GIDE Project - Creativity for Local Enterprises

It is now the first semester of third year (crazy how quick time passes by) and we are now about 4weeks into the new project. The project we have been given is for GIDE (Group of International Design Education), which will be hosted in Dundee this year in February. Only a few students work will be selected to be shown and presented at this exhibition along with the work of students from other Universities. 


The brief is ‘Creativity for Local Enterprises’, I felt that this left it very open to decide what is that I was going to design and who would it be for. After a number of mind mapping sessions with groups and as an individual I decided I wanted to design something around the though to prostitution. This mind map below shows the things that I thought about when I consider this word.

I found an organisation in Dundee called Women’s Rape and Sexual Abuse Centre (WRASAC) which helps women and families through a number of kind of abuse. With in this organisation I came across a project which they do called ‘Vice Versa, Discovering New Directions, Dundee’. It is a support network for women in prostitution to be able to go to a drop in centre on a Wednesday evening to receive support and help from the people that work there. It is a place for women to go to get advice on lots of different topics, feel safe and hopefully try and exit the habit they have got themselves into.

After meeting with a women who works in this project I have learnt a lot more about the type of women that are taking part in the drop in centre, she has given me insight as to what the women need and what the support workers need as well.


My aim is to design a better centre than the one they already have, so that it is a place that is open 7 days a week, have room for the women to be able to stay the night(s), medical support place and mainly a place for the women to feel safe.


From talking with the women from vice versa there are a number of things I have to think about when designing this centre such as -
Location - it can’t be far out of the area that the women walk the streets as they are more likely not to go to the centre. Also can’t be in a very quiet area as this will open up dangers for the women.
Security - there has to be better forms of security to the premises (intercom, roller shutter, safety glass etc)
Support groups - have different parts to the building for different things, such as medical and education try and keep them apart


I have been researching into curve within architecture as I want the building to be full of feminine shapes as it is a centre for women. I have found a lot of inspiration that has helped me get an image of what I think the building should look like. My main inspiration at the moment has been Frank Gehry.

EMP Museum, Seattle

Starwood Hotel, Spain

The next step I am going to take will be to find the appropriate site location and then to plan out what the centre will need to contain within it.

Assignment 5B - Summer reading and other plans

Since we break off at the end of May we have a lot of time during the summer so these are some of the plans that I have made for this time.


Books
Blink: The Power of thinking without thinking - Malcolm Gladwell
Outliers: The Story of Success - Malcolm Gladwell
I have chosen two books written by Malcolm Gladwell due to really enjoying reading his book 'The Tipping Point' I thought it would be interesting to see what some of his other books are like. 
Did you Spot the Gorilla?: How to Recognise the Hidden opportunities in Your Life - Richard Wiseman
I chose this book as the clip it talks about I have been shown before and thought it was very interesting, so I thought the same about this book which talks about the same concept.
Natural Flair (Eco Architecture) - Taschen Publishing
I have chose to look at a few books to do with my discipline as from doing this current project it has got me very interested in sustainable architecture and how it can be built in a good way.
Sustainable by Design: Explorations in Theory and Practice - Stuart Walker
I have also chosen this book for some of the same reason as the previous book, although I thought it would be good to look at a book that is not necessarily specific for my discipline but it could provide me with inspiration on doing other things or ways of doing things.


Blog
Personalise
I need to spend time on making my blog my own and adding a personalised background/logo.
Portfolio
I want to create a portfolio containing all the work I have done over the past two years for anyone to see if they come onto my blog.
More content
I need to spend more time adding more post around the things I come across in day to day life and my design thoughts rather than just sticking to the assignments and studio projects I have.
Twitter account
I need to set up an account and would like to link it into my blog so that it is easy for people to find.
Details
It is important that when people come onto your blog that they can find out a bit about yourself as well as finding out about your designs.


Contacts
Other Disciplines
I feel it would be good to get in contact with some of the students in different disciplines especially textiles and jewellery as there has been such a divide over the past few months.
Exchange students
As there are a number of students in my course that are going away on exchanges it would be good to keep in contact to see how they are getting on and what there projects are like etc.
People in Industry
Connecting with people who are in the architecture and interior design industry is important as they open up the chance of potential employment or even a period of placement.
Twitter
Using a twitter account will help find and follow fellow designers and people in industry that could help me with inspiration in the future.

