communication obsession

“Other images came via the internet, such as the ‘pepper-spraying cop’ - one of the most popular internet memes of the year - which originated from an incident at University of California, Davis, when two police officers pepper-sprayed a line of peaceful, seated protesters directly in the face. Videos from bystanders were uploaded on Youtube, but a snapshot of Lieutenant John Pike caught in the act went viral and he was Photoshopped into a myriad of situations and contexts.”

Liz Mcquiston - Visual Impact

From Know your meme: 

“After an investigation into the incident, Chief Spicuzza announced[38] that she was stepping down from her position as police chief and retiring on April 18th, 2012. Her resignation may have been in response to a independent task force report[40] released on April 11th that blamed the incident on poor communication and decision making from all levels of the school administration, from the policemen themselves to those in command. On July 31st, 2012, the Sacramento Bee[41] reported that Lt. John Pike is no longer employed by U.C. Davis, not confirming whether he was let go or left the position on his own accord. In 2013, Pike requested workers compensation payments from the university, saying that he had been traumatized by the incident.[55]

The news of Lt. Pike’s employment status change was submitted to Reddit[48] the next day, where it received 8681 upvotes and 2572 points, reaching the front page. Major news outlets also covered the story including the Huffington Post[49], San Francisco Weekly[50], NPR[51], CNN[52] and the Los Angeles Times.[53]

This is the campaign designed to advertise the new luxury development of Greenwich Peninsula in London by The Beautiful Meme. Apart from the hipster vibe, it has been criticized for heavily referring to the historical pioneers of America, a 19th century expansionist practice related to imperialism and colonialism. Yes, slightly bad taste. The word pioneer is used in the campaign, implying the silly concept that Greenwich is a sort of undiscovered land in London, where no one have been living before the arrive of the rich people – apartments start from £450,000.Also, apparently the developers sent to TBM the South Park’s SoDoSoPa parody video as part of the brief, specifying “This is exactly the communication we don’t want.” What a time to be alive.A few months ago I designed a website as part of my self-initiated project, privatelyownedpublicspaces.com. The website was meant to raise awareness on the progressive privatisation of London’s public spaces (still happening at the moment) and it aimed to enlighten the controverse phenomenon of “regeneration”, its meaning from an architectural/urban/communication point of view and how it’s changing our perception of the modern city.

Looking back at the project today, I can say it was a fiasco.

Leaving aside my poor code skills at the time (that generated a Window ’98 aesthetic for no particular reason), the website failed to reach the public in a clear and engaging way. But why?

I think the biggest mistake was to take for granted that my audience had the exact same knowledge that I have about the topic. If you have no idea of what regeneration is, when you look at the gallery all you will see is a bunch of modern buildings and benches. The communication didn’t work both because I gave a very vague context (a short quote from Anna Minton in the homepage), and because the pictures themselves weren’t powerful enough to be considered self-explanatory or engaging at any level.

The fact that I didn’t know who the audience was is visually translated in a messy communication that maybe people can perceive as “dystopian”, but they don’t know exactly why. However, at least I feel relieved that someone appreciated the “cool” cctv moving logo. I guess.

Anyway, I recently discovered a blog that is doing what I wanted to do, but in a more effective and interesting way, here is the link: developmentaesthetics.tumblr.com .

It focuses on the visual aesthetic of new developments in UK, and most of  the images are commented and analysed. I think it’s very interesting and I recommend it if you’re curious about what is happening to our crazy world. An example?

This is the campaign designed to advertise the new luxury development of Greenwich Peninsula in London by The Beautiful Meme. Apart from the hipster vibe, it has been criticized for heavily referring to the historical pioneers of America, a 19th century expansionist practice related to imperialism and colonialism. Yes, slightly bad taste. The word pioneer is used in the campaign, implying the silly concept that Greenwich is a sort of undiscovered land in London, where no one have been living before the arrive of the rich people – apartments start from £450,000.

Also, apparently the developers sent to TBM the South Park’s SoDoSoPa parody video as part of the brief, specifying “This is exactly the communication we don’t want.” What a time to be alive.

