people involved. Show a reason for everything.

Ethics or protocols?

Data compliance lawyer – new technologies and enterprises. Ask the right questions and say you’re a student (this does help).

Advice:

Look what’s available to you – what you know. Find out who’s in your network

Take smaller steps – break things down and map a process.

Investments: Public bodies needing ‘outreach work’, provide a public facing service.

Communication strategy: See if there are local talks, etc. introduce yourself, followup with emails. Or if nothing around then research a person from the organisation, see if they’ve done something connected – a paper or project – research it and reference it, then get in touch. Give a reason for the connection.

Susanna – still phone people first
Louize – email first and follow it up

Links to look at:

My Subconscious Shopper:

Policy Lab https://openpolicy.blog.gov.uk/category/policy-lab/ (Links to an external site.)

Design Against Crime at CSM http://www.designagainstcrime.com/ (Links to an external site.)

Designers on Holiday:

https://www.amazing-designers-holiday-on-the-wonderful-island-of-gotland.com/ (Links to an external site.)

Precious Plastics Community, Dave Hakkens open source:

https://preciousplastic.com/solutions/community-platform.html (Links to an external site.)

Smout Allen:

http://www.smoutallen.com/ (Links to an external site.)

Unknown Fields Division:

http://www.unknownfieldsdivision.com/ (Links to an external site.)

Bompas and Parr:

http://bompasandparr.com/ (Links to an external site.)

Advice and Tools for Collaborative Working:

http://universityoftheunderground.org/ (Links to an external site.)

https://london.hackspace.org.uk/ (Links to an external site.)

https://biohackspace.org/ (Links to an external site.)

http://www.troytown.org.uk/ (Links to an external site.)

http://createlondon.org/new-projects/ (Links to an external site.)

https://www.hackspace.org.uk/ (Links to an external site.)

https://openworkshopnetwork.com/ (Links to an external site.)

https://www.norwichfarmshare.co.uk/ (Links to an external site.)

https://machinesroom.co.uk/ (Links to an external site.)

https://fablabs.io/labs (Links to an external site.)

https://schoolofthedamned.tumblr.com/ (Links to an external site.)

Abake:

Interview about collaborative practice for Precarity Pilot – http://precaritypilot.net/abake/ (Links to an external site.)

Anish Kapoor:

https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/brighten-the-corners-annual-report (Links to an external site.)

http://anishkapoor.com/ (Links to an external site.)

https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/brighten-the-corners-anish-kapoor

Week 6: Resources

Read | Watch | Listen

Below is this week’s list of materials. For the full module resource list, please refer to the Course Hub. We encourage you to also go beyond and carry out your own independent research into themes delivered. Do not forget to use the Ideas Wall to share new ideas and thoughts.

1. TYPE Talk, Andy Altmann (2012) Dinner for One? (Links to an external site.), [online]. [Accessed 11 April 2019].

2. LYNfabrikken Aarhus Denmark, (2012) Lecture with Troika (Links to an external site.), [online]. [Accessed 11 April 2019].

3. Open Cell https://opencell.webflow.io/ (Links to an external site.)

4. OffShore Studio Migrant Journal http://www.offshorestudio.ch/ (Links to an external site.)

5. TED, Anab Jain(2017) Why we need to imagine different futures (Links to an external site.),[online video]. [Accessed 11 June 2019]

What are the advantages of interdisciplinary provocation and how could you utilise this approach in your practice?

Week 6: Workshop Challenge

The Challenge

What are the advantages of interdisciplinary provocation and how could you utilise this approach in your practice?

Put theory into practice and spend an hour brainstorming ideas based on the following challenge and who you would choose to work with.

Identify a discipline and specialist who could help you to reflect from a dynamically opposing position on a specific problem.

Pick one of the issues below and discuss with your chosen individual how you may solve the challenge. This should ideally be recorded as an audio podcast. Our interest in this also relates to the way in which different disciplines discuss an issue and their manner and approach in communicating differently, as well as how you would capture this.

As a guide, please evolve your own strategy for bridging the questions. Equally, you may wish to also consider the core issues: how would your specialism solve this and how different is this to the expected design thinker?

Do not forget to consider the communication style you would use to encourage interdisciplinary dialogue.

Finally, how do you summarise these findings in a way that is acceptable to both collaborators?

Improving mental health in young adults.
Reducing pollution in inner cities.
Encouraging greater engagement with galleries and museums.
Reducing isolation and loneliness.
Promoting greater community cohesion.

Encouraging Greater Engagement with Galleries and Museums

I’ve gone for this as a subject for this week. I was going to go for the mental health subject originally but as I covered that issue quite a bit in an earlier module I thought it best to choose a new subject (keeping the mental health as a backup just in case).

There’s also an ulterior motive work-wise for getting to know the people running the town’s Museum and Art Gallery…

shrewsbury-museum-and-art-gallery-stratforduponavon-and-the-heart-of-england

It’s a pretty run-of-the-mill place; occasional specific exhibitions by featured artists, historic artefacts on a tour of the country or as a venue included in various annual events in the town.

The displays aren’t anything special, just things on shelves which once you’ve seen them you’ve seen them. There’s no interactivity, except for a quill to try and write like a mediaeval scribe or make a rubbing of a brass plate with a broken crayon. The featured events are rarely anything different…

Schedule and content

I’ve found the person I need, Fay Bailey, the manager at Shropshire Museums, and have contacted her by email. She’s happy to help with the project and we’re setting up a Zoom meeting which I will record for the audio.

She has asked for a heads-up on what we’ll be discussing so I drafted what’s more like a set of questions for the time being. I’ll use these as prompts to myself as we’re talking.

Subjects:

Who are the people visiting the Museum, how wide a cross-section of the public?

With the Stop Cafe, gift shop and public information in with same building, do these add to the visitor experience or are they seen as separate?

The museum has an entry fee, do you think people can be put off visiting by that or do people expect to pay to visit a museum these days?

With the availability of online information in general, what do you think keeps a visit to museums relevant these days?

Is there currently a way for people to view artefacts online?

I’ve often visited the museum for the events held there, but they seem quite separate to the museum itself, how much do they increase the footfall into the museum? Does the type of event being held make a difference to that number?

Do you think the Museum gets enough promotion in the town?

What type of outside agencies do you think could create a positive change for visitors?
(Sound and vision, sensory experiences VR and AR)

If there were no budget constraints, what would be your dream scenario or ideal way to further engage visitors?

When coming up with this as an agenda I noticed most of the topics were about money so I’ll try and steer away to avoid this being the key subject of the talk.

Instead I’m hoping to engage in the possibility/thoughts of new approaches to displays, such as VR and AR for some areas, and anything else I can think of in the meantime…

Reflection

Luck break here in finding the right person to speak to. I’m on the board of the ‘Shrewsbury International Cartoon Festival’ and it dawned on me, rather than digging through various websites, to ask the others if they knew who the best person to talk to would be – a successful bit of networking for once! – an email later and we’re ready to go (after a bit of chasing and reminding and a few Zoom links where Fay didn’t turn up).

One of the things this exercise made me think was don’t take things at face-value. Yes, the museum isn’t the best, you have to pay to get in and unless there’s a special event on it’s not really somewhere you’d visit twice, but… it seems the managers there think the same as I do about its content.