Barcelona

At the beginning of the Easter break I went to Barcelona with two other girls from my course. I was so looking forward to being able to get away and forget about the current project for a while, and what a beautiful to be able to do that in. When we arrived early on the Tuesday morning we dropped our stuff off and went a walk up the main street outside our hotel ’La Rambla’. We came across a market which we thought might have only been there for the day but luckily enough it was there the whole time we were. It will filled with lots of different stands from meat to fish, fruit and vegetables, chocolates and jellies, ice cream and nuts, and then there were hot food stands.

That same day we were walking about we found the Cathedral in the centre of Barcelona, it was such a beautiful building was just a shame that there was so much scaffolding around the outside. Once you went inside there was only a little amount of structural support which was good so that you could see the grandness of the building.

The following day we tried to follow the map we had to find the beach but instead we came across the Park de Ciutadella, on such a beautiful day it was nice to sit and take in everything around us. It was such a large park I don’t think we managed to see it all as it was getting late in the day and we had a big walk to get back to the hotel. When we left the park we seen the Arc de Triumph and then made are way back.

We had an early night that night as we had planned to go round a large area of Barcelona to see most of Gaudi’s buildings and a few more. First thing that morning we took the metro and went to ’La Sagrada Familia’ and all I can say is unbelievable. I was so taken aback at the scale and magnificence of it. As soon as we got inside the Cathedral I was totally speechless, the inside was beautiful from the stairways to the pillars to the stained glass windows. We spent a lot of the morning just sitting in the cathedral taking all of it in.

After having lunch we made our way back in towards the town to Casa Batllo and La Pedrera, which from the outside are beautiful to look at. We never ventured inside them as we thought that the outside of them were the main features of the buildings that we wanted to see. After looking at all the designer shops we went to Park Guell, it was a stunning day with the sun shining which made the park even more spectacular. It was just a shame that there were people out trying to sell bit’s and pieces which I felt took away from the atmosphere of it.

Barcelona is such a beautiful city and would definitely love to go back when I get older to see things I hadn’t seen and everything else again to see the changes that had been done over the years.

Assignment 5A - Planning for the Future

For the final assignment of this semester we had to look at the topic we chose in semester one and develop a proposal of how we would develop it further using techniques developed in the second semester. 



The topic I chose was ‘Smoking‘ at the start it was a very open search from why people started smoking, to health related problems, legislation and advertising and how these all related back to design. I took it on further in the final assignments in semester one. I started to focus more on the advertising side of smoking and how it has an affect on people who do smoke. My main focus was on the question, ‘Does advertising have any affect on smokers/smoking?‘. The research that I have already completed was secondary research based, when looking into advertising in relation to the effects on smoking that information was full of statistics that other people had collected from doing there own from of primary research, articles and journals that people had wrote. I feel that the information I have already collected now needs more specific questions and data collected which would be best done using forms of primary research. Finding the information myself has come at a good time especially from doing the assignments in the last (second) semester, they focused on the use of techniques that would help collect primary evidence. From completing these assignments I now know which methods would work best for the information that is needed. 


The first form of primary research I will carry out will be an interview of local people in the Dundee area, an interview would gain important information from those people who smoke. I would ask non smokers similar questions that the smokers were asked to find out what both sides feel about advertising and what effects they had on them. With an interview you can get the questions you need answered and also be given information that you may not have thought to be relevant. The only problem with an interview is that the interviewee could be making the answers up which would result in the answers being invalid. The best way to get round this problem would be to ask people who are comfortable with answering the questions, there is more chance of getting honest answers back from them. Before going straight into an interview I think it is best to mind map the topic first. I did this on an other assignment which was to carry out an interview and record your findings, the mind map helped high light questions that would be good to ask and brought up others that link them together. With some answers people give you they can lead onto a question you may not have thought of so it is best to have time and note taking space to allow this to happen. From this you can gain a lot of vital information.


The second research method I will use will be an observation, since from doing the pervious assignment with an observation I felt it gave you more of a realistic view of something. With an observation, it gives a first response to something, I would ask a couple of smokers and non smokers to come and watch a number of smoking advertising clips and images individually to see how they all reacted to them. This I feel would give you an insight to how effective advertising is at first glance, as well as getting to see how they react when no one else is round them. Although this does not give you any information on what the people will do after seeing the images but there are no easy ways of recording that sort of data. It would be an interesting experiment as I think that the reaction between the non smokers and smokers would be a lot different than one another. 


