Unit 1 Reflections

DISCOVERY! That’s what sums up unit 1 for me. 
Rough Guide required my group to ‘map’ Chinatown and Soho. This helped me discover a bit about people on my course, a bit about areas of London I only had touristy knowledge of, and how to work quickly enough to create 100 pages for our book in one evening! Balancing time well has been a key part of this unit- each week our lectures posed new issues to consider and extra tasks to complete alongside our practical work. Immediately I thought- I’ve got to stay on top of all this! Although setting up this blog has been a new venture, I found the format actually encourages good time management. Like an online diary, the ability to create posts that people (like you, hello there!) can instantly access, and to share visually inspiring imagery that helps convey my ideas, quickly appealed. I enjoyed personalising my blog name, banner and the layout of each post; I’m learning that the clarity achieved through selectively refining work is the best way to present a clear concept- both in written and practical terms. 
I’ve also discovered I’m an ideas-led person: my Rough Guide work went from general mapping, to a focus on doors, then specifically intercoms, to the idea of pushing buttons and playing around. I wish I’d been even more ‘posting’-happy when I began blogging, as its fascinating to have a record of all the little influences that have shaped idea development. It’s an aim I’ll work on for the start of my future projects! I’ve enjoyed referring to ‘Pinterest’ almost like a visual source blog, due to the vast amount of imagery it contains, which then sparks off countless other ideas. Visiting lesser-known galleries and exhibitions in link with our lecture series has reminded me that inspiration can be found all over this city…and I can’t wait to keep broadening my perspective and discovering more as the course progresses!

Door to door

Here's a little more on my Rough Guide research! To help capture the sense of movement, interaction and playing I felt as I journeyed from door to door around Chinatown and Soho, I created this little gif, mapping some things I saw on my route. 

A snapshot of my observations (October 2013, author's own)

It's the first time I've made a gif animation- but I think it works well as a quick, fun way to be reminded of the feel of your research. It would be interesting to carry this simple style of animation further along in the design process to experiment with colourways for patterns and prints, too. There is an inspiring post about animating colours on 'The People's Print' blog at the moment, actually. Here is an example of one of their animations. I love the dynamic feel it has; your eye can't help being drawn across the pattern with the transition of the colours.    

Colour pattern animation
(thttp://thepeoplesprint.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/blog-post.html, Accessed October 2013)

As I mentioned before, all the strong, bold colours really stood out to me when wandering around my given research location. Continuing to explore these colours in my sketchbook has been helpful, as our upcoming technical block work takes its basis in our initial research, so I'll need to have a colour palette at the ready by then.

Sketchbook exploration (October 2013, author's own)

Along with the different colours of the doorways I was obsessed with, even  the deliveries and piles of rubbish were surprisingly colourful in Chinatown!

Looking at the way the boxes were stacked continued to remind me of the idea playing a game, as with the intercom buttons before. Some of the stacks were not that different to a game of giant Jenga- knock one part and the whole thing could topple! I realised I wanted to keep exploring this concept of playfulness for our follow-on project, 'Box Clever', where we have to collect a box of objects to inspire our first week of drawing. But more of that to follow!

Week 1, project 1

'ROUGH GUIDE'

Lets rewind back to the first week, first project on BA Textiles at Chelsea.

Task 1: to compile research about different areas of London into 100 copies of a collaborative group book...Our own 'Rough Guide' to the City, containing one page of work from every single person's individual sketchbook on our course. It was an exciting, if not slightly daunting task!

A friendly face in Chinatown
(author's own, September 2013)

My group was given the focus area of Chinatown, Soho and Covent Garden. To start, we just went there and explored. I quickly found that wandering slowly around central London with a sketchbook is an interesting experience. Seeing as people are usually in a rush with somewhere urgent to go or a specific task to do, I got some rather odd looks as I stood and sketched, picked things up off the street and took rubbings from nicely textured surfaces. I met a few friendly people along the way, though!

Almost immediately, I felt quite drawn to doorways. It interested me that each door was different, and that so many people passed through them everyday, but probably didn't pay much attention to them. I felt like every door had it's own personality. The intercoms were especially fascinating.

It started to feel like a game: going round from door to door, peering at the name labels on the buzzers, looking the shapes of the buttons to press and call people...while resisting the urge to just press the whole lot! Some doorways were painted really great, vibrant colours, and I got a bit obsessed drawing every door I passed.

Drawing doors- sketchbook pages (author's own, September 2013)

I realised that I'd found my personal area of interest for the Rough Guide. It was fun to be working on a project again, and I wanted to keep the playful feeling I had when I was out exploring, clear in my work. Repeatedly revisiting the location helped to feed my thinking (while giving me the chance to keep drawing doors!), so I was quite excited for our first group tutorial, where we'd be selecting which page we'd be contributing to the class book. My tutor Cathy commented that she really liked the intercoms. In light of my playful approach to the research, I decided I wanted to make my final page somehow interactive. The aim was to take the 100 copies of our page (one for each of the 100 books!), and then customise them with something, so they were all individually hand-worked/drawn/sewn into. 

Experimenting a bit in my sketchbook helped me think about how I could play with my pages- literally! Cutting away holes where buttons should be and changing the colours and messages on the intercom all worked well for my concept. 

Playing with intercoms- sketchbook pages

So finally, it was just the small matter of applying my idea to 100 copies of the image I'd selected for my page! I wanted to change all the name labels on the intercom picture to names and messages of people from my course, so that every book would be personal to us. It took a whole morning to go around the group and collect the names and messages. Each page turned out slightly different, depending on what people wrote. Here's a couple of samples: 

...And a few snaps of how to final collaborative book turned out (one of my photos made the cover, hooray!)