My Work in Progress

Just before we finished up at Easter for the holidays, we had a great opportunity to pitch our personal projects to other specialisms. For textiles, this meant that we go to test out our concepts for Hallmark on new eyes.

We were put in groups of 8, with a mixture of JMD and IED students. I didn’t know anyone in my group very well which in a way I thought helped me to get honest feedback. We each took it in turns to give a 5 minute presentation of our work. We were supposed to use slides, however I ended up just running through my sketchbook as my laptop had ran out of charge by the time it was my turn. For Hallmark I am designing 2 stationary collections based on scenes from the fairytales, Hansel & Gretel and the Three Little Pigs. I have used collage and a Pop Art style to make these scenes more grown up and quirky, with young women, 15 - 30 as a target market. Below are the images I chose to share with my group.

I ended up getting my presentation done really quickly because as usual, my nerves made me speed through. My group asked me some questions afterwards on things that maybe weren’t so clear when I was explaining my concept, such as how I was going to indicate my product range etc.

After what feels like forever, last week we finally saw the beginning of the construction work of the V&A Dundee. Architect Kengo Kuma, who designed the building, made an appearance to mark the work getting underway.

I've heard so much negativity towards the museum being brought to Tayside; it costs too much, it's taking so long... In my eyes, good things cost money and time. Although I'd be lying if I said I wasn't getting a little but impatient. I saw comedian, Dylan Moran at the Caird Hall last week, who said we have 'the nicest photos of a V&A'. Can't argue with that really.

As part of our Partnerships, Networks and Connections 2 module, we got the chance to visit the V&A Design in Motion Bus, on the art school grounds. The mobile gallery, brought to life by designer Gabrielle Underwood, showcases 7 up and coming designers currently working with new technology to push the boundaries of their discipline within games, products, jewellery, fashion and textiles.

From the outside, the bus looks great. It is decorated with a William Morris' 'Strawberry Thief' inspired design by Abertay graduate Sophia George and Abertay student Ellen Brown.

We were then given a talk whilst on the bus. Although the space was tight, I think it was really well designed with the exhibitors in mind.

The above photos are a collaboration between Sara Robertson, who is our current Year 3 lecturer in Craft Innovation and Smart Materials at DJCAD and Design and designer-maker and researcher in smart textiles Sarah Taylor. They are pushing the boundaries of new technologies within their traditional craft and design background. With materials such as fiber-optics, liquid crystal and themochromic inks they are exploring how textiles, in particular can “transform and respond to their wearer or environment.”

The bus also featured the work of Holly Fulton, Scottish leading fashion designer.

What I loved most about the bus was the way in which it was curated. The team behind it all contributed their thoughts and ideas to Pinterest boards which is a great insight into the way in which curation and art & design is general is moving along in the 21st century.

The first couple of weeks of semester 1 have been somewhat hectic. Our first touch point lecture welcomed us back and gave us a brief overview of what was ahead for textiles, IED and JMD. For me personally, this is the most important year for us, as it's our final chance to go for it and take a risk, learn what works for us and what, ultimately, really doesn't.

I found it interesting to find out what the other specialisms taking part in our module will be up to this semester. I was particularly intrigued by JMD's National Art Medal Competition brief.

As a whole, we are all continuing with the same module criteria, this year is all about teaching us to work under short time frames, with broader briefs and generally giving us some knowledge on how the industry really works.

Textiles students spend third year mostly doing competition work, which I find really exciting. Last semester we had the task of tackling the RSA briefs. The RSA design competition is, these days, more about design for social change rather than designing something to look 'nice', I will talk more about the RSA in another blog post, as I am still in the process of perfecting it, after I was chosen to have my work sent forward.

This semester however, we have just finished our Bradford competition boards. We were asked to pick the designs from last year that we felt had the most potential to be developed further and pick a competition category in which we thought they would best fit. I picked C1, which was all about combined processes as a way to create an innovative design. The work I felt would work best was my Pattern & Structure design work, based on Glasgow's ever-changing skyline. It's key features were collage and juxtapositon.

I didn't want to submit the same designs to the Bradford competition, I wanted push them that little bit further to see what else I could get out of them.

I have always loved experimenting with the heat press in our print studio, so I decided that as my design was playful, I would add some extra textures, such as vinyl and flock to my fabric, to give my design more depth.

This was the most hectic and knackering day out of the whole week. It was techincally our last working day, as tomorrow we are giving our final presentations in the morning.

We began by being asked by Louise Valentine, to protoype without making, and simply just by answering the following questions:

Does our project increase everyday behaviours?

