More topics…

I honestly cannot decide on a thesis topic to research. Why is it so hard for me?

I’ve thought of a few more and found some that I could possibly do:

• the psychology of attraction – I feel it’s a dead end, where do I go with this? It’s interesting to read about and extremely entertaining but where to next?
• Different types of information graphics – the history of it, what form did it begin with? how did it change? what are the advantages and disadvantages? how can it be improved? what is wrong with current model? what kind of tools are being used? most popular? most effective?
• the psychology of decision making – how does it affect our health? how do we make choices? what kind of choices are there? does decision making hurt productivity?
• How much do people (particularly college students or full-time working people) spend on food? What kind of food do they eat? What affects their decision? What do people think about food in general? Where do they shop? How they cook and eat? What goes on in their kitchen? How many people diet? Why? Focus on area? Compare to another? Say downtown Toronto to Scarborough? Types of food? Ethnic foods? Location of types of food? What time? Who they eat with? Food psychology? Map out Toronto’s eating habits?
• How much do we think about where our food has come from? What does  it take to make a pizza? What are the origins of the ingredients?
• study the flow of life in canada compared to another country? Is life moving too fast for us to enjoy in Canada? Compared to say Europe? Stress levels? Employment?
• women in the ruban city and workplace
• perception of suburban life to city life – freedom, isolation, social integration and interaction
• What is a community?

Thesis Topics

I’ve changed my thesis topic since last semester. Honestly it’s hard to pick. This is something that I will be doing for a year. What can I research and work on that I will not get bored of and want to keep going?

I’m just going to list random topics that come to mind and some topics I’ve looked up. However I am going to organize it into 2 categories, one related to design and the other not.

Design:

• Identity and Branding
• Information Design and Graphics
• Packaging
• Interactive & Website
• Wayfinding
• future of print media

Non-Design:

• Psychology – mental disorders – living with a person with a mental disorder
• Beauty – The view of beauty and stereotypes in North America vs. Asia (An example, a lot of asian girls want white pale skin yet girls in North America want to be tanned)
• sustainable fashion fabrics
• Are organic foods really healthier for you?
• Deviance & Normality – cultural scares
• human memory

Brenda Laurel: The Human Face of ResearchDesign

• Design research as an integral part of design practice
• can’t have one without the other
• minerva – goddess of wisdom and military strategy
• owl brought back information
• we scared of information/research because its gonna dictate our design decision – not true
• uses same methods as market research – tells  u how to sell something – but design research tells you how to make decision, to inform you
• design research differs from m.r in breadth and purpose helps designers to identify opportunity spaces tunes intuition and informs creativity
• art of changing culture without being kicked in the teeth
• no consumer
• post-consumer
• must leave behind biases when doing human centered research
• we design tools to look at data, design tools to look at those tools
• scenario building and strategic analysis
• understand people, how can it be conducted economically?
• deploy methods strategically
• begin with quantitative data
• baby boomer research
• probes – three bags, inside cards, photo journals
• personas – make belief things that marketers do, capture patterns
• but they make it up, you gotta look at your research
• did a study on teens, personas, don’t know they keep changing media types,
• students did baby boomer education videos and others
• what is mobo? thumb print, can sense light, etc
• kids attracted to objects that connect to technology and life
• zeitgeist taster
• human change, crises, sustainability, new ecologies of people and things
• human change: demographics – 11 year old girls-attitudes have really changed
• people are changing all the time because environments are changing
• human change: emergent social topologies, online gaming worlds-social interactions, real world and online currency
• human crises: health, extremism and conflict, energy issues, climate change
• sustainability: design, materials and technologies -big impact on what designers are going to do,
• new ecologies of things: sensor networks, locative technologies, IP everywhere
• open source everything

Research Readings #5: I Come to bury Graphic Design

Kenneth Fitzgerald

• to consider teaching or theorizing about graphic design, ask: What is its ultimate goal?
• agrees improving life is one of design’s ambitions but it’s not design’s primary objective
• it’s first concern is reproduction
• this motivation is often to the exclusion of better-place-making the world
• most theory – whether it is academic or practical – also comes down to procreation: assuring the creation of more professional design
• while desiring awareness of and recognition for its activity, design deliberately makes little real substantive effort to reach out to non-designers to explain what it’s doing and why
• argues that design professionals should be given more work
• a thorough appreciation of design leads to demise as a specialist profession, should elicit the desire to do it yourself
• isn’t this where little designers come from? designers would be everywhere and nowhere
• example is Rem Koolhaas – an architect who formed a design studio – as art director – works are contemporary, capable and forgettable
• Another one is Mac temp Dave Eggars, who only designs for his literary journals and associated products
• his approach is anti-design style, flouting professional treatment
• from a different perspective, untrained design can make inroads into information design
• Edward Tufte – genius of information design – fails to account for the subjective realities of culture – culture as broad social forces and as smaller group dynamics
• design has a death wish, constantly wishes to eradicate itself, designers will instinctively reject this notion
• to detractors, vernacular design is crude, subjective
• designers are seen as possessing an elitist aesthetic agenda insensitive to people’s needs
• modernist rejection of the vernacular may come from recognizing the true risk to designers
• it’s not that commerce – the public exchange of ideas, goods and services – will not be able to function without design, but that it will
• design also has a fascination with and frequently embraces the vernacular
• bracing reality check for over-theorized design
• in its passion, design stalks contemporary art and outsider art
• uncritical use of vernacular sources has received extensive critique
• fad for vernacular bad taste may be attempt by designers to survive by blending into the landscape, designers abandoning their identity, acting on death wish
• design education is where little designers come from
• notion that design is on the job learning experience continues to dominate
• successful design program is defined as one that produces professional design and designers
• also accumulation of knowledge for its own sake: the goal of the liberal arts
• can studying graphic design be of general, not just professional, interest?
• anything to offer outside of the sometimes questionable promise of a job?
• design education should strive for the idealism of education, educators on quest for legitimacy
• For them, design education is entirely about producing designers. It’s vocational training.
• There’s nothing wrong with that—unless you’re claiming to be engaged in something else.
• Swanson, however, is discussing education, in a design context
