Snow Fun

So today got into university for exactly two hours and were then told to leave again, was good getting to the workshop but you can only get so much done in a certain period of time. Fingers crossed it open and for a bit longer tomorrow, hopefully get a bit more work completed. Got some work completed earlier so tonight was definitely intended for having some fun in the soft new snow.


Making a snow lady is very difficult with this type of snow/ice but it looks not bad considering.

The snow angels turned out out good although it didn't help in trying to stay warm.

My new wellington boots to keep my wee feet dry!

But the best way to warm up again is with a hot chocolate with marshmallows and chocolate on top.

Yum Yum

Snow!

On Saturday night the snow started in Dundee, in the early hours of Sunday morning the thunder, lightening and hail stones started and kept going until Sunday morning which I never thought they could all happen at the same time. But I can say it was not a very pleasant sound to be woken up to.

Snow on Saturday morning.

 It was so exciting on Sunday when the snow/hail was pretty deep, so me and my flat mates  thought it was the perfect time to start decorating the flat with Christmas decorations. Here are some pictures of the living room and the view we get from out bathroom window of the town centre.

Caird Hall

Ok so today (Monday) the whole of Dundee University has been closed due to severe weather conditions, which when I first heard I was pretty happy but when I actually thought about the amount of work being missed out on due to not being able to get into the workshop started to freak me out. Although it was a good day of doing work and enjoying the snow, I can't see the weather getting much better. I am worrying that it is more than likely that the university will be closed tomorrow again. Fingers crossed it isn’t as there is still so much to get done for this project!

Assignment 3: Looking Up, Looking Down

For this assignment we were asked to research further into the topic which we had chosen for assignment 2. The area I had chosen was smoking so is the area which I focused on. To start of this research I wasn’t totally sure what it was I had to complete and now I am still not one hundred percent sure if I have done it correctly. But before I started researching I made a brainstorm of some of the key words that I might want to use.

Brainstorm 

I then to start with looked for books and journals on why people/teenagers start to smoke in the first place and then I looked at the campaign and advertising side to cigarettes and smoking. These are some the books and journals that I found to be useful.


Altstiel, T. (2006). Advertising Strategy: Creative Tactics From the Outside/In. Sage Publications.
It says about how certain ‘magic’ words and headlines help with the selling power of the advertising campaign. He/they are saying that its all about the way you say things in advertising to communicate the right message your wanting to get across. 

Flay, B. (1994). Journal Of Health and Social Behaviour. Differential Influence of Parental Smoking and Friends’ Smoking on Adolescent Initiation and Escalation and Smoking Volume 35.
This journal speaks about they have discovered that teenagers whose parents smoke or the people around them that there is a higher risk that they will become users themselves. Then this is brought into the behaviours and attitudes of theses people to see how they relate.

Menning, C. (2006). Journal of Health and Social Behaviour. Nonresident Fathers’ Involvement and Adolescents’ Smoking Volume 47.

They are trying to find out/predict what makes adolescents become smokers at this age and how family life relates to this, research has shown that households that are unstable have a higher percentage that the child will become a smoker. It goes into detail about how parents come into the connection between them and smoker.

O’Keefe, T. (1971). The Public Opinion Quarterly. The Anti-Smoking Commercials: A study of Television’s Impact on Behavior Volume 35.
It talks about the methods which were used in the anti-smoking campaigns and did they work to the best way which the advertisement could. It says that communication, messages and reinforcements are the big parts of advertising campaigns for them to be very influential on the viewing watching them.


O’Shaughnessy, J. (2003). Persuasion in Advertising. Routledge.
The section in this book is about the way cigarette packaging means so much to a person who is smoking them or well at least a number of years ago this was the case. So if the packets looked more upper class they seemed to get sales and that it doesn’t matter if the government changed it will still stay the same.


