MandoBuddy providing a platform for people who would like to improve and practise their Mandarin by connecting them together, along with Mandarin speakers in the world who love to make friends. Other than interactions with people through text messaging and voice notes, users also go through Quiz of the Day to help them widen their Chinese vocabulary. Recommendations for popular Chinese songs and dramas are also included as part of the function so users may grow interest in the Chinese culture through these mediums. Quiz of the Day and Recommendations may also allow the users to have common topics to start chatting.


Here’s the link to my MandoBuddy app prototype

1. Briefly share your experience going through Dialogue with Time. What were some of the feelings, thoughts, challenges and insights gained while role playing an elderly person? (150 Words)

The trip to Dialogue with Time was very insightful as it walked me through facts regarding ageing, then projecting the future me (as an elderly) before allowing myself to role play as an elderly. In reality, as a young adult who has yet to experience the difficulties faced during old age, we could only see what the elderly experience through our eyes. This exhibition had allowed me to put myself in the shoes of the elderly by stimulating the problems they faced with daily. One of the exhibits was the stimulation of tremors while unlocking the door. I had a taste on how difficult it would be to insert the key into the lock with tremors and I believe that the actual tremors experienced by the elderly would be even worse. While the stimulations do not entirely represent the difficulties stimulated by them, it has helped me to understand their circumstances better, to a certain extent. That evoked an even stronger sense of empathy towards this group of people which gave me a greater reason to want to help them.

2. Drawing on your experience, can you think and list some of the benefits inherent in the design research technique of role playing? (150 Words)

  • A better understanding of the “role”
    • Role-player personally faces the difficult situations which are never encountered by him/herself so he/she is able to gather primary thoughts and feelings on the issue through personal encounters during the role-playing process. With personal emotions evoked, role-player will be able to delve deeper into the issue instead of just touching the surface of the issue.
  • Different POVs – gathers different understanding of the same “role” by different people
    • During encounters by different people, people will notice the different problems faced by each individual. With the help of role-playing, we are able to gather more inputs based on each individual’s own role-playing experience. The inputs can then be pooled together to solve the design issues faced by the relevant group of people.

3. Can you think of some contexts where role-playing can be useful to help discover and define design challenges or contribute to the development of design solutions? (150 Words)

In situations where people find it difficult to understand the actual circumstances or something that people do not feel as strongly for, role-playing will be effective in discovering and defining design challenges as it is an engaging way to expose people to the situation of the particular group that is concerned. One example would be mental illness. Most people assume they know how it is like suffering from mental illness but what they understand may differ from the actual situation. Through role-playing, people may change their initial way of thinking and allows them to see things from different perspectives (as a particular person in concern and as an outsider). That can help with giving a more all-rounded insight as compared to someone who only has one.

I particularly liked the editorial designs of Harper’s Bazaar magazines by the Russian designer Alexey Brodovitch. Other than the interesting cropping of photographs which he was famous for, there was an intensive use of white space to bring emphasis to the visual elements on the cover page. The dynamic grid columns was interesting to me as well as it was very different from the regular horizontal and vertical grid system.

Brodovitch was the art director for Harper’s Bazaar magazine in the United States from 1934 to 1958 and revolutionized the mainstream American publications with his experimental editorial layouts – “the use of text and image in dual page layouts; the use of color photography; cropped and off center images; and the extensive use of white space”. (The Art Story) Brodovitch’s legacy was something worth mentioning as his experimentations are still relevant even as of today.

 

“All designers, all photographers, all art directors, whether they know it or not, are students of Alexey Brodovitch.” – Irving Penn (The Art Story)

 

If you don’t like full skirts…
Article in Harper’s Bazaar, Photographs by
George Hoyningen-Huene
March 1938 (Iconofgraphics)

 

The Consensus of Opinion
Article in Harper’s Bazaar, Photograph by Man Ray
March 1936 (Iconofgraphics)

 

Through his designs, I see how type and image can flow together to make a well-designed layout as he often relate his images to his typography within a spread. That showed how we can view typography, not only as plain text but also as an image on its own to achieve a layout that is dynamic and interesting. His works have played a very important role in the world of editorial design and they have inspired me to create something that can be as interesting.

 

References:

“Alexey Brodovitch Paintings, Bio, Ideas.” The Art Story, https://www.theartstory.org/artist/brodovitch-alexey/.

“Alexey Brodovitch.” Iconofgraphics, http://www.iconofgraphics.com/Alexey-Brodovitch/.


Fig.1 The Rosetta Stone on display in Room 4. (The British Museum Blog)

The Rosetta Stone from 196 BCE particularly caught my attention during the lecture as it was an important discovery that helped with the decoding of hieroglyphs.

Hieroglyph, a character used in a system of pictorial writing, particularly that form used on ancient Egyptian monuments. Hieroglyphic symbols may represent the objects that they depict but usually stand for particular sounds or groups of sounds. (The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica)

After the 4th century CE, people could barely read and write hieroglyphs due to their lack of use. As such, the fact that it consisted of 3 different scripts, hieroglyphs, Demotic and Ancient Greek, all with the same content contributed to the understanding of the Egyptian pictorial writing when it was discovered in 1799. (The British Museum Blog)

In the early 19th century, scholars who were able to read Ancient Greek eventually decoded some of the hieroglyphs. An English physicist, named Thomas Young, discovered that some of the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone resemble the sounds of “Ptolemy”, the king then. Jean-François Champollion, a French scholar also found that the hieroglyphs could relate to the sound of the Egyptian language. Through the study of the stone inscriptions, with reference to other texts as well, he made further breakthroughs in the understanding of hieroglyphs. (The British Museum Blog)

Just an extra note, I noticed Chinese characters started out as pictorial representation as well, from 甲骨文, the oracle bone script. Hence, I actually find it interesting to note how things have evolved differently in the East and the West to become the languages we have today.

 

Reference:

  1. “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about the Rosetta Stone.” The British Museum Blog, 2 Aug. 2017, https://blog.britishmuseum.org/everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-the-rosetta-stone/.
  2. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Hieroglyph.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., https://www.britannica.com/topic/hieroglyph.

< Research & Process >

Through Project 2a, I have decided to focus on YELLOW COLOUR as the element of my zine.


Back cover (left) and cover (right) tryout

/ Initial idea /
Foodie adventure photozine

  • Empty stomach on page 1 (cover) to indicate the state before feasting the good food from Bedok
  • Filled tummy on page 8 (back cover) with checkpoints (food places intro) to indicate state after going through the recommended food places in Bedok

 

Image result for collage zine  
Reference (left) and Spread 1 tryout (right)

  • Initial spread 1 layout was referencing towards pop art cover layout instead of spread layout. Therefore, spread did not look appropriate.
  • Barely any visual hierarchy as the images appear to be of similar sizes.
  • Use of split complementary colors to make the spread look more harmonious.

 

/ Comments /

  1. Zine is about food so cover page should include the food that will be featured instead for anatomy.
  2. Photo angles can be limiting when shooting food stores, like the bakery. Illustrations of more interesting angles can be included.

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