My Final Year Process – Designing An Experience

As I began my journey into my final year in the School of Art, Design and Media, my heart gravels with great worry for my final year project and my upcoming thesis paper.

While I had been doing visual communications for the past 3 years, I certainly did not see that as a career goal. My interest always laid with artistic practice and examining various curatorial approaches to artworks. Oddly enough, I wanted to melt my various interests together. A story I never told many people, was that I originally came to college because I really believed I wanted to be a visual designer. It’s crazy how your mind can take you places and make you believe in things that you could never fathom. Of course, what made me snap out of it, was the fact that I could not marry art and design seamlessly.

Thinking about it in relation to my final year project, I decided to try and design a visual system to digitally translate exhibitions that were happening physically, online. It was a huge task. I was not used to designing frameworks and systems, and my coding skills were abysmal. I began observing Google Arts & Culture for a start. Google Arts & Culture details artworks from all over the world and aggregates them into specific data sets for categorisation. This means you get to see works based on their: colour, medium, topic, era, or country. They also tried to translate various exhibitions into webpages to show the curator’s writing as well as integrate their high fidelity scans into their virtual exhibition.

At this point, I was wondering “why is no one integrating this during their pandemic show”. From there, I decided to work with my thesis supervisors (Ms Candice Ng & Assoc Prof. Laura Miotto) to design a possible framework to digitise an exhibition and try to maintain the integrity of the artist’s intentions.

Upon further conversation with Professor Miotto, it was quite amazing to see how she moved my mind from doing something so massive and to look at redesigning the online experience. Originally, I was looking at creating a massive framework that would probably be too large for an undergraduate thesis project. In the end, she told me to focus on one exhibition, and be that expert of it.

None the less, I scaled down and chose the exhibition Time Passes that was showing as part of the Novel Ways of Being programme by the National Arts Council in response to the on-going COVID–19 pandemic. Through my consultation, I narrowed down my scope and looked at the intangible experience that was designed in the physical exhibition and how do I reinterpret and translate this exhibition digitally.

Looking at the exhibition and talking to the curator, Samantha Yap, I noticed 3 main points in the exhibition that were vital to experience itself: Sound, Colour, and Distance.

Sound

The sound is the sound leaks in the exhibition. From large scale immersive video works, the sound of the air-conditioning, and even the sound of footsteps, walking, and talking. These sounds contribute to an individuals experience within the space itself and it affects how you view the artworks – whether or not the sound comes from the artwork itself. You are either irritated, calm, or even excited depending on the atmospheric sound, and this sound is vital in designing the experience. That’s also the reason why people enjoy Berlin techno for its deep drone sound, creating a ritualistic moment as you get lost in the sea of the music.

Colour

The colour of the space sets the mood. Sometimes its too cold, too white, too wooden, too raw. The atmospheric colour changes the mood of the artwork as well. For the modern art institution holding contemporary art, the walls and the flooring just did not fit. You usually see the ornate frames in a modern art institution against the parquet flooring. While in contemporary art, you usually find yourself in a white cube. Figurative and literal white cubes host works to stop you from being distracted by the atmosphere of the space. This hint of atmospheric colour in the exhibition was very important to this particular experience. It changed the tone of the artworks and the new digital framework had to emulate this.

Distance

Speaking to the curator, she notes to me the specific placement of certain works. The distance, the dividing walls, the ones you see at first sight. The artworks are intentionally placed to give you breath to think about the others and some to not interfere and distract by others. It is only through space in the physical world can this take place, and it is only proper to find a solution to design a digital exhibition that showcased this distance.

What’s next? 

It is only through analysing the lack thereof various other solutions in the existence that I realised the need to look for or to design a solution that encompassed sound, colour, and distance and yet contained the elegance of exhibitions on Google Arts & Culture (here’s an example).

While my own design is still in prototype, I do hope future exhibition makers think about designing these online experiences with sound, colour, and distance in mind. Perhaps we could one day share these intimate viewing experiences globally with the use of these traits.

Vanessa Ban

25 Singapore Female Artists Who Are Reinventing The Local Arts Scene For  Millennials - ZULA.sg

Vanessa Ban works within graphic design and education. She began her graphic design studio, Studio Vanessa Ban as a service provider for graphic design to many GLAM sector clients such as S.E.A Focus Singapore and Singapore Tyler Print Institute (STPI) to name some. Apart from her work with these cultural institutions, she had also done various branding projects for lifestyle brands.

