I meant to blog this a long time ago, (ahh this Summer has been terrible for keeping up with things)… Iain came and talked to me at Pirate Utopias, and then wrote a really nice blog post about me. You can check it out here.
I wanted to say thanks and write a wee post about Iains blog which is really worth a good look, he seems to be able to pick up on some really interesting bits and pieces around the web, and he works for Poke who do some awesome work! Including my favorite: Baker tweet.
This was a short animation that Louisa and I made during our time at New designers when we were working the floor of the Goldsmiths design factory/meta-design experience. The brief was to take one of the winning arguments from the debate we held the previous day and make a film to communicate the winning notion in half a day.
Unfortunately, I only just had a chance to render it out, but here it is better late than never.
I can’t decide whether I love or hate this project, it borders on super cheesy at some points but then claws back and throws up some beautiful sentiments and an interesting method of interviewing. I really like these quite abrupt questions that give lots of similar expected/consensus type answers, but every now and again you get something super personal and poetic. Obviously it helps that it is beautifully shot, so at worst it’s a really pretty piece of film.
This one is shot in Brooklyn, which I actually prefer to the London film I think, though the guy at the beginning of London is pretty cool.
Interviewing has become super interesting to me, I especially had troubles, but also increasing interest, with the interviews part of my work this year, and looking at how people use interview in design. I generally have issues with it, simply because it’s so hard to execute well. Looking back though, the interviews are where the belief project actually started to come alive. I guess it’s obvious to say that design can be mulled around and played with in the studio, but essentially it has to go back to people in someway, and thats what the interviews were.
I remember thinking at the beginning of the year about how you can kind of pry into sections of peoples life. Looking at Sophie Calles hotel work, and the questionable ethics that go along with it. The interview project starts to do a similar thing I think and the concept is very simple; drive around asking people for interviews, but it’s executed perfectly, and starts to highlight interesting little bits of peoples lives that become really beautiful.
I think the reason it works well is good editing, an interview only becomes interesting when you feed it to someone, it can’t be pages and pages or hours and hours of research presented in a block, perhaps the ‘design’ here is the editing; choosing the interesting bits. I’m not sure how you do that quite.
I think these two are my favorites so far (though I can’t embed them unfortunately):
The Goldsmiths Meta-Design Experience will be a five day production line, where we will mix our individual interests with the public’s input to create starting points around which we will build new projects in the space. It will showcase ongoing experimental design processes as opposed to static finalised objects.
Rather than displaying our work as polished, saleable outcomes we have decided to use the exhibition to demonstrate our design thinking and ability to generate ideas. We want to celebrate our design process and show the messiness, the bad ideas, the problems we face throughout, and so on.
Over these five days we aim to democratise our current work; offering it up for conversation, critique and re-contextualisation. Putting it under scrutiny, allowing groups of people to unpick processes, and concepts and developing new ideas to take it further.
The first of the flickerer videos; taking the flickerer to ‘the source’.
On wednesday I interviewed 5; my mother, father, grand parents, and my 4 year old cousin.
I wanted to trace this perception to a definite source, and then continue down this line to see where it took me; not very far actually, only to my grandparents.
I have a number of thoughts about what happened, which I think needs another blog post, but most important to me at the moment was the way the five people used the object in very different ways and they’re resulting, ‘re-assembled beliefs’; scared, skeptical, or easily convinced, somehow I picked five people that seemed to hold very different ideas about the object, had very different ways of interacting with it, and drew differing conclusions from it.
My Dad, interestingly, shifts his thoughts throughout, and then remains skeptical; he kind of clings onto the perception towards the end, continually offering different, more thoroughly thought out reasons as to why you shouldn’t flick the lights.
So, the protest didn’t really come off, I think the reasons were pretty obvious why actually…
Though I wasn’t demonstrating that H&S was the source of these perceptions, thats what people thought I was saying by being there, and so it didn’t match up with what I was speaking about, so it meant that the whole thing didn’t make much sense to people observing. I wanted to demonstrate that H&S as a system took commonly held perceptions and rolled them into a bureaucratic system, that could be enforced with laws etc.
If i am doing anything with health and safety it is to reduce bureaucratic surrounds, and attempt to establish a system of questioning and experimentation in its place. But, as I have found all along (see pete graver) I think when you attack something like this people are going to stick up for it…
I had one guy from inside suggest I should stop reading the daily mail; he told me that he was defending a 15 yr old boy who was killed on a building site. This was super interesting, because I became this horrible person, and it was ‘the people like me’ that this man had a huge problem with that he was fighting himself.
I still understand the health and safety office as the ‘enforcement’, in the literal sense, but perhaps, in terms of a self-enforcement, it is actually more interesting to be infiltrating the media.
I’ve been working on some graphics to go with the machines, and performances. I want to make these kind of awkward pieces that will sit along the similarly awkward culminations of objects and have the whole thing look kind of un-easy. I want there to be a prompting of questions, you know “is this for real, is it that important”, but also the “I actually really want to know about this”… I feel like it might be starting to work, I’m not sure though, criticisms, anyone??
