Tag Archives: locale

Locale: Zine

(Click to enlarge all images)

For my zine, I decided to focus on an aspect of my site I mentioned in my presentation – the bizarre juxtapositions that I could find upon closer inspection of the organization in Mustafa. Although there is an overarching organization to the items, some items don’t “go” together, making for an organized mess. My response to this, was then to create my own categories for these organized messes.

I started by looking at some of the weird juxtapositions.

       

(In order)

  1. Lighters next to whiteboard markers
  2. Hair accessories next to passport covers
  3. Olive oil next to walking canes
  4. Cereals above fresh fruit
  5. Umbrellas below guitars
  6. Diapers next to Thermoskins

From these, I tried to brainstorm how they could go together. Initially I went with a family theme (Mustafa for the Family) for my spread:

  • Young kids: Nutritious breakfast (Watermelon + Cereal)
  • Teenagers: Make your own guitars with umbrellas! (Umbrellas below guitars)
  • Mom: Support your back as you change the diapers (Diapers next to Thermoskins)
  • Dad: Escape away from the stress of home with a fashionable passport! (To dress up your passport… Hair accessories next to passport covers)
  • Grandpa: Make walking fun (Olive oil next to walking canes)

I was initially thinking of having each A5 page be a representation of each of the family members above. After consulting with Joy, I realized that this was too ambitious and just too much visually, and Joy advised me to try going for three A4 spreads instead. This was actually a really pivotal moment because it allowed me to narrow in on the concepts I liked best and could explore deeply.

I zeroed in on the cereals above 1) fresh fruit (honey stars over watermelon, specifically), 2) lighters next to whiteboard markers, and 3) olive oil next to walking canes. My categories for them were 1) Dessert or Breakfast? A fun meal with minimal cutlery needed 2) Study on your birthday and 3) Make walking fun.

I went back to Mustafa and collected more reference images to manipulate.

The journey of each spread:

Spread 1: A nutritious breakfast

First version:

I referenced the Honey Stars packaging for the cereal and splashes of milk, as well as the below photograph of a watermelon’s inside. I used my own photographs for the watermelon itself, as well as the background (Mustafa’s floor at that section).

  

Feedback from consultation:

  • Could make milk red-tinged
  • Sense of gravity needs to be stronger, perspective needs to be clear
  • Incorporate shadows!
  • Make a watermelon bowl?

Version 2

Process: I decided to not quite literally put honey stars in a watermelon, but imply it with a bowl that looks like a watermelon. I felt like this would go with the whole Surrealistic feel of the zine, because then it wouldn’t be so immediately obvious what I was doing. Also, it would solve the issues I had with perspective.

 

For the background, I decided to use the barcode on the watermelon instead of the floor because it might not be clear to viewers’ that I was using Mustafa’s floor – it just looked like any other floor in the previous composition.

I also overlaid the bowl with the watermelon textures from the photographs I took.

Feedback from consultation:

  • Looks a lot better than the previous spread
  • Shadow on the background needs to be obvious
  • Barcode could be incorporated in other ways, like on the cereal itself

I agreed that the barcode could be incorporated in other ways, because the bowl looked like it was floating in mid air. Joy raised the question of what was so special about the barcode sticker, and I mentioned that the sticker had the Mustafa logo on it. She then suggested using the Mustafa logo for my candle spread, and I really liked that idea of using the Mustafa logo. Therefore, I considered the background more carefully for my final spread and used the logo as part of the tablecloth.

Final spread:

Process:

I took a closer look at the Mustafa logo and tessellated it. I then manipulated a lace tablecloth to look like the tessellated Mustafa logo.

Furthermore, as I wanted the barcodes to be a unifying factor throughout my zine, I incorporated it into my honey stars as well. I felt like this added an additional layer of meaning because with the Mustafa barcode, they would now be uniquely Mustafa honey stars, instead of cereal bought at any other store, giving the work more context.

I also made sure to add the shadows I missed out for the previous versions of the spread.

Spread 2: Study hard on your birthday!

Version 1:

Process: I used the below stock image from Pexels for the base cake, and used the Mustafa markers as candles as well. The flames on the candle were from another Mustafa product (also below) – I used that because I thought that if markers burned, they would probably burn with a weird colored flame because of all the chemicals inside.

 

I thought about how it could be like if the candles burned, and came up with my own version of the smoke, consisting of the Japanese letters from the back of the lighter packaging because Japanese letters have a very abstract quality.

The background was a blowup of the barcode on the markers, with the opacity lowered.

Feedback:

  • Balance the left with more candles because it is off-balance
  • Not obvious that it is cake – use a better cake image
  • Mustafa logo could mirror happy birthday cake toppers

Final spread:

I completely agreed with the feedback on the use of the cake image. Therefore, I went back to Mustafa and took photographs of the cakes at Mustafa’s bakery, that I used for my final spread.