Vaknin, J. (2007). Smoke Signals: 100 Years of tobacco Advertising. Middlesex: University press.
This book talked about so many area of smoking and advertising etc,I picked up that it was saying smokers received such advantages from it but then goes on to say how it has changed over the years. Now in advertising you wouldn’t be able to show someone smoking.

Furniture Project (Pallets Pallets Pallets)

Since starting this project it has been pretty full on and I haven’t had much time to be able to update this about it too much. So after deciding in the group that we were going to use pallets to come up with a piece of furniture. We got a number of blue pallets and broke them number to make them into different forms and to help with the design process. Whilst doing this we found it was hard to break them down into individual pieces so that put a restriction onto what we could do. We had been told the best option would be to saw them apart and use them that way. After getting four basically new pallets we were thinking of designs. We had planed at one point to incorporate growing/living plants into the furniture but this has now been decided against, along with a number of other ideas.

The reconstruction of a tree like shape out of the pallets.

It has been hard to think of a design and communicate it with everyone in the group and for it to be decided for or against. But different designs have been put to the table but have gone to make room for new ones.

Four basically new pallets

Ok so we have just under three weeks left of this furniture project. We thought we had eventually made some progress, which helped me to de-stress but then today our tutor basically told use, not in so many words that our design was crap and that were not getting enough out of the pallets. Which means now that we are back to the drawing board for the third time after initial ideas have been scraped previously. With not much time left lets just stay its going to be a very hard and stressful few weeks.


After hearing this me and Shona went down to the workshop to start working with the machinery and built some sort of structure out of the planks of wood cut from the pallets we have at the minute. It was good getting to terms with the machinery again before we start our actual design which is the only plus at the minute.


Tomorrow we are going to collect the new pallets which we have found, which will hopefully make it easier to come up with a design. I will try to keep this updated as much as possible over the next few weeks.

Assignment 2 - Mind Map/Poster

After discussing with my group about how design relates to the area of the tipping point which we discussed. The part of the book I chose was Suicide, Smoking and the Unsticky Cigarette but after discussing with my group it came across that smoking related more to design than the others did. I took smoking and came up with ways which I thought it related to design which you can see in the mind map below.

The ways which people would have to have come up with designs for so many parts of cigarettes and smoking campaigns, is I feel much more than what you would think from just looking at a packet of cigarettes. People have to think of ways to sell a product but in some parts of my mind map it is more a factor of selling to people that smoking is bad. There are so many areas that have been designed from, the packet they are kept in, the images on the packet, the campaigns, the advertisements and so many other things. Below is a poster of a number of the things that have been design to try and put people off smoking.

Assignment 2

For this assignment which we have to complete before our seminar next week so Vikki Sonia and myself got together to discuss and make a brainstorm on the ways that the topics chosen for the last assignment relate to design. The areas that we had to discuss was, the Stickiness factor, rise and fall of NYC crime and Suicide and Smoking. We took a few minutes on each topic and all three of us came up with different words that we thought related to design. Here are some of the images that were taken through out our brainstorming and the words that we came up with.

The next step is to create a mind map/ poster on the results we have come up with.

Lecture by Hazel White

Today’s lecture was taken by Hazel White, she talked about design but when she was talking about different types of jewellery and how technology has been applied to it. She then discussed about how a help button was put onto a necklace type object, which I have seen before and thought it was very interested and a good way to help elderly people. Hazel was talking about how people won’t wear this item due to how large an obvious it was, its as though those people wearing them are being labelled that they are incapable of looking after themselves. Which I feel is understandable, if it was me I would not want to wear it as it really states something about them.

I feel that with the amount of money and time being spent on making technology in jewellery as much as people may feel it’s a good thing, they could be using there time to design this much better. If the necklace or even a bracelet had a smaller button which they could press for help that was not as noticeable amongst the rest of design of the piece of jewellery, people may be more willing to wear it. If the item was an accessory rather and an object needed just to get help, it would become more of a success and would help more people if they did have an accident as I feel people would not have a problem wearing a piece of jewellery that has this technology incorporated in it.