Tim Rollins and K.O.S.: A History

JANUARY 23 – MAY 31, 2010

In August 1981, Tim Rollins, then twenty-six years old, was recruited by George Gallego, principal of Intermediate School 52 in the South Bronx, to develop a curriculum that incorporated art-making with reading and writing lessons for students classified as academically or emotionally “at risk.” Rollins told his students on that first day, “Today we are going to make art, but we are also going to make history.” Asked what he meant by “making history,” Rollins said:

"To dare to make history when you are young, when you are a minority, when you are working, or nonworking class, when you are voiceless in society, takes courage. Where we came from, just surviving is ‘making history.’ So many others, in the same situations, have not survived, physically, psychologically, spiritually, or socially. We were making our own history. We weren’t going to accept history as something given to us."

Together, Rollins and his students developed a collaborative strategy that combined lessons in reading and writing with the production of works of art. In a process they call “jammin’,” Rollins or one of the students read aloud from the selected text while the other members drew, relating the stories to their own experiences. Their signature style was born as Rollins and K.O.S.—Kids of Survival—began producing works of art directly on the pages of these books, cut out and laid in a grid on canvas.

The collaboration between Rollins and his students soon outgrew the classroom. Frustrated with the strictures of the public school system, Rollins opened the Art and Knowledge Workshop, an after-school program in a community center five blocks from I.S. 52. After teaching, Rollins would meet K.O.S. members at the workshop; homework would be done and art would be made. In 1987, Rollins and K.O.S. implemented a traveling workshop to spread the ideas and inspiration behind their project beyond the South Bronx. In 1994, they moved their operation to a studio in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood. There Rollins and some long-term K.O.S. members rebuilt and expanded the project nationally and internationally, significantly increasing the number of workshops conducted with other schools and arts institutions. Today there are active K.O.S. members in Philadelphia, Memphis, San Francisco, and New York.

In 1986, Rollins and K.O.S. had their first exhibition at Jay Gorney Modern Art, which represented them until they moved to Mary Boone Gallery in 1991. Rollins and K.O.S.’s decision to exhibit their art in galleries and museums signaled an important turning point: they began to distinguish themselves from other teacher-student collaborations by demanding that their work be engaged first as fine art. Between the mid-1980s and early 1990s, Rollins and K.O.S. participated in two of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Biennials (1985, 1991); Documenta in Kassel, Germany (1987); the Venice Biennale (1988); and the Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (1988), and had solo shows at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1988); the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (1988); the Dia Art Foundation, New York (1989); the Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford (1990); the Museum für Gegenwärtskunst Basel, Switzerland (1990); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1990); and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (1992).

Tim Rollins and K.O.S.: A History, the group’s first comprehensive survey, is accompanied by a major catalogue, which is available in the Museum Store.

Tim Rollins and K.O.S.: A History is curated by Ian Berry, Malloy Curator at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, in collaboration with the artists, and is coordinated for the Frye Art Museum by Robin Held, Deputy Director, Exhibitions and Collections. Presentation of this exhibition at the Frye Art Museum is made possible by funding from the Frye Foundation and the generous support of the Offield Family Foundation and SeattlePI.com.

Somers Town Sparks: empowering young people trough collaboration

Last week I casually found a flyer of Somers Town Sparks in my newsletter: an event, organised by Snook and Origin Housing, meant to bring together locals with young people at risk to support their ideas and create community initiatives. I’m currently researching on the role of the communication designer in community-led projects for social innovation, so I instantly got curious about the nature of the event and its purpose; as I’m looking for collaborations and networks to work with, it just seemed perfect for me.

I didn’t know exactly what to expect, so I just popped by the Basil Jallicoe Hall on the day of the event. I found a diverse group of people sitting at the tables: a lot of young people from the New Horizon Youth Centre, some employees from social/no-profit organisations, a few spare locals and a good number of designers from different fields (me included).

After a quick briefing from the organisers, the young people started pitching their ideas to everyone. Then, each participant joined one of the groups based on the expertise they could bring to a specific project. Discussions, skill-sharing and suggested tools helped shape each idea in a more concrete way, opening possibilities for future collaborations. Finally, thanks to the knowledge acquired from this brainstorming, the young people pitched their ideas again to everyone. The most voted one won a small amount of money to kick-start the project.