How might we design products and services to prevent mental illness?

How might we design activities that build resilience and promote mental health?

How might design help people to embed positive mental health activities as part of their daily lives?

We found this to be a useful exercise to really make sure we were all very clear on our concept and the practicalities of it, and so myself, Beth and Abbie went out on to Perth Road to our prototypes to the test. It was an interesting experience once we managed to get the images up on to street signs (all of us being 5ft wasn't entirely practical). We found that a lot of people, including young men which surprised us, turned their heads as the walked past it and smiled. A lot of older women even gave some "aaaaaw" sounds which was exactly what we were looking for.

After lunch, 4 of us visited the children's hospital at Ninewells to ask some of the children if they would help us out by drawing for us. We were overwhelmed by just how positive an outlook these children had, and really put the project into perspective for us. All the play specialists were very interested in our concept and said that they were really glad that they could help.

Some of the team also prototyped some more so that we can show everyone how our drawings and quotes will work as an advertisement campain, we have street lamp signs and bin signs, just to reiterate the idea of getting the message out throughtout Dundee.

There was a different energy in the room this morning, everyone is getting noticeably more tired and I think we all had that mid-week slump. I think that's why today was the best day to get out of the DCA and get some fresh air, work in a new surrounding and speak to some other people. We learnt all about Ethnology today, what is the best what to ask people questions to get the answers and insights that you need. You can manipulate a situation very easily just by changing a few words around. For example, instead of asking 'Do you think their is too much reliance on anti-depressants by the NHS?' you could ask 'Why do you think the NHS promote anti-depressants so much?' Avoiding yes or no answers but not being too invasive is key. Listen, don't talk, that kinda thing...

So at this stage we felt like it was time to delegate so we could get as much out of this morning as we could. Myself and few other girls did some more research into post-natal depression, what else is on the market and why the current treatments are failing. Megan, Abbie and Beth went to the pediatric ward at Ninewells hospital, to ask for their help. The staff were incredibly friendly and the girls were invited back tomorrow afternoon to interact with the children and ask them to draw or write down what makes them happy. I will be attending with them this time because I work with children so I feel this is where my strengths lie and I will get a lot out of it.

At the moment, our concept is, street art/wall art or an advertisement campaign, that will help mums/dads and expecting parents and remind them that they are doing such an important and incredible job at raising their children. The thought process behind this is that a child's drawing of what makes them happy, is usually very niave and simple. It reminds us to live in the moment and not in the past or future. We also want to break down the taboo surrounding post-natal depression. A lot of women feel their is an ignorance, and assumption made that a suffer dislikes their child or can't look after them, which has no basis or truth behind it at all. Infact, we have found through research that most women, when feeling down, are perked up when they look at their child's face, quite the opposite of what the general public seem to assume.

Today was the day to begin prototyping. As I said yesterday, we didn't have a final concept idea yet, so we were thrown when we were asked to begin prototyping in pairs immediately. Turns out, this was the best thing we could have done, because if it wasn't for that exercise, I don't think we would have gotten the result that we did.

The concepts that we had were as follows. An interactive scrapbook, in which you can send memories and songs to loved ones when you are feeling down. The other concept we had was vague, it involved children and the fact that their innocence and naivety brings a sense of joy to a lot of people's lives. We wanted to take advantage of that in some shape or form.

We regrouped very quickly and decided we had to make a decision as to who our target market was, as we felt being too general wasn’t giving us enough focus or drive. We had discussed post-natal depression yesterday, after a kind and brave young woman got in touch with us via our Facebook page to speak out about her experience of it. We felt that because we had already gone down a route of involving children, and so far it was working, that it could tie in quite nicely with honing in on post-natal depression.

In our pairs we all started pulling materials together to find something that we could hold, analyse, and improve on. Myself and Beth started making soft objects, that could be made up of children’s drawings, clothes, photos and sound clips, a way of compiling memories but not in the traditional way - getting mothers to reflect on their triumphs in parenthood and how far they have come, whilst at the same time producing something which could be a bonding experience for mum and child. The problem we had was that when working in pairs, we found a lot of loop holes and differences in what we all had thought our concept was.

We gave a presentation before lunch, to the rest of the groups about our prototypes, and very quickly we knew what the flaws were. We were holding too much importance on creating a product, when really our concept still needed some work.

At 2 o’clock, we met back at our table and decided that prototype.2 had to really show everyone what we as a team wanted to achieve, clearly and effectively, so we simply went back to answers we got from the surveys we did yesterday, and thought like children, creating a wall of naive drawings and messages of encouragement or just generally what makes us happy. It essentially became interactive wall/street art and we got a fairly good response from the feedback we got after our final presentation of it.

