Nadia Plesner

Today in our Design Studies lecture was about Good Design Bad Design, Jonathan Baldwin talked through a number of different things along with visual literacy but when he discussed Nadia Plesner it really stuck out to me. She designed a t-shirt with the image of a darfurian child who was holding Chihuahua and on the other arm he had a Louis Vuitton bag. The issue raised behind this top was that people focus on such meaningless things such as a bag compared to major issues across the world. After hearing about this story in the lecture I researched it a bit further to find out certain details on it.

Once the campaign started she got a copyright lawsuit from Louis Vuitton saying that the each day she continued to use this image she would be charged $20,000.


When I first heard this I was in shock that they would do this and on such a large extent, as for a student or most people $20,000 is a lot of money to spend on a campaign. The image on the bag I felt was a good way to raise attention that there are much more important things happening around the world at this time. If I had done this myself I would never have considered that it would be going against the law.


Jonathan had said that they can’t be picking in what copyrights they let slide n which they don’t. Even if the Louis Vuitton thought it wasn’t that a major breach of copyright they had to use a lawsuit other wise it could lead others to do the same thing.


Although this may be true I still think that a campaign like this is a lot more important to raise awareness than for the sake of someone breaching a copyright in a small way.

Assignment - Second Mind Map

After doing the first mind map I then picked an area in the book to go into further detail on. I chose chapter seven as while I was reading the book it was the part which I liked the most and enjoyed reading. I think I liked it so much was because it talks about such real topics which are really relevant at this time in many places. I had never thought that if one person killed themselves that it would have the same effect on others who are in the same mind. I found it a very interesting chapter in this book.


This is my mind map.

Below is my annotated bibliography for this section.


Page 216
Rubinstein,D. H. (1995). Contemporary Pacific.
Rubinstein,D. H. (1983). Social Science and Medicine.
It tells you about the suicide of a boy in Micronesia and then starts to give you information about suicides in that country.


Page 221
(1998). Journal of the American Medical Association. Harvard School of Public Health
Providing information on statistics about smoking amongst school teenagers and is to show that even to the extent of strategies done can’t make people stop smoking.


Page 222
Phillips,D. P. (1974). American Sociological Review. University of California San Diego.
He looked at different suicides and links them to there area and puts all the information on a map to work out if there was a relationship between them.


Page 230
Eysenck,H. J .(1965). Smoking, Health and Personality. New York. Basic Books.
Eysenck,H. J .(1991). Smoking, Personality and Stress. New York. Springer-Verlag.
It is being told that there are different personalities for those who smoke and not smoke, it explains these types of people.


Page 242
Rowe,D. C . (1994). The Limits of Family Influence. New York. Guilford Press.
He is expressing that although parents may do stuff in front of you i.e. smoking, doesn’t mean that their children are going to pick it up in there life.


Page 246
Glassman,A. H . (1990). Journal of the American Medical Association.
It is used to show how people link smoking and depression together as a means to help.

Assignment - First mind map

At the start of design studies we have been told to get and read the book “The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell. Once I received the book I sat down to start to read it, I found it hard to get into on the first chapter or two as I thought that everything kept being repeated in the same context. After restarting the book I found that although the author repeated stuff it started to all make since. I found that with everything being talked about in different situations, it explained and made me understand it better than my first attempt of the book. In the first seminar we started in groups to make a mind map of the whole book and were told it was to be finished for the next seminar along with a mind map of a specific section in the book.

The image below is of my mind map of the whole book.

Furniture Project

Since we have finished the last project it is time to move onto a new one, the project we are starting on Monday is a furniture based project. This is going to be something completely new to me, I am excited to get started and think it'll be very interesting whilst being something totally different but at the same time it'll be a big challenge. I've started to looked into furniture and product design over the past couple of days, its started to get my mind thinking about this area.

I came across a furntiure designer called, Lui Honfay. These images below are of some of the work he has done.

I am continuing to look at a number of other different designers to get some inspiration as I am not totally sure what aspects we are meant to be focusing on. I will keep this updated the whole way through this project and how I am getting on.

Presentation sheets

This image above is of all the presentation boards the way they had been displayed all together.

All the images above our of the six sheets we created with the information about are project we wanted to be shown. The images I have are not the best as they were taken whilst on the curved wall, I will take better pictures and upload them at a later date.

Project finished

So the first project has come to an end. We managed to get everything done on time and actually got it done earlier than expected. It was such a relief when we got our boards pinned up on the Wednesday a day ahead of the final pin up time.

Due to me not being in Scotland on the Friday I had to record my presentation on a video for my tutors to watch along with the rest of them. Since we got everything done early it gave me time to plan out what I had to include in the presentation etc, so on the afternoon after pinning up my group as a whole recorded it. We had a number of technical problems with the camcorder we had, then with the laptop we were using but in the end we just used a digital camera which did a good job. The recording went good and we got all the information included in it, but if there was anything we forgot Yasemin and Lynsey could discuss it more on the day.

To my knowledge the presentation went really well and the girls seemed to be happy with the feedback that we got, although they said there was a problem with the recording and it would not play well. It turned out that the rest of my group had to explain a number of things over again.

It's now just a waiting game to find out actually how well we did..

First Blog

I am trying to write this blog for the first time which has taken me a long time to actually start, I don't think it'l be an easy thing to do but it'l be like one of those things once you have started it becomes much easier the more times you do it.

It is coming into the last week of my first project for second year, the project brief is to design an Exhibition Space on Juteopolis. At the beginning I wasn't looking forward to doing it on jute since I picked the Jute Industry for one of my projects in first year, I have to say the feeling is still the same about it. Jute isn't the most exciting of materials and gets very boring after such a long period of studying it (which I suppose applies to anything). Although my group have decided to stay away from jute the material and foucs more on the lives of people at the time, I will be very happy once the project is finished.

Been in the studio all day on a Saturday to get as much work done to minimize the work load but when you are making a model a whole day only turns out to be like a couple of hours work. Today is Sunday and there seems to be a lot of work yet to be completed for Tuesday/Wednesday so we have time to get the boards printed and my presentation recorded. Looks like there will be a number of late nights ahead. I will try to keep this updated in the progress of the last few days of this project as the deadline gets closer and closer.