The third form of primary research to be carried out would be a visual analysis, at the start I thought it wouldn’t provide much information, but thinking back to an older assignment I felt the same at the start of it but in the end I found out a lot from looking at a persons belongings that what I thought I would. The type of image I would look at would be of people smoking or of an advertising campaign, the only problem I have with this type of research is that the information gained is only what you yourself make of the image making the results very bias. What you get from an image and what someone else could make of it may be completely different. For this technique I would ask a number of people (smokers and non smokers) to analysis the images to see if people saw the same things. This could make the information gained more correct in comparison to one persons reaction. An easy way to record this information would be on a brain storm, write down each word or phrase people came up with when they looked the image, and see if there were many of a similar nature. This could then lead into a mind map showing all the information grained from this analysis divided up into sections. I found that when completing mind maps it helped lay out information so that it was easy to read and simple to follow.   


The methods of primary research I have suggested through out this proposal are best for the information I want to find out. All the information will be gathered and analysed which will lead to different statistics etc, this will follow in a conclusion that answers the question, ‘Does advertising have an effect on smokers/smoking?’. 

SEPA Project

Over the past few months I feel like I have not been posting enough on my blog due to having such a large project on at the moment. So to make up for this I will explain what it is exactly what I have been doing. 


This project is to refurbish an existing warehouse into an office building for SEPA, to begin with it started of as an 11week project due in before we broke off for easter but due to the size of the project and not having enough time to complete it we have been given an extension until the 2nd May. 


Before starting into designing the office space I researched into what SEPA does and what it is they are trying to achieve. From finding out more about SEPA I came up with the idea of making in inside of the building as natural as possible and to make the inside of it feel like you were still outside.  With this in mind I then researched into different types of natural design and how people have brought nature inside a building. The main thing that stuck out to me was the grass carpets, green roofs and growing walls. 

With this concept in mind I continued to research it but started to think of the design of the interior and exterior of the building along with the interior layout. At this point I decided that I wanted to make most of the buildings walls in glass to create an open feel within the building and to also make the most of the natural light that would be available. This then followed on with the inside design, thinking about the insulation, types of flooring, the circulation of the building and a number of other things.


But I am now at the stage of completing the entire design in sketchup and now it is time to start thinking of making things final and to start the rendering process.


I put up another post when it is near the deadline with images of my final design and the sheets I will present with..

Assignment 4: Piecing it together

From carrying out the interviews about why do people collect stuff showed a number of different sides to why people think they do. There were some similarities that came up in a few answers, the items normally relate back to a person, mostly family members. Which brought me to think that things are kept for a sentimental reason, this makes we question whether or not the item would be kept if it had not been give to them by someone close/special to them. 


Whilst talking to one of the interviewees she mentioned that some people could hold on to things because they do not like to throw out things, none of the items have a meaning behind them. I found this point she made very interesting so thought I would go online to see if I could find anything that backed up what she was saying. I came across a website called essortment.com, it talks about ’compulsive hoarders’ which is a term I have never heard before. It means that the person accumulates things that most other people wouldn’t bother keeping. Some of the things that they keep are very bizarre and even at times if you asked them they wouldn’t even no why they kept it. This website lead me onto the ‘Understanding Obsessive Compulsive Hoarding’ website. It give details about it and says it is a link to being a form of OCD, the website then gives people the chance to explain why they do it. 


There are so many different reasons as to why people do it from the item being sentimental, passed down through the generations, don’t like throwing stuff away, might need it in the future, but this I feel is mainly about why people accumulate stuff. 


When looking at why people keep stuff I suppose does fit into the last area but I feel it is more about sentimental value of an item is why people keep most things. For each of the answers I got were about items that were given to them from someone, which I feel myself would be the reason as why I would keep a specific item. 


The interviewing process I found a little uncomfortable at the beginning, especially due to some of the people were not too sure what to say at the beginning making it much more different to get answers that were helpful. I think if I had made more questions and given more time on each of the interviews I could of collected better information. I will know for the next time I do an interview to answer the question myself first and then come up with some more questions that could make it easier to get more useful answers. 

Assignment 4: Interviewing

For this part of the assignment we had to carry out interviews with people to collect information from them. 

To start the interviews I asked my flat mate Clare would she ask a friend from her course to meet us at a café to answer a few questions. We arranged to meet the next day with two of Clare’s course mates and one of there flat mates. I thought meeting at a café was the best option to keep an informal interview, more of a chat really. Each of the three people I was interviewing that day asked to not be named on my blog so I have kept there details confidential. Below is what I found from the interviews.