Somers Town Sparks is a relevant experiment from a social innovation point of view: it gives the possibility to present, discuss and put into practice ideas from young people who are homeless or at risk, and it’s an important way to empower them and find a way to positively react to their risky conditions. The monetary prize helped to bring some challenge and motivation to the workshop. All participants were involved and helpful in contributing to the ideas, in a co-participated and collaborative mood: receiving relevant tools and knowledge from different expertise legitimised the young people’s ideas and helped them shaping their projects in a practical and insightful way.

Being part of the event gave me the opportunity to reflect on the relevance of visual communication in conveying ideas. The groups that pitched their ideas using visual references, such as sketches, to do-lists or conceptual maps, demonstrated to be more effective in communicating their purpose to the participants, so being more likely to be voted for. Furthermore, I noticed that each presented idea required a communication design intervention in order to be realised, be it a smartphone app for young homeless looking for a shelter, a video promoting a music studio for kids at risk or a brand identity for a pop-up sandwich shop.

Linocut / Woodcut Session at The Field by MPBS

A week ago I participated to this workshop at The Field, a social centre in New Cross Gate. The theme was Reclaim Space but it wasn’t mandatory. A lot of different people came to the The Field: young like me, children with parents, older ladies. The atmosphere was informal, intimate and relaxed, I felt being very distant from the chaos of the city. 

The guys from MPBS are very nice: we discussed about the lack of free social spaces like The Field in London, where people can organise, discuss, chill and create together; I feel it gonna get worse in the next years. Since the space hosted the workshop, they created a sign to give something back. 

Before I Die by Candy Chang

After losing someone she loved and experiencing deep depression, artist Candy Chang created an interactive wall on an abandoned house in her neighborhood to create an anonymous place to help restore perspective and share intimately with neighbors while remaining an introvert. After receiving permission, she painted the side of an abandoned house in her neighborhood in New Orleans with chalkboard paint and stenciled it with a grid of the sentence, “Before I die I want to _______.” Anyone walking by could pick up a piece of chalk, reflect on their lives, and share their personal aspirations in public space.

It was all an experiment and she didn’t know what to expect. By the next day, the wall was full of responses and it kept growing: Before I die I want to… sing for millions, plant a tree, hold her one more time, straddle the International Date Line, see my daughter graduate, eat more everything, abandon all insecurities, be completely myself…  She understood her neighbors in new and enlightening ways, and the wall reminded her that she’s not alone as she tries to make sense of her life.

Spot the Chinatown Bullockcart by P!D, the Singapore Heritage Society and Dramabox

Community Advice by Susan O’Malley

I interviewed a few shy of 100 people in Palo Alto for this project. I asked: What advice would you give your 8-year-old self? What advice would you give your 80-year-old self? Using the words of those I met, I designed ten different letterpress posters. Sometimes the poster text is verbatim from the interview; other times I conflated several people’s advice into one. In addition to hanging the works in the opening exhibition at the Palo Alto Art Center, these posters were installed along Embarcadero Road in Palo Alto for passersby to see.

The Street Vendor Project by CUP

Did you know you can get a $1,000 ticket for parking more than 18 inches from the curb? When you’re earning an average of $14,000 a year, as many of New York City’s street vendors do, that can really get in the way of making a living.

In 2009, The Street Vendor Project, designer Candy Chang, and CUP created this issue of Making Policy Public to decode the rules and regulations for New York’s 10,000 street vendors so they can understand their rights and avoid unnecessary fines.The poster uses simple graphics and minimal text — in the five languages most commonly spoken among NYC’s vendors — to explain some of the most-often violated laws.

CUP and Street Vendor Project staff and volunteers launched the project with a sweep through the five boroughs to distribute over a thousand copies of the poster in a single day. The document’s portable format makes it easy for vendors to keep them on-hand. Street Vendor Project members tell us they even show them to police when there’s a question about a specific law!

Different Data Wall Map by  Dan McCafferty, Joshua Singer, Patricio Davila, Rachele Riley

Community-Activated Design by Clinton Carlson