Here are my notes base on the points the college wants us to address:
What are the threads/themes in my work?
I am the kind of designer that tries to give great importance to the creative sensibilities of my audience and clients. Themes that interest me are often those that I find most appealing and actually engaging to my audience in real time. I love generating images and interactions that invite the crowd to participate, comment and in the process of participation help determine the outcomes and conclusions of each work.
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| The Uncomfortable Radio made for Adaptation / Interpretation (Photo by Dominic Tschudin) |
During my second term’s elective, ‘Adaptation / Interpretation’, I decided to engage with the subject of pornography and how it is affecting our relationships. Since then I have narrowed my interest to the subject of Internet porn and it’s effects. I make the distinction because the way we use it now (since the advent of high speed internet) is significantly different to how we have been using porn in the past.
I think we should all be more aware of the effects this is having on us so I will try to make my work going forward as inclusive as possible. It may be that for now my focus will be on design practitioners. At present I am considering to aim my work at individuals who are publishing visual work and in my opinion could benefit very much from an understanding of the repercussions of constant exposure to pornographic imagery.
What is my dissertation research topic?
Why is it important that everyone knows more about the effects Internet porn is having and why is this significant for us as creative practitioners? (WiP title)
How does my research connect with my current practice or interests? What are the intellectual underpinnings of my studio work?
In “The Design of Everyday Things”, Don Norman suggests that the reason so many physical products are hard to operate is because engineers think “We are people ourselves … so we understand people”(p.6) and so often they make design choices which reflect a mode of thinking incompatible with that of the non-engineer.
I find that as a designer I face the opposite issue. It is very tempting to think ‘what will people feel or think when they see my design?’ The difference is that our specialty is in everyday communication – so the trick I use is asking what do I find interesting? I like to start from my personal interest that, especially today, is heavily influenced by what I experience using social tools - tools that almost everyone else is using.
I think that for a while now I was looking for a way to engage with the subject of porn (which as mentioned is now narrowed to Internet porn). It is a subject that I felt I wanted to talk more and know more about; as it turns out I am in a large company, not a huge surprise. Following a 7-minute talk I gave at the college, with only one twenty-second slide relating to the subject, I was inundated with references and questions from students who had something to say about the subject. This strong indication that the subject is on many of our minds is exactly the kind of thing I am interested to explore in my practice. My interest in the topic has now been reinforced because I identified that I myself have a control issue when it comes to Internet porn consumption.
As for intellectual underpinnings, I read a lot of social and behavioral-science publications as well as social economics and design theory to complement my practice. My practice is often the testing-out of conjunctures and hypotheses I develop from this research. Up until recently my work’s chief objective was exploring and understanding interaction itself. Most of my work relies on interaction and audience participation to exist. Since I started focusing on IP and its affects I am trying to use what I have learned to bring existing knowledge on the subject to a wider audience.
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| The Uncomfortable Radio (photo by Lyz) |
What was the most challenging project I did this year? Why?
I like to call the latest project I did as a part of adaptation/interpretation ‘The Uncomfortable Radio’. This project has been by far the most challenging so far this year. It has been demanding from a technical side, because I had to engage with technology, both writing code and assembling hardware. Getting to know the people who operate the college's workshops and the workshops themselves for the first time was also something that I had to do very quickly, and I am sure this had an impact on the finish of the final piece. The most challenging aspect of this project is the fact subsequent research I made has altered my views on the subject so significantly I practically had to discard (or at least put aside for now) a lot of the research I have done up until a certain point because I no longer find it reflecting real issues successfully.
Which of my projects were the most successful? Why?
‘The Enormous Radio’ also qualifies as the most successful product in my opinion.
The comment I received after having several tutorials with Adrian and having presented to him my booklet ‘Three hours, chewing gum and describing higher education.’ (an outcome of the VX elective) was ‘More ambition!’
Adrian said that the work was adequate but if I can produce something like that at this stage I should really be pushing it a lot further and making something more significant both technically and intellectually.
The subject of Internet porn and its effects is not only ambitious because of its pertinence and relevance to our time (the ignorance regarding it often compared to that we had about smoking in the 20th century), it is also a personal struggle for me and so dealing with it publicly is something I constantly have two reckon with.
On a practical level, I have been a lot more successful in communicating what I intended with The Uncomfortable Radio than anticipated. In spite of them being vague to various degrees such nuances as colour choices, nipple shaped knobs and inclusion of 69 stations has helped to make those who engaged with the device more curious about the subject. My original aim was to create a piece which turns an experience of life uncomfortable until it is engaged with, this also has been achieved to a greater extent that I had imagined.
What are my strengths as a creative practitioner and what are areas should I develop further?
I think I'm very good at talking about my work, presenting is something that I feel increasingly comfortable with and look forward to. I'm also comfortable with putting my work out in the world and exposing my process. I believe this has led to an adjustment in my expectations from working as a creative practitioner that leads me to make better choices quicker and be more satisfied with them.
I have still yet to have collaborated meaningfully with other designers for reasons that I really feel I should be reflecting on. I am really unable to put my finger on why at the moment, which I believe is a symptom of the issue.
I am also increasingly relying on interactive technology (such as Arduino etc) and as things stand I still need a lot of help when it comes to writing code and assembling physical-computing components. I find myself daunted by the challenge of learning how to use it and write code more proficiently yet it is becoming clearer to me that that is the way forward.
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| Inner configuration of the radio |
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| Painting the radio |
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| The grill was laser cut |
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| The configuration of the Arduino (masterful hot glue artistry) |
I like this question because it allows me to separate the answer into two parts:
a) It seems that a lot of us as creative practitioners feel we are coming into projects or visual interactions from a point of experts. But as James Surowiecki notes in The Wisdom Of Crowds “… experts are much like normal people: they routinely overestimate the likelihood that they're right.”(p.33). I implement the implications of this statement into my practice with a determination that the opinions of my collaborators, whether they be my audience, clients or students/staff around me in the academic environment, should play as strong a part in my decision making process as my own. In other words my starting point is that everyone is just as intelligent as me if not more.
b) With my current topic of research (the effect of Internet porn) I am challenging a very strongly held belief that addiction to Internet porn is not a proven phenomena. It may be hard for us to connect masturbation to Internet porn as a probable cause of many emotional and psychological issues, which were experiencing today, yet the evidence that this is the case, are mounting. Whether I am an early adopter or a part of the early majority to agree with this view, I've been convinced by it, and convinced that it is crucially important to disseminate the knowledge we have about it as well and as quickly as possible. Being a part of the Royal College of Art I laso feel I have a responsibility to bring this information to other creative practitioners because most of us know barely anything about it and up until now we had a very important role in perpetuating and validating the use of pornographic imagery without fully understanding the implications.