Female, Law student 

When asking the questions I found that she collected cocktail rings, it all started around eight years ago when her grand mother passed on one of her cocktail rings to her. She said that she would never have collected something like this unless it was from some special that started it off, which her grand mother was. I asked her if there was any reason behind why her grand mother kept it or why she passed it on, but she didn’t seem to think so. It was more just a special piece of jewellery that she wanted her grand daughter to have and keep for the future. She carried on the collection due to finding these pieces of jewellery pretty and functional. She told me that it was hard to find more of them and that she would have to go to vintage shops and boot sales to get them. She keeps them in a vintage 40’s jewellery box that was also give to her from her grand mother at the same time.  After finishing talking about her grand mothers jewellery, I asked her why she thought people collected/kept stuff? She answered with, “I think its more about the sentimental value of an item rather than what it actually is, like my grand mothers ring, I don’t think I would have collected more of them or kept it if I hadn’t been given it by my grand mother in the first place. It can be nice to keep happy things around you. Other times it’s just force of habit of not throwing things out.“

Female, Law + French student 

When I started talking to this girl she was glad she went after the first interview as she found it hard to think of something, but in the end she realised that she collected/held onto tickets of all the gigs she had been to before. Which makes me think that maybe sometimes people don’t even realise they collect thing, and she said the same thing that she never really noticed herself specifically saving them, it was just automatic. She said the reason she kept them was that she liked to be reminded of all of the people she had been to see and this was an easy way. She has them stuck over her shelves in her bedroom at home, so that it is easy to be reminded of them which is a big deal to her as she said she loves music. When asked how long she has had them for, she thought that the first one she has is from 2006 which would been she started to keep them for five years. When asked why do people collect/keep stuff? She said, “People like to be reminded of things they have done or places they have been to. With keeping hold of things from these place, they keep the memories in them and make is easier to remind yourself of things.”

Female, Nurse 

For the last interviewee when we were in the café this girl said that the thing she collects and treasures the most are cards that she has kept from many different occasions such as birthday, christmas, good luck, congratulations etc. When trying to explain why she had kept them she was finding it hard to explain this, but she basically was trying to say was that she didn’t like to throw away stuff that someone had personally made or wrote for her. She said that it is nice to look back at them years down the line and to see who was in your life at that period of time. Which isn’t really a meaning to them but was that she liked to keep hold of personal stuff.  All of the cards are stored in a large box in her bedroom at home, that she has had for years. She said that after her next birthday she will have to get another box as the one she has is nearly full. She thinks the first card she has kept was from her first holy communion which with her being 20 years old was a long time ago. When asked why do people collect/keep stuff? She said, “I think it’s because the item/stuff you keep is usually given to you by someone so you want to keep it as it is a gift, but also if you like a certain thing then there is more reason to not through it away, and to gather more of them. It’s more of a personal thing to yourself whilst other people could wonder why you would keep such a thing.” 

For my last interview I went down to my next door neighbour that I have only meet a few times to ask some questions. This is what I found out from talking to her.

Female, Art student 

We went into her bedroom to have the interview as she trying to organise some work at the same time. When talking she said about how her granny made her a Dumbo headboard and ever since then she has collected all elephant like things, such as toys, teddies etc. so when I was looking around her room I thought it was strange the way she had no signs of this, but she then said that all of this stuff is kept in her bedroom in her family home. She has now got to the stage that she doesn’t want to throw them away, especially since it has been fifteen years since she started collecting them. Over the years most of the items came from family member and close friends. Since being in her room it was good as I noticed that elephants were not the only thing she kept, she had a drawer full of what it looked like receipts, train tickets and gig tickets etc. When I asked her about it she said that it was just a habit to throw them in the drawer and once they were put in there she didn’t really like to get rid of them. I then asked her why do you think people collect/keep stuff? She answered with, “Many nostalgic purpose, but I guess some people like having a story to tell and don‘t like to throw away things they have had for years.”

Assignment 4: Mind Mapping

In this assignment we were asked to pick a question, brain storm/mind map it and then interview three or four people with questions relating to the chosen question. 

I choose the question 'Why do people collect/accumulate stuff?' From mind mapping it i came up with these seven questions.

Do you collect anything or have accumulated anything?

