Week 1: Research

Evolve, Innovate and Pivot – Alec’s lecture was an enjoyable lesson, time and time again he mentioned that it’s ok to adapt, it’s ok to change, be agile. It’s a vital part of what we do and Iget so wrapped up in final outcomes I forget to focus on the process and the development. Intern was something that really interested me when we first met Alec in our second Module, to be able to create a platform that can be accessed by everyone, regardless of their background is no mean feat! I can really relate to Alec’s past, I have had a number of different careers, hoping the next one gives me more freedom and creativity, until I realised I need to forge that path, not wait for it to come to me.

We must find ways to fill the gaps, that’s what we do as designers, we seek out the areas that need more development, areas that need improvement and we try to find innovative, creative ways to do just that.

I really enjoyed listening to Joe – his work interests me as one of my ideas is this concept of current and future social concepts of graphic design – with social media and digitalisation, will our social graphic design lose gravitas? Will it not send the same message we intended, will our work be watered down with the effects of our ever developing digital world?

I want to look at designers in the future – I want to know what our careers will look like from a socio-political standpoint. As Joe looked at previous and future political speeches, can we look at our future socially motivated graphic design and predict the changes that will take shape?

I’ve emailed Ben to follow up on this lecture. I found it insightful, powerful and informative – it made me realised that for a successful Graphic Design project we don’t have to be coming up with something physical, we can utilise our learning within research and theory and combine these skills to push research driven practice. It excites me, I love research and I love delving deep into topics I never knew much about. “you’re not writing, you’re authoring”, it’s not about just writing down facts and figures, it’s curating this knowledge to make connections, bring up new problems, highlight issues, encourage subjectivity.

In questioning what we think we know, we are questioning our own opinions, values, ideas and thoughts – it’s a ladder and we’re using that to build further, not to answer a question necessarily, but to really push our thinking and questioning.

I’ve asked Ben for advice on academic writing as I feel this is where I’ll need to improve, I’d love to read some great journals or theses written by fantastic academic writers, to understand the changes I need to make and the development I can work on. I struggle with academic writing because of the lingo and jargon used, I don’t want to write a research paper which overcomplicates our use of language and thus the question at hand. As Ben states, we have a tendency to over complicate things because we can’t imagine that people don’t know what we know. MAKE IT ACCESSIBLE.

I am definitely a holist, when I write I just get my words down on the page, either by typing or handwriting – I just brain dump and sift through it afterwards. Then I’m good to organise these thoughts and ideas and go from there.

Week 1 Reflection

These lectures so far have been immense food for thought, I’m hoping I can pick Ben’s brain a little about research driven practice, I want to understand this more as this really interests me.

I’m panicking a little about picking a topic, I really want to do a research project, but then I also love the idea of writing and designing a children’s book addressing the gender gap. I need to spend more time analysing each topic, understanding further what I wish to achieve and forget about the final outcome. My tendency to look towards the end goal and not focus on the actualy depths of the issue is something that has held me back previously. Hoping I can combat this with the project and really develop my own learning and processes.