S.E.A Focus art fair portion
S.E.A Focus Catalogue

Introducing her background, Ban was a graduate from London College of Communications with Bachelor of Arts, Graphic Media and Design. Her practice as a designer is exemplified with her body of work seen on her website. Intricate use of text and symbols for appropriate graphic design for her clients. Just by observing the work that she had done for institutional clients such as ICAS for the exhibition, Dissolving Margins, her design direction of a dissolving margin is highly appropriate, direct, and interesting visually. Other examples of her work include the branding of S.E.A Focus and the application of the brand towards the spatial design.

Cover of Dissolving Margins
Insides of Indifferent Idols

I found great interest in her work surrounding publications. One of the publications that she had designed include online publication for independent researcher/curator, Wong Bing Hao. Due to the nature of the publication, Ban had fit certain things one would not do in a publication, such as putting the page number in the inside margins, or indenting the in a different manner.

Ban’s great commitment to education is also extremely lauded. Apart from being an adjunct lecturer in both LASALLE, GSA, and NTU ADM, she also started her own summer school programme called External Assessment Summer School as an independent dissemination of knowledge. She hopes to help practitioners within various fields of art and design learn more about collaborative processes and creating independent projects with each other.

External Assessments Summer School

Overall, Vanessa Ban is a great designer and role-model and a pleasure to have learnt from personally.

Week 8

Since my first time watching my work on the media wall, I wanted to slow things down and to make my work more sequential. As a result, I did the following:

Reduce grain size

Make grain and noise black and white

Re-sequence the work to make it more obscured and mysterious.

I also decided to add music. All along, I wanted to use techno / Drum and Bass, because it fit the whole experimental and noisy look for the video and it’s about fading into obscurity within the universe. I’m glad I managed to find something on FREEMUSICARCHIVE.org.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1EazqZMvVLkBrki7OnLtwZ2ghJuZoNmG5

You can view the work here!!

Quantum Bodies : Examination of the grain and the molecular

On the level of the body, quantum mechanics explore the subatomic levels of the molecules within the human body.

I want to juxtapose the seeable with the unseeable, the body and the wave. Using the body as a symbol to create the wave itself, this entanglement of waves creates the visual paradox of the human body illustrating a non-physical concept such as light and wave.

This was my first run.

This is my second edit

I used the green screen from the mocap room to keylight my body and to tile the body to fit a terrain-like landscape. The movement of the body shows the multiplicities of molecular movement. The human body that moves alongside the terrain accentuates the body slowly melting away into the universe, being one with the subatomic.

Does Design Care? Does it have to?

Design doesn’t have to care entirely. Often times, according to a paper by Barab et al., designers often are not critical ethnographers but as instructional designers interested in the research and development of designed structures that facilitate learning and empowerment. (2004). At this point, I think about my own personal practice and the assignment brief that had been brought down onto me for this assignment. What do I care about? What do I need to care about? Is it about what I care about or is it about what other people care about? What does the word ‘care’ even pertain to.

noun
noun: care
  1. 1.
    the provision of what is necessary for the health, welfare, maintenance, and protection of someone or something.
    “the care of the elderly”

    I took to the idea of the first definition and tried applying it to the issue that I found dear to me, non-linear relationships.
    However, is it always about me? What about people who are in non-linear/ conventional relationships, what do they want?

I went to ask a friend of mine who works in a cafe that is known to be a safe space to people of all gender identities, ethnicities, or other minority understandings. As a heterosexual/possibly asexual woman, she asserts that such relationships are not for her. Even the language that she used depicts her non-aversion to such possibilities.

In hindsight, when I asked her if she’d want people to understand these relationships more, she maintained that she would want people to know more about these relationships, and even for people to consider them for themselves.

So, why not?

Furthering this, I decided to ask a homosexual man on his take on his own relationship.

While not explicit, this inference shows that his thought of a monogamous relationship between him and his male partner constitutes as a linear progression.