Why have you kept it?

Meaning behind it/them?

Where did you get it/them from? 

Where do you keep them? Special place?

How long have you had/collected it for? Or taken to collect them?

Why do you think people collect/keep stuff?

3C - Observe & Record

 Primary Observation


For this part of the assignment we were asked to visit somewhere we had never been before, either a bingo hall, a casino or a football match to observe people and to see how we felt being in an unknown place.


I decided to go to a bingo hall as this would be a totally new experience to me. Before I went I wasn’t to sure what to expect when entering the building but once I went in I actually felt a bit nervous because it was all new to me and I wasn’t sure where to go or what to do. At reception I asked would it be possible to enter the hall to observe people playing the game which actually doing so myself, the guy behind the counter was very helpful and informed me that you had to become a member before you were allowed into the hall. Once I became a member I made my way into the bingo hall and worked my way upstairs to the second floor as I thought it would be a better place to observe everything that goes on.


The place itself was a lot more different than I thought it would look like, it was much more glamorous especially with all the slot machines etc. They also offered free tea or coffee you just needed to ask a staff member, there was also an area to get food and other drink, which would be good as I think a lot of the people in the hall would be there for most of the day.

I went with a couple of friends that also had to do this assignment, and we noticed that as soon as we walked in the older people already sitting were looking at us in a strange manor. It was as though they didn’t approve of us being there. We also found out at the end from the manager that some of them had been asking why were we there taking notes etc. The manager also said that the old people usually tend to sit in the same seats each time they come so that they have the same number on the cash line boards each time.


Whilst observing you can feel the intenseness and the competitiveness in the place and you can see how serious the people take the game. There is complete silence in the hall until someone calls ’house’ then there is a bit of talk until the game starts again, then its silence again. When ’house’ is called, the staff run about the hall to find the person and then calls out there numbers to see if they have won.

Membership card

When I was looking out over the balcony on the second floor I noticed that there were a number of people covering up there books with the numbers. I thought this was very strange because its note a game you can cheat in to win, but then I figured that it was probably so people couldn’t see how far they were to wining.




After a few minutes in the hall a member of staff came up to use with out member cards and a member pack, which contained a free session for you and a friend in it and a voucher to use on there online bingo. Then about 5 minutes after another member of staff was handing out £5 special books for Sundays to everyone in the hall. After the main game had finished there was the chance to play cash line which was an automated board built into the tables, they had a special offer on it which was two for one. These were all the offers/strategies I seen to entice people to play and spend more.


As we thought it would be best to only observe and not play the game itself, a couple of the girls I was with decided to play the cash line game. I just sat beside them and watched, it was very exciting especially when the boards started to get filled up the intensity started to build up so that know one else called it before you had all your number. I could understand how it could become addictive and I didn’t even play.

Cash line Board 

When looking around the hall I noticed that people either sat by themselves or it was a large group of people together. But even those in a group they only sat together but never actually interacted with each other. All of those that were there by themselves seemed to sit away from the large groups of people and really kept themselves to themselves and didn’t bother talking or sitting near anyone else.

3B - Ethnography

After reading The Ethnography Primer I now understand what ethnography is. To begin with i thought it was just a research tool, which is it but it has a lot more depth to it than what I first thought. It provides a much more in-depth analysis of someone/ a target audience. It a good way of gathering information and communicating with people rather than going on statics collect by someone else. I personally feel that it is better to gather your own data about a certain thing, as each individual person gathers different things from it. The information collected by yourself is going to be more relevant to the data which you need in comparison to someone else's data. This will then help us as designers to create a product or service that will relate better to person/people in question.  

3A - Service Design Tools

For the first part of assignment three we were asked to look at this website servicedesigntools.org and look at the tools and case studies used then relate them to our studio projects. 


Affinity diagram - is a creative process used for gathering and organizing large amounts of datas, ideas and insights by evidencing their natural correlations. I could have used this tool in any of my past projects, as it would have helped lay out the initial ideas when starting to design.


Mock up - is a model, an illustration or a collage describing an idea. This tool would have been good to use in my exhibition design project, as you have to create a relationship between the exhibition space and the concept (Jute Industry). This could have helped bringing the of the information from both parts together easier in the beginning. 


Storyboard - it is the representation of use cases through a series of drawings or pictures, put together in a narrative sequence. This tool would have worked well for my first year project, domestic dwelling as I was designing a space for a person in a slum to live. It would have helped identify connections between the designer and the user.