 

Moreover, the feedback on balance got me to come up with the idea of having the zine be progressively messier with more and more off-balanced spreads. This would tie in to my own experience – Mustafa seemed to get more chaotic the longer I stayed there, not only because I was noticing the messiness in the order, but also because of the external stimuli (the feeling of overwhelmingness). This is why my final zine, from the front cover to the back cover, get messier by the spread.

Finally, I made the cake topper with Mustafa’s logo, using the below stock photo as reference for the stick.

 

I initially faced some difficulty using the image as a brush on Illustrator, but I eventually figured it out! 🙂

Spread 3: Make walking fun

Two variations of my first spread:

 

Process:

I noticed that the highlights on the photographs I took of the olive oil bottles looked really organic. I decided to manipulate them into the oil stains on the floor (hence “taking” from the site more, because the reflections would be those cast upon the bottle by Mustafa’s lighting).

   

I masked around the highlights, and clone stamped over them with an olive oil section cropped from another photo. The floor the olive oil is photoshopped onto is Mustafa’s floor at that section!

Feedback from consultation:

  • Integrate the stains with the floor more; could spill into cracks
  • Cane could interact with floor
  • Lighting needs to be fixed, cane can’t really be seen
  • Make splats look more realistic

Final spread:

Process: Because I got markedly better results by staging my own set-up with my watermelon spread, I decided to do the same for this one. I splashed olive oil over a white tile and overlaid it over a composition that showed the cane more clearly and had better lighting than the previous version.

 

I was inspired by Jackson Pollock by this piece, and tried to have my oil splatters resemble his drip paintings as much as possible by using quick, vigorous strokes.

Feedback from critique: This was the weakest spread – more could have been done to bring out the quirkiness. In all honesty, I agree, I would’ve liked to spend more time on this spread and formed images with the splatters as well. I think I spent too much time trying to make the splats look realistic instead of doing something more with them.

Spread 3: Front and Back cover

 

I used actual Mustafa receipts for the front and back cover.

The back cover is more glitched up than the back cover to go with how my spreads get messier and messier, ultimately ending in the messiest back cover.

Locale: Research

Mustafa Visits: In the search for the Unique Selling Point

Before visiting the site, I conducted some secondary research on Mustafa:

  • 24 hour shopping mall
  • 22 years old; opened in April 1995
  • Located in Syed Alwi Road, Little India
  • 37,000 m2 retail floor area
  • Over 300,000 items sold

On the 2nd of March, I walked to Mustafa from Farrer Park MRT, entering via Entrance 3. One thing I immediately noticed was how crowded the streets and mall were. This was probably because it was Friday evening, one of the peak timings, as I would later come to find out.

The mall is surrounded by Indian restaurants, which makes sense because the mall is located in Little India.

At the entrance, there was a small monitor showing the occupancy to warn shoppers when it’s unsafe to enter. At that time, the occupancy (probably an average, for a certain amount of space) was 259, with the maximum load being 431.

Upon entering, I saw the pharmacy section. Upon seeing all the overwhelmingly numerous different types of medicines sold, I decided to note down the broader categories of products sold instead of being more specific, like noting down pharmacy instead of cough medicine, ointments etc.

      

Brief overview of items sold on each floor

B2: Electronics, Electrical Appliances

    

B1: Menswear, Womenswear, Children’s Apparel, Jewellery

   

L1: Health & Beauty, Baby food & Milk Powder, Pharmacy

   

L2: Supermarket, Fresh Produce (F&V, Meat, Fish), Grocery, Perishables (most crowded)

    

L3: Supermarket, Household Products, Car Park

    

L4: Stationery, Hardware, Household items (least crowded)

   

Unusual products?
In my quest to note down the different products sold, I noticed some rather unusual products being sold, most of them being of the food variety.

          

Interviews
I conducted interviews with two employees. First, I interviewed Jasbee Kaur from the sunglasses section.
As I did not have a unique selling point yet, I just asked some general questions.

Q: How long have you been working here?
A: From 2000 till now.

Q: How familiar are you with the place?
A: I know all the places, so I’d say pretty familiar.

Q: How’s it like working at Mustafa?
A: I like it! The boss is nice. There is no target I need to fulfill, no nothing. For every 100 customers, 95% are okay. Most of them are tourists from India and Bangladesh.

Q: What are some pros and cons, or pet peeves?
A: A pro is that all items can be found. But there are no seating places and baby fitting places. Some new staff might point customers the wrong way.

Q: When are the busiest times?
A: Friday, Saturday and Sunday, from about 11.30 am to 7 or 8 pm. On public holidays it goes up to about 10 pm.

Here’s my second interview!

