Project 4: What is your Research?
Project Description
To this point, we've explored graphic design as a means of close observation and self-expression. For this project, we will broaden our aperture. Whether working for a political campaign or a news organization, graphic designers may engage visually with politics to persuade and inform a perhaps disinterested audience.
Launching from your manifesto in which you spent time understanding what it meant to represent the intangible parts of yourself in a written and visual format, you will now move into representing a component of a culture and political movement that is not your own.
From here you are given the latitude to determine the outcome. We're asking you to draw on your animation skills, type skills, hand-making skills to best interpret your research. At first this may feel like a vast sea of possibilities — one without beacons for orientation. It is up to you to provide those beacons for yourself in order to develop a route that cleverly and artfully delivers information. This is a design research project based on the work of David Reinfurt's "R-E-S-E-A-R-C-H" class.
Grading
Your grade for this project will make up 1/4 of your grade for the class. You will be evaluated based on your capacity to curate and present a set of thoughtfully designed visual studies grounded in a single subject, a well-articulated and meaningful statement, and a composition that showcases meticulous attention and professionalism in achieving the objective.
Project Goals
- identify and explain a researched political or protest movement from the the past three decades outside America to an English speaking audience.
- demonstrate understanding of the visual culture within which the movement took place.
- create the front-end of a website OR an animated video explainer that’s conceptually driven by the culture to explore that movement.
- Part 1: Collection
- Collect 3 possible design research subjects for investigation. Post each to an are.na channel with visual and textual references. Come to class have made something with each! Be prepared to discuss. Together, we will help you select one subject to continue working with.
- Part 2: Make Something Again!
- This could be as simple as translating the work from one media to another — copy it in pencil at 1:1 size; make a short video of the work moving between different scales; describe the work in your own words recorded as a short audio file; print it in black and white; print it at six different sizes; hang it upside down and make notes on how this changes the work; etc., etc., etc.
- The most effective way to learn about a piece of design is by making something new. This is directly opposed to the research process that you might be familiar with which relies on previously written and recorded accounts. In this case, you want to know not so much what is it? but rather, how does it work? And so, an empirical approach will be best. Bring what you’ve made to class.
- Part 3: Make Something Again, Again!
- Make three new things in relation to your original. Each must be in a different media. Using the first practical response as a guide, refine your inquiry. For example, try to understand color in the work. What happens if it is monochromatic? Or shifted to warm colors? Experiment with typography — copy the work but change the type. How does this alter the original? What do you know about when and how your subject was made? What were the tools of the time and how did they shape the work? Bring what you’ve made to class.
- Part 4: Make Something Again, Again, Again!
- Make three new things in relation to your original. Each should be in a distinct media, at a distinct scale, or with a distinct approach. All of your design research involves making new work. You will continue to do so. This is a design research project where thinking and making are collapsed into one fluid activity.
- Part 5: Perform Your Collection
- You will prepare a 9-minute presentation to be delivered over in class. This constitutes the documentation of your design research project. It will be recorded. Therefore, this presentation should be very carefully scripted, choreographed, rehearsed, and performed. You might present from a specific space in the building. You might be wearing specific clothing. You might enlist others to help in the presentation. You might consider lighting and sound. You will present the works you have made, which will necessarily be in different media, and so you should consider how to do this gracefully.
Resources
Reading
- Erik Carter’s “What’s the Future of Type”
- Infinite Wonderland