Degree Project Thoughts Take II

As a branch off of sustainability, I want to focus on food, and how making the right food choices can grow a more sustainable society. Lately there has been a lot of talk about the food industry, what is good for us, what is not. Most people are uneducated about the food they eat and its nutritional value. They never think about the process by which food gets from farm to table. Eating for the most part is an absent minded activity. We eat mainly to get full. By making deliberate choices about what we consume, we can turn eating into a conscious activity, one that normally doesn't call for any. As people are getting fatter and disease rates grow higher, it is the perfect time to begin informing people about what they eat, where it comes from, and how they can better their lives by becoming more conscious eaters. I think college students are in need of the most help due to our busy schedules and whacked out sleep cycles. Often out of convenience, or lack of knowing how to cook, we either eat fast food or go to the cafeteria, when in fact it would be cheaper to buy groceries and make something that would last for a week or more. I want to use graphic design to inform this group of the nutritional value of what they are eating and give them the reason and tools to change their habits.

One of the goals is to change the way in which college students living on their own think about food, how they get it, and what they are eating. The second is to give them the reason to buy and cook healthy food, why it is important to buy from local grocers and eat foods that are in season. The primary message for this project is that buying local, organic foods will promote a more sustainable society as well as becoming conscious eaters and understand where their food comes from. The communication strategies would involve messages of an informational nature with statistics and reasons/suggestions for improvement and why we should change the way we go about eating.


Competitive Landscape/Bibliography?

Food Inc. (film)
Supersize Me (film/book)
In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan
Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer
The Future of Food (film)

Visual Advocacy-->Final Design Ignites Change Mock-Ups

Nearly half of all high school students in Kansas City don’t graduate. Students note a lack of connection to school, boredom, and personal issues contributing to their decision to drop out. Zeal is a speaker series designed to get high school kids excited about finishing school. Speakers come from the local community and include a range of athletes, artists, and corporate professionals. Zeal will provide students with five speaker sessions during the school year. Speakers talk to students about their careers while after-session workshops provide the students with meaningful insight and hands-on experience in learning a career-specific skill.




Athlete Poster


Designer Poster


Postcard


View the DIC project page

Multi Med. Ex.--> Wireframe Sketches

Multi Media Ex.-->Reading Response 1- The Language of New Media p 63-78

When the Macintosh was released in 1984, the vision of the GUI was a clear definition between the human and the technological creations. It stayed true to its principles of clarity and functionality. In this case when the user creates a file it never disappears unless it is deleted by the user. The passage states that all culture, both past and present, came to be filtered though the computer and the human-computer interface. Translation: the computer interface acts as a code that carries cultural messages in a variety of media. The thing about this is that movie and tv screen did not disappear from these applications, they were integrated into them.

The interface of the computer determines how the user is going to react to the computer itself. The interface also comes into play in society with work and leisure activities which are increasingly involving the computer in many different aspects and utilizing the same interfaces.

Human-computer interface (HCI) describes the way in which the user interacts with the computer. It also includes the metaphors used to conceptualize the organization of computer data. Originally HCI was invented when the computer was primarily used for work. During the mid-1990s the computer was largely thought of as a tool used to archive cultural content, but by the end of the decade the computer was becoming more than just a toolbox, turning into a "universal media machine." HCI has evolved into a set of controls used to operate a machine and the combination of the printed word and cinema become distinct ways of recording human memory and experience.


What Are Two Aesthetics defined by Blade Runner and the Macintosh?

First was a "futuristic dystopia" that combined futurism and decay, computer technology and fetishism, retro-styling and urbanism, L.A. and Tokyo. The Macintosh popularized the Graphic User Interface (GUI) which remained true to the modernist values of clarity and functionality.

How did the role of the personal computer shift in the 1990s?

At the beginning of the decade, the personal computer was still thought of as a sort of typewriter. It was used to produce cultural content that was stored and distributed in the appropriate media. By the end of the decade, Internet use became commonplace, and the computer's public image was no longer just control, but a "universal media machine" that could be used to author, store, distribute, and access all media.