Continuing on, I realized that I started to get more and more overwhelmed. Mustafa is very visually tiring on the eyes after a while, with really tall shelves and bright, saturated colors. My eyes started getting really fatigued from the repeated patterns in the shelving. Even though it was organized in a way, there was a lot of cramming into spaces that didn’t really seem big enough.

I also started getting very, very lost. Thankfully, the signs pointed me to different sections.

Inside the mall, there was also a bakery. Here, I sampled the spinach pizza. It was pretty salty and I didn’t particularly enjoy it (probably because it was cold and slightly hard), but it was definitely not terrible. I could see someone really craving pizza coming here for pizza at 2 or 3 am.

Visuals
Architecture
Very geometric shapes, with both strong straight lines (for example, rows of items) and curved lines (from circular “hole” in the middle surrounding which floors are arranged – see below).

 

Colors

Really bright and saturated! They are also repeated in recurring patterns.

Leaving the mall, I tracked the number of people passing through different entrances per minute, as well as the racial profile, as I noticed that there seemed to be more Indians in the mall than other races.

Entrance

Chinese

Indian

Malay

Others

1

6

22

8

11

2

9

19

5

6

3

10

17

8

5

 

Walking along the other side of Mustafa, I also noticed how there was in-house restaurant. Here, I sampled the tater tots. Again, it was pretty salty. However, it was still an improvement over the pizza from earlier because it was hot.

After the visit, I found some unique qualities about Mustafa.

1) It sells some really weird and unique items, that you wouldn’t think would be sold under one roof, or could even be found in Singapore. Most of them are of the food variety. I considered analyzing the weirdest food items I’ve seen there and maybe do a review of them as well.

2) How it is a one-stop place for literally anything you could need at any random time of the day. I thought that this could be translated into an infographic with a clock, and showing what you might need at different times of the day can be found where specifically at Mustafa.

3) It sells a huge variety (brand-wise) of certain items, like rice and spices (see below for rice varieties).

               

4) It’s method of organization seems to make sense, but also can be really bizarre. The items are arranged in a sort of nonsensical way, like for example there’ll be cereals over fresh fruit.

Consult

After the discussion with Joy, I narrowed down my Unique Selling Point to Mustafa being an organized mess. My task would then be to find out how people react to this mess, shoppers and staff alike.

Visit Two: Unique Selling Point identified. On to further research! How do people react to the organized mess?

Going into Mustafa this time, I had a much clearer idea of what I was looking for. I came up with a set of questions beforehand.

Questions for staff:
1. How did you make sense of the place?
2. How long did it take you to make sense of the place?
3. How organized/messy do you find Mustafa on a scale of 1-10?
4. What are the most busy times? When are the least busy times?

Questions for seasoned shoppers:
1. Profile: Age, gender, how long have you been shopping at Mustafa?
2. What do you come to Mustafa to buy?
3. How do you navigate? (Stairs, escalators, lifts?) (Start from bottom floors upward? Which sections do you visit first?)
4. How long does it take you to navigate? Do you spend more time navigating or shopping?
5. How did you make sense of the place? How long did it take you?
6. How long do you spend here? How much do you spend usually?
7. How organized/messy do you find Mustafa on a scale of 1-10?
8. What would be the best strategy for a new shopper?

Questions for newbie shoppers:
1. Profile: Age, gender, how long have you been shopping at Mustafa?
2. What do you come to Mustafa to buy?
3. How do you navigate? (Stairs, escalators, lifts?) (Start from bottom floors upward? Which sections do you visit first?)
4. How long does it take you to navigate? Do you spend more time navigating or shopping?
5. How long have you been here?
6. How organized/messy do you find Mustafa on a scale of 1-10?

Below is an interview I managed to record with the help of a friend.

Field Ethnography

I also did field ethnography in that I shadowed my mom as she shopped. I wanted to play this video during my presentation but technical difficulties arose, sadly! I initially tried shadowing a random shopper on one of my earlier trips, but they noticed me and told me to stop following them so I decided to just accompany my mom on one of her shopping trips. She is a seasoned shopper. I’d previously accompanied her for short trips, but never had really analyzed how she navigated through Mustafa. This below video does that.

Staff behavior to mess

I also walked around trying to observe the staff’s behavior towards mess and captured this video of a staff conscientiously picking misplaced items out of a pile during the peak hours.

The above videos illustrate some research I didn’t manage to cover during my presentation. My presentation can be found below (it also covers some other research methods I did not talk about in this post, cause it’s already on the slides)! I organized my slides according to the unique selling point, the organized mess, hence splitting the presentation into two parts: the “organized” and the “messy” aspects. I also summarized the results of my interviews with 10 employees, 10 newbie shoppers and 10 seasoned shoppers, and explored other sensory and physical impacts.