Mike Press and some students from other disciplines joined us for our end of day presentations and gave some very valuable feedback. ‘Ask yourselves why you are doing that? How does that work?’ They said we had almost play devil’s advocate and really challenge our ideas, to help them grow.

Today was the first day of the change by design module. It seems like only a couple of weeks ago, we were being shown our semester one timetable and change by design seemed so far off, so when I awoke this morning I was overcome with a sense of panic, that I didn't know what I was going to be faced with or what the format of the week would be (I like to be organised)... turns out we were introduced to the idea of a 'sprint' at about ten minutes past 9 and that has basically set the tone for the rest of the week.

A 'sprint' is defined in the dictionary as 'an act or short spell of running at full speed'. In design terms, it basically means a fast-paced and energetic design thinking process. We have only 5 days to come up with an innovative idea/product/service that will promote mental wellbeing, so of course it was going to be intense.

Thankfully, I have a fair bit of experience in the field of mental health problems, so I was quite pleased when I found out that this was the route we were being asked to go down. The facts that we were given, such as '25% of people in Britain will suffer from poor mental health at some point in their life', sadly didn't come as a shock to me. However, I don't think I had ever truly thought about the amount of money that it costs the NHS, nevermind the amount lost in earnings each year due to people being unable to go to work.

We started off by splitting into three groups and brainstorming. Equipped with good old pads of 'post its', we covered a wall in words and phrases associated with the idea of wellbeing, positive and negative. Words such as: trust, abuse, harm, money, alone, family problems, support network, health, opportunity, self help etc, came up again and again, but we quickly learned that noticing what we have mentioned a lot or not mentioned at all is very important in the next step of the design thinking process.

We had to do a bit of editing in order to find 8 key points we thought were most prevalent. These were: impact of social media, grief, health and wellbeing, education, trust, emotions, building and evaluating happiness and environment. We then individually chose which one of those we would like to explore most and that's how the teams were formed. The team that I am part of is exploring happiness and how to promote it. We decided very quickly that we had to do some research, and split up into mini groups to do so. Some people went out and asked the public what makes them happy and what makes them sad, very simple but we felt it necessary to know what trends exist and who to aim for. Myself and another textile student, Laura, created Facebook and Twitter pages, to ask people to share what makes them happy online. Our thought process behind that was that people may answer differently when you are not asking them to open any emotional barriers face-to-face so to speak. They may be more honest if they feel less pressured or embarrassed, which a lot of people did.

With all the answers we collated, what we found was that most people said that they are happy when they are with their family and friends, when they are in love, or when they know that their loved ones are happy, therefore our next logical step was to research the idea of how to make people happy by involving the people they are close to, or that make them feel good.

We have bounced a lot of concept ideas around, such as an interactive memory scrapbook, interactive street art and soft toys, however I was save all that until tomorrow when it's time to prototype and smooth out our ideas, with a fresh mind set and after one of Mike Press' inspiring and excitable talks to get us thinking.

In two weeks time, Design & Craft students at Duncan of Jordanstone are being set a five day challenge, (unknown to us at this point) that will involve design for the greater good, to do something for society, rather than design for design's sake. In preparation for this block, we have been advised to get our hands on a copy of 'Change by Design' written by Tim Brown, CEO and President of International Design Firm 'IDEO'. Shamefully, I didn't know a huge amount about IDEO before now. They concern themselves heavily in consulting other companies on innovation, how to achieve where they maybe aren't achieving or realising where weaknesses may lie, how the company could be strengthened... you get my drift.

The thing that I found whilst reading the book, was how simple and logical all the resolutions and answers to problems big firms have seemed. I think in hindsight, something in a designer's brain would twig, and a certain amount of "aaaah, how did I miss that?" would come into play I'm sure - but it did leave me wondering what our experience will be like and whether we will execute the challenge as designers, or design thinkers. I would like to think the latter however whatever the outcome, I'm confident that everyone of us will come out of the experience with a new insight to problem solving and working outside the boundaries of our specific specialisms.

For the past seven weeks, I have been in a state of denial as far as our Change by Design module goes. This is partly because my mind has been wrapped up on our 'Shifting Cities' project which I will discuss at a later point but also because I was in a bit of a panic - being shy doesn't usually lend itself to working in new groups on something so intense. Reading the book has changed that view a little, it has certainly given me a good basis on how to tackle the project and get the best out of it and out of the team particularly. Step one - buy post-it notes in bulk!