Based on letters by Noah Smith, Penelope Swales, and Jacques Attali, their article – The Benefits of Free Love, illustrates their own romantic and sexual relationships. In Smith’s letter, he mentioned that AIDS was an incentive for monogamy, ‘selecting’ the most monogamous people for survival. He also mentioned that experiments with ‘Free Love’ had led controversies since 1960s till now. Penelope Swales then brings in her own polyamorous / non-monogamous relationships as an example and states that illicit affairs are not polyamorous relationships especially since they are not honest. Attali was much simpler in representing his thoughts. While the two aforementioned writers had critiqued his essay, he clearly states “In my essay, I was not forecasting that polygamy will replace monogamy, but rather that the two will exist simultaneously. Therefore, both Noah Smith and Penelope Swales agree with me – if not with each other.”

Next Step

After a conversation with a friend of mine who is interested in critical design, I decided to think of my findings and what I wanted to show in an infographic and who I wanted to target.

Based on my conversation with Jenjira and Coke, I realised that what people between the age of 25 to 35 want to learn more about different relationship types instead of the mainstream and linear. From this, I can understand that my target audience would be 25 to 35 men and women and my infographic should aim to present various forms of non-linear relationships and that tagline should encourage youths to try various forms of relationships.

In terms of products that I want to look at making, 1 would probably be a zine/website to serve the purpose of allowing people to understand and be more accepting of non-linear relationships. That is phase 1 – promotion and awareness. For phase 2, I would want to try condom packaging to promote safe sex. This is in-line with Smith’s comment on how 1960s sexual revolution and experiment in free love had led to controversy till now. The idea of free love and empowering the body would require sexual / romantic exploration. As Smith had mentioned, HIV/AIDS would seem like an incentive for monogamy. Thus, safe sex would for both men and women would allow for such exploration.

Conclusion

So in terms of care, why do we have to care about people with different relationship philosophies?

Quantum Mechanics of the Body

Theor(ies) Explored : Macroscopic quantum phenomena, Quantum Wave Theory, Many-body problem

CONCEPT : Body wave Body scape

 

Long story short. The quantum theory that I am picking on is the exploration of macro examination of matter and the wave-particle duality.

Image result for wave particle dualityThe exploration of the wave is the exploration of light, a non-matter, to cancel and add on to each other over 2 slit plates to product images on a screen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macroscopic_quantum_phenomena

https://quantumwavetheory.wordpress.com/

Image result for quantum body

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-body_problem

The many body problem refers to a general name for a vast category of physical problems pertaining to the properties of microscopic systems made of a large number of interacting particles. ….In such a quantum system, the repeated interactions between particles create quantum correlations, or entanglement. As a consequence, the wave function of the system is a complicated object holding a large amount of information, which usually makes exact or analytical calculations impractical or even impossible.

On the level of the body, quantum mechanics explore the subatomic levels of the molecules within the human body.

I want to juxtapose the seeable with the unseeable, the body and the wave. Using the body as a symbol to create the wave itself, this entanglement of waves creates the visual paradox of the human body illustrating a non-physical concept such as light and wave.

Image result for moonlust album allie

Image result for bodyscape artImage result for bodyscape artpaul foley, bodyscapes

 carl werner

scriptum vitae

Task 1A Exploratory

1. Non-Monogamous Relationships

The times are changing and as the world evolves, relationships and intimacy hav changed as well. Previously known non-socially acceptable relationships refer to throuples, sugar daddy/mommy and their babies, large age gaps, queer, polyamorous, open relationships and other lesser known variants that constitute a human relationship.

Currently, the only socially acceptable relationship is the heterosexual monogamy. At times, it is easy to say that such relationships should be only variant. However, we should try and understand that the world is more diverse and different than we actually think it is. End the discrimination and stigma of lesser known variants of relationships.

2. HIV-stigma

HIV currently has a strong stigma in Singapore. The truth is, while HIV is common and rampant in places where sexual freedom occurs, like America, this fact would also mean that the society and medical attention is more focused there.  According to U.S. statistics, more than 1.1 million people in the U.S. are living with HIV today, and 1 in 7 of them don’t know it An estimated 38,500 Americans became newly infected with HIV in 2015.Gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men bear the greatest burden by risk group, representing an estimated 26,200 of these new HIV infections.From 2010 to 2015, the estimated number of annual HIV infections in the U.S. declined 8%.In 2016, 39,782 people were diagnosed with HIV in the U.S. HIV diagnoses are not evenly distributed across states and regions. People in southern states accounted for more than half of new HIV diagnoses in 2016, while making up 38% of the nation’s population. However in Singapore, of the 434 cases, 94% were male and 71% were between 20 to 49 years old. About 41% had late-stage HIV infection when they were diagnosed. Sexual intercourse remains the main mode of HIV transmission. 96% (417 out of 434) of the cases acquired the infection through sexual intercourse. Heterosexual transmission accounted for 36% of all cases, while 50% were from homosexual transmission and 10% from bisexual transmission. 45% of the newly reported cases were detected in the course of medical care provision. Such cases are typically at the late stage of HIV infection. Another 27% were detected during routine programmatic HIV screening and 23% were detected from self-initiated HIV screening i.e. voluntary screening. Cases detected via voluntary screening are more likely to be at the early stage of infection. When differentiated by sexual transmission, a higher proportion of homosexuals and bisexuals (33%) had their HIV infection detected via voluntary screening compared to heterosexuals (8%).