Service specification - is a written document that grows up during the design process. It describes the aim of the project in a detailed way and the evolution of the ideas developed step by step. This tool would have been useful in my furniture project, due to working in a group it would have been good to do this a keep updating document each time someone else moved forward with an idea etc. 

Assignment 2: What Images mean..

To start of this assignment we were told to read ‘The Rhetoric of the Image’ by Roland Barthes. Once reading the essay I quickly agreed with what Jonathan had said on the design studies blog about it not being easy to read, I found it very difficult to understand what it was that he was trying to get across. I got into my group which consisted of two other people, we discussed what we thought about the piece of writing and how a lot of it we didn’t understand. As a group we decided to look at Jonathan’s discussion/summary on it, this made our understanding of polysemy (it is a theory that suggests things/images have more than one meaning) a lot better especially with the examples he used. They were much easier understood in comparison to the examples Barthe used about advertising.


I now understand that there are three different types of messages that can be obtained when looking at an image, they are the linguistic, the coded iconic and the non-encoded iconic message. The non-encoded iconic message is the first message that comes to mind when you look at an image, coded iconic message is got from looked deeper into the image than at a first glance and the linguistic message is achieved through knowledge of the image.


2b
The next part of the assignment was to test the theory. So as a group we chose three pictures randomly to give out to different people, they had to put them into an order and see if they could come up with a story from the pictures. These are the three images below:

2c
The task was to identify what was happening in each picture then to bring them all together in any order to get a story from them. So we set up a sheet consisting of space for the person to fill in there name, gender, age, occupation, what was going on in each picture and then the story that they came up with.


We collectively asked nine people in totally, three family and friends each. There were six stories that were very similar to each other as they said about looking into the distance and listening to the waterfall and grass. Below is a couple of the stories that were collected.


“Children at zoo, go to see the giraffes and it starts to chase them over the grassy area. Children were scared when they came to the edge of the cliff where there was a beautiful waterfall in sight at the bottom. The children had no choice but to jump..”


“The giraffe is sad and confused, he goes to the cliff that he sees in a distance and jumps off it, but he ends up in the field with the blowing flowers and grass and is happy.”


“The giraffe went for a swim in the bottom of the waterfall and then went into the field and picked some flowers.”


After the ninth person we decided to stop as we kept finding that a number of the stories all seemed to relate back to each other, we thought this was a good time to move on to the next part of the experiment. We picked the story below as it was the one that had similar points in it that were in a lot of others stories.


“The giraffe is looking and listening, he sees green grass blowing in the wind. He can hear the rushing of the waterfalls, rushing down the mountain side, he pricks up his ears, it is quite loud, but he is happy that he can see so far because he’s so tall.”


2d
To test this theory further we added another image to the three that we already had, it is shown below:

We chose binoculars because there was a point in the story of the giraffe being able to see far in the distance. So adding in this image we hoped this would help tell the story more. We asked three different people to see if they could come up with the same or similar story. Below are two of the stories that people came up with.


“A gentleman decides one spring day to go sightseeing and stumbles across a lost giraffe who appears to be searching for food by the same cliff.”


“Walking along the cliff edge with the waves crashing below, looking inland with binoculars I see a giraffe chewing some flowers in the distance.”


At this point in the experiment we didn’t feel that it had worked out as well as Barthes suggested polysemy would. In each of the stories we got, the person seemed to add in another person into the story rather than it being the giraffe that the story was about. But at the same time the context of the story was similar to the story we wanted people to get. If the fourth image was not added to the other three, we felt that the stories would be more similar to the first. At this point we were in two minds of whether this theory actually work or not.


2e
We took the fourth image away, and just left the original three. We added the word ‘Listen’ to the picture of the giraffe, we added this because with the fourth image, people didn’t seem to mention anything about listening to the waterfall or the grass in the fields which was part of the story that we wanted to get. We then asked three people to see if they could come up with the story with the help of the text. This was the story that was the most similar,


“The flowers which are in the Swiss Alps also have a waterfall which is similar to the Niagara Falls. The giraffe has been looking and listening out for his friends to come back from the waterfall.”


We felt that this worked much better than having an extra image. We all agreed that the polysemy theory of adding in text “fixes” the meaning of the story and forces the persons story to go down the same path as other rather than having an extra image which we didn’t feel worked as good.