How are the work and leisure spaces differently perceived in industrial and information societies?

Work application are considered to be the word processors, spreadsheet programs and database programs while leisure applications are computer games, and informational DVDs, etc. The reading states that these two sets are converging in our modern technological age. The information society is engaged in many activities that span across both of these areas: imputting and analyzing data, running simulations, searching the internet, playing games, watching video, listening to music, etc.

What does Human-Computer-Interface mean and entail?

The Human Computer Interface (HCI) describes the ways in which the user interacts with the computer. It includes physical imput and output devices like the monitor, keyboard and mouse. It utilizes metaphors to conceptualize and organize computer data such as files and folders on the desktop. The HCI also includes ways of manipulating data such as copying, renaming, and deleting. It can list the contents of a directory, start and stop a program, and set te computer's date and time. The term HCI was coined when the computer was primarily used for work.

Multi Med. Ex.--> Website Prototypes

Prototype 1: The Grid

Set up in a systematic grid, inside each square would be a thumbnail of the work. When clicked on, the box expands in the center of the grid and the viewer is able to view multiple images of the work by scrolling from side to side (or clicking on arrows?) As work is added, the grid becomes larger and tighter.

Prototype 2: The Tagging Wheel

What appears on the home page is a circle with cropped work on the perimeter. When the viewer clicks on a piece the circle zooms, centered on the selected work. The viewer is then able to navigate the circle in this zoomed state by clicking and dragging. Lines may be drawn between pieces by tagging them with similar qualities or type of media, similar to the mutual friend map on Facebook where lines are drawn between common friends.

Prototype 3: The Rolodex

Here the work is displayed like a rolodex file system. When the work in the middle is selected, the ones in front of it get moved to the back, in the same order.

Visual Advocacy--> DIC Project Page Revised

Nearly half of all high school students in Kansas City do not graduate. Most students note a lack of connection with school, boredom, and personal challenges contributing to their decision to drop out. Zeal is a speaker series designed to get high school kids excited about finishing school and going to college. Speakers would come from the local community and include a range of athletes, artists, and corporate professionals. Zeal would provide students with five speaker sessions during the school year, one every two months. The speakers talk to students about their careers and what they had to accomplish to reach that point. After the session, the speaker would give a workshop for interested students where they demonstrate a skill used in their profession.

Degree Project Thoughts

I have spent a lot of time this semester thinking about, not surprisingly, what I want to do when I graduate. I have come to the conclusion that I really don't know, and that is ok (for now). This is the first year in school that I have begun to seriously pay attention to what I believe in and realize how important it is for my happiness to stay true to those beliefs, let alone stand up for them. I came to graphic design because I was inspired by the idea that what I created could be used by someone other than myself, and beyond that, the idea that design has the power to change.
My vision for the degree project is probably not far from many of my classmates in some respects. I want it not only to reflect my three years in the design program, but showcase who I am both as a designer and a person. With this in mind, throughout this semester in Visual Advocacy, I have come to realize how passionate I am about sustainability and the "green movement." I had been conscious of these movements before, but I had yet to dig deep into the research of "Cradle to Cradle" and the like. One of the things that I have always been interested in is sociology and anthropology. I want to figure out some way that design can visualize the ideas of what it means to live in a sustainable world.
I am not solely talking about the environment, but the planet as a whole. As I have begun to think deeper about what these "buzz words" really mean, I think the general public has gotten so caught up in the green movement, myself included, that we have lost sight of what it really means to be sustainable.
Beyond considering the materials used in the design, I want to create something that not only informs people about what sustainability really means, but encourages them to act with the knowledge they have gained. Going back to the ideas in the first paragraph, I want to create something that is in some way physical, because I think it is the only way to get this sort of idea to stick. Think of the design building, and all the little reminders there are about the importance of reduce, reuse, recycle, and are we not reminded of these ideas every time we see it on the wall?