Another issue is that due to this stigma, the research and aftercare of infection is expensive and hard to access. Pre Exposure Prophylaxis (PreP) would help prevent or lower the risk of HIV infection in high risk sexual intercourse. However, the access to this drug is expensive and many people go to Thailand to get it at a cheaper rate.

3. Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation Labels

Currently, the idea of gender variance is socially unacceptable in Singapore. These variants include the non-binary, transgendered, inter sex, queer, and other alternative labels. The problem with people not accepting this label is because of the conservative nature of Singapore. What people should do is to understand that the world is changing and labels are constantly being blurred.

4. Toxic Masculinity

Toxic masculinity is a poor man’s excuse of being gregarious and disruptive. We should end toxic masculinity. A post on Urban Dictionary that sums this urban term is “Any Male action that doesn’t conform to liberal ideals of what a man SHOULD be in today’s society. If he isn’t sensitive and emotional and docile he is accused of toxic masculinity. Where as used to these people were known as “douche bags” or even “assholes” (see also Twunt) now they are blamed for being a product of the male driven society” I think that all in all toxic masculinity is rampant in Singapore due to National Service and the poor excuse and teachings of the army officers would prove this true especially in times of all the deaths and injuries caused during training that were not through negligence.

______

I feel that I would want to touch on topic 1. This is because there is little to no diagrams or tables present currently that explains relationship variants.

Image result for polyamorous

 

These are all the types of relationship symbols and infographics that I could find on google. But it would be better if we could do more to let people visualise and understand the stigma that people feel.

I feel that not a lot of people know about this and should be respectful to people that are not part of the status quo. I want to target adults because they are more likely to want to explore relationship variants. If you don’t know, you never try! And no one should judge them for trying to find a suitable relationship variant for themselves.

Dialogue in the Dark

The visually impaired people struggle with their ability to see in an inaccessible world. The challenges that they face are often times the ignorance of able bodied people. Our guide Liana mentioned that there had been complaints about accessibility equipment and design features for the visually impaired by able bodied people, like the beeping of the traffic lights to help them cross the road.

Personally, I feel that it is hard to live with visual impairity as a lot of things in the world are visually charged. With the visual impairity, the handicap might be larger as they cannot read wall signage or directions.

I learnt that there are many subtle things that help the visually impaired, such as audio features in ATMs and braille and note sizes on dollar notes. However things like the dollar note braille can be useless when wearing and tearing occurs.

I also learnt that the visually impaired are able to experience things in another way. Like boat rides, to experiential holidays, they experience it through sound and touch, making use of other senses to experience their surroundings.

I think a big challenge would be that the world is made for the visual and people who can see are generally very visual creatures. It is hard to cater to an audience that cannot see but it doesn’t mean that is impossible. Like in visual design, embossing and debossing to create texture is more costly than flat surface printing. This cost escalates when we want to cater to the visually impaired.

I think role playing allows the designer to understand their audience better and is able to cater the design to a particular audience. Apart from that, it gives the designer new sensibilities to approach design in a more accessible manner. Even then, if the design is trying to approach accessibility, there is only so much a visual designer can do in terms of the add-ons to help remedy this.

Role playing definitely helps to allow designers to understand the problems and challenges faced by a certain group of people. However, it is tricky as it can only do so much to instil a sense of understanding. Also, it takes a lot of empathy and thought to constantly re-evaluate the designed solution if it is applicable to the audience. Often times a lot of solutions end up marginalising other communities or contributes to factors of another problem. At times, we try to have everything, but can’t seem to get anything at all.