Phase 3: Week 9

Design Development

Weeks 9-10: Tutor / peer review briefing of work to date

Weekly learning objectives 9-12

• This period of the MA Final Major Project is for you to demonstrate a clear sense of development and review, to allow your project to evolve holistically but also maintain depth and rigour. This ensures it is critically positioned and conceptually exciting and new. It is always a challenge at this phase of longer and more in depth projects – you need to focus on keeping motivated and maintaining the ambition and intention of the original question driving your work.
• Alongside the development of your practice based studio work, you need to be working on your draft critical report, due to be submitted for formative student peer review in Week 13.
• By the end of this period you are expected to have a body of work that certifies your final direction and area for developing, building and launching, as a culmination of the final Phase 4.

Formative Phase Outputs

Personal action plan created in relation to your studio project and report, responding to feedback from the formative panel / student review of your case study presentations in Week 8.

Design development captured, edited and presented in a format of your choice, as a clear narrative of your project development, to be published via your research journal (blog) and on the Ideas Wall.

Critical Report draft development, to be published via your research journal (blog), with a link to it on the Ideas Wall.

All outputs to be clearly documented on your blogs, with evidence of active engagement with the Ideas Wall.

Points:

Suggested References

Notepad

Scrapbook

I’ve gathered together some visual references which show examples, in part, for the type of look I’m considering. I’m looking into alternatives to the clean lines of publications like Rouleur and Soigneur as well as the Rapha brand. I’m not dismissing these altogether, just looking for a possible contrast which could be applied in layers.

Points gathered from David Carson podcast

Transworld Skateboarding magazine: originally published only using submitted articles, photos and even the layouts from the people who were to be featured themselves!

A nice idea in theory but it’s bound to get messy; just because someone is a cool, likely famous within that world, skateboarder doesn’t mean they’re going be able to show their status on paper. This does, however, give me a starting point to the idea of creating contrasting layouts rather than a rigid, perhaps restrictive, grid throughout.

Andrew Diprose suggested creating sections. These sections could be defined by their layout and not just the content or with a variation of the grid.

Check out:

• Raygun
• Beach Culture
• Transworld Skateboarding (look for originals as well as it is now)

These publications highlight for me the same idea of areas where sub-cultures develop; Music, Surfing, Skating. They each develop their own fashions and followings – what brings these groups together?

Transworld Skateboarding

Beach Culture

Raygun

Trends

Music, surfing & skating all have a heavy influence on how people choose to look. Sport also, especially football. People want to look like their ‘heroes’ and because not everyone is in a band, a pro-surfer or a pro-skater or pro-footballer, I think that the look develops initially from what the people who are, wear.

Music, surfing & skating cross over a lot whereas sport seems to sit by itself. Sport in general breaks down into separate groups; football jerseys, in particular, standing out as a token to show belonging. So much so that it can lead to real prejudice.

Is cycling the same?

Cycling’s an odd one when it comes to trends. A trend can be what gets people into cycling in the first place; it becomes popular which bring more people into cycling. However, dressing like your heroes is seen as another real faux pas. Wearing full-team-kit (unless it’s your own club kit) is frowned upon and seen as a mark of inexperience! Another no-no is to appear all ‘Rapha’d up’, ie. wearing Rapha clothing from head-to-toe…

Visual references – maybe’s/something like…

A bit of visual reference.

Reflection

This week’s planned schedule went out of the window due to work commitments, so I swapped around the intentions for weeks 9 and 10 and looked at styles instead. Raygun, etc., is likely a visual step too far for cyclists (maybe ok for mountain bikers) who are used to clean lines and sharp photography.

Somewhere between the two perhaps. Expecting the expected still!

Week 10 will now be research into the need to belong to groups/clubs/teams. This research will also be the start-point for the draft critical report.

I need to keep a check on looking into styles as I go from here, there’s still the need to define a question for the project to answer. I am finding though I’m writing up my notes; something drops into place so I must be doing something right…I hope it stays right and keeps moving.