Final Project Brief.

The last week has been spent refining the brief for my final project. It is not concrete necessarily but represents a flag in the sand, with regards to outlining what I will be exploring for the foreseeable future. The document is 16 pages of objects, ideas, references and people that my be useful in my exploration of the area. An uploaded pdf is available here: bgbarker.com/briefdoc01

Democracy Map

I am beginning an exploration of my possible (read probable) final project territory.  This was a poster to map how we (humans) connect to democracy. The inspiration came from a silly story in America where people were using tax payers money (through credits) to buy golf carts. The governments response was to do nothing. I felt this disconnect was interesting and could form a basis for project understanding why we feel so removed from our money. I've been speaking with local councils to gauge their opinions on this. (thanks to Matt Ward for the image)

Christopher Baker Influenced Ideation.

In exploring new ways of generating ideas I drew on a piece of work by Christopher Baker, famous from the Data Flow book. He made an average gun by taking a line drawing of every toy gun patent ever filed in the US and laying them over the top of each other to make an average. Its a very beautiful thing. My posters were made from a series of robots that I made using everyday technologies, like the wii remote, a laptop and an electric tooth brush. It was hoped that while I was building these robots, I would start to make connection between thing that I would otherwise not have considered. In other words I was distracting myself by making robots, whilst I was actually coming up with the seeds of an idea.

Digital Interfaces in the Real World

These were illustrations of idea I had had for using digital interfaces in new contexts. Specifically in areas where it avoided a question. I had be struck by a couple of points that Tom Igoe had made in his book Making Things Talk. He was referring to the way interfaces should be designed to keep the user in the loop and understanding the process that was going on. If it was common for a pregnant lady to wear a loading screen, or a sleeping person to show a buffering bar. I also tried to represent the idea of a real world colour picker in the video below.

Exploring Choice

Through an exploration of negative intervention for brief developement. I arrived at an area that was interesting to me which was that a negative impact can affect the number of choices available, which can have a positive impact. This brief can lead to explorations of how we can navigate (or possibly remove) the choices of modern life. The video was designed to represent the noise of modern life.

Little Book

A booklet I've made to collect the results of my survey of the pubs in New Cross. I was surveying them to understand the impact of the heavy snow day in February earlier this year. It is part of a project to understand if positives can come from a negative impact.

Screen Printed t-shirt.

I decided to learn some screen printing technique as the chance presented itself. This was done using two photographically exposed screens and two colours.

Me being a grown up!

As part of tinker.it at designers_block, here's me attempting to fit into the adult world.

Post-its!

Part of the beginning of the process of finding a brief to work on this year. Each person came up with ninety ideas and we mixed and order them to generate a range of briefs. There is a sample one below.
















































Quote:
Oscar Wilde: "To me beauty is the wonder of all wonders, it is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances."

Background:
A theme that was common in the collected ideas, was the idea of ugly design. It brings up a number of debates around the idea of aesthetics and the subjectivity of beauty. Oscar Wilde spent most of his life extolling the virtues of beauty and the aesthetic movement. His first novel, The Picture of Dorian Grey is almost entirely dedicated to this discussion. In this brief we want you first to connect with this debate and understand what beauty means to different people and in different contexts. Then react to your research to make something that can fit within your definition of ugly.

Project Definition:
Design something ugly! This maybe a service, an intervention, an object or a graphic, the most important thing is that you engage with the issue of what it means to be ugly and find an angle that allows you to generate an outcome.

Deliverables:
During the eight days we would hope to see a few days spent researching and understanding ugliness, with the aim of arriving at your own definition (this need not be a complete definition, but a starting point), then this should enable you to spend a week making your final outcome as unutterably ugly, as possible.

French Band: The Yupps

I did a little photography for a French band from Metz called The Yupps, whilst I was there. They sang in English and were good. I think they are coming to England soon to play in Brighton and London.

Food Day

This morning I finally got round to doing a few things that I had been meaning to do all summer. Primarily, visit Smithfields meat market to look at high quality produce at wholesale prices. I got there early (5.45 to be precise) and it was every bit as extensive as I hoped. It clearly isn't aimed at small customers like me, but it's very easy to buy in small amounts. I got chicken livers, braising steak, black pudding, sausages and duck breast. The prices are all very decent (sausages £4 for 1.5Kg, chicken livers £2 Kg) and the quality seems superb. I can't remember eating such good sausages, and at around £1 per lb, they are priced like 10 years ago. However the best moment of the morning came when I was searching for bread at London Bridge, nowhere was open at 7am, so I decided to knock on the door of a wholesale bakers called Tivicos. I asked if he could sell me a loaf of bread, he asked me what size I wanted (i said biggest!), then ran off and got me one, stuffing it in an old flour sack. Then when I tried to pay him he refused! Which made it hands down my favourite flavour of food, free!


From there I headed back home (via Bermondsey Antiques Market) and was on Wickham Road by 8am, Exactly 3 hours after leaving. Once there I set about cooking some of those sausages, which were excellent.


Then faffed around cleaning the kitchen and got out my newish coffee machine and persuaded it to make easily its nicest latte so far. Perhaps the double cream helped! I just got back from buying Mushrooms so chicken liver pate should be coming soon.

The Chicken Liver pate is complete. The livers were great, not much preparation needed. I made two flavours (as you can see). One is Mushroom and Parsley, the other is Thyme. The thyme one is a bit disappointing, somehow the soft flavour doesn't really compliment the richness of the livers, perhaps it needed lemon. I can always add it when its eaten. The mushroom one tastes great though. Seems to be a really strong combination. Anyway, here are the picture of that.



Next I'll relax for a moment before starting on the beef and black-eye bean casserole. Perhaps I'll even open the bottle of Bordeaux that I brought back from France with a slice or two of Alsace jambon.



The stew is done, I'm tired. Simon is here to pass judgement and he says its ok. Tough judge!



Yeah, it was nice. Now the left over cheese.

Robot Animation

A little animation that I put together whilst working at Tinker.it.