Our discipline
After we finished the experiment we start down and talked about how it relates into our discipline of Interior Design. Instead of it being a specific image or object for me I think its more about the way you design something such as the space, the lighting, the colours and a number of other things that make people interrupt a meaning behind the space.

Assignment 1: Are You What You Wear/Buy/Sit On/Sleep In/Talk To?

Analysis and Deduction 


For the first assignment of semester two, we had to collect images of either yourself at various ages or images of your bedroom. We then were given a partner who we didn’t no and was from a different discipline to swap our images with. The task was to analysis these images to see if we could work out what that person was like. 


Whilst I was at home for Christmas I looked for pictures of me growing up but unfortunately I didn’t think that the pictures I had found were natural enough for this analysis so I decided that I would take pictures of my bedroom in Dundee instead. 


For the second part of this assignment I swapped my images with Hannah Doig from Graphics. We then had to analysis and write down our reactions to the images that we had been given. Here is a list of things that I thought about whilst looking at the pictures - my first reaction. 

• Lives in a university bedroom/halls 
• Is a bit messy - boxes filled with stuff - dirty plates/cups etc - lots of things sitting out
• DVD collection - variety of taste
• - very similar to my own taste has a lot of DVDs I also have
• - more into girlie humorous films sex and the city, clueless, Bruce Almighty  
• - but then in contrast likes Harry potter, Sweeney Todd and seven pounds
• Magazines - into fashion - vogue
• - This could reflect her style of clothing. (no clothes in sight to comment on this)
• - Number of pieces of jewellery 
• Likes patterns - bed cover - rug - piece of wallpaper - scarf’s 
• Likes/enjoys a few alcoholic drinks vodka/ empty wine glass
• Likes a bargain (Snapfacts book discounts) 
• Sentimental - personal items - happy birthday tag (maybe from someone special) - Cards
• Poster show a personal style and taste
• - influenced by a certain type of style that’s in all the poster 
• - likes to keep cards ( could have a meaning behind them to why they are kept)
• Favourite colour - Green (although this could be the colour already on the walls/curtains)
• Seems like a feminine/girlie girl - nail polish - perfume - Pink glasses - Pink cushion on floor 

Overall I think Hannah is a very girlie girl and a bit on the messy side although there are a number of things that have been organised (DVDs and posters) this could all be an organised mess. She likes to collect remunerable things and has a large variety of tastes in different things. 


Discussion 


As both Hannah and myself did not have time to meet up to discuss each others reactions we did it via email instead. 


On getting a response back from Hannah, she told me that in fact I was mostly correct particularly the point I had made about her being messy. Well maybe messy would not be the correct word to use, maybe clutter as she described it. This could possibly be caused by the lack of storage available in her room which always seems to be a problem in student halls but at the same time I feel this could just be the type of person Hannah is.  


Although I picked up on pink items which made me think that Hannah was a lot more girlie than I first imagined, I was then corrected that they were gifts giving to her on moving into halls. The other point that I said about her favourite colour possibly being green was also incorrect and was in fact one of my thoughts that it was the colour already on the walls when she moved in. So as I said at the start most of my reactions were accurate about Hannah, from her DVD collection to her being into fashion and overall being a girlie girl. 


When I was waiting on my response from Hannah on what she thought of me and my room, it made me feel a bit nervous/anxious. It was strange to think of someone making an impression of you from just looking at your room and your possessions. Although it has been proven that you can learn a lot from this as Hannah and myself have got each other pretty spot on.  


Here are a couple of images that I sent to Hannah are below.

Everything that Hannah said about me was correct which was very good but at the same time I find it strange that you can find out so much about someone from looking at there stuff. She picked up on the fact that I very organised and clean, that I like things being in the correct place and don’t like much mess sitting about which is such a contrast to Hannah‘s room. The main thing that she got correct was that I am very sentimental, I always have to have pictures of people and things that I have been given from that have a meaning behind them in my room. 


I think that over all Hannah and I did a good job at finding out about each other although at the same time I feel it could have been better if we has met up to discuss our findings rather than over email. I felt that doing it over email restricted you in actually explaining what you meant in a way she could understand. If I was to do this type of research again I would definitely meet up with the person to discuss it more. Doing this research has being very different to anything I have ever done and I found it very interesting. Actually being the research subject for me, I found it a bit strange as I didn’t know what to expect from the outcome but I wouldn’t mind doing it again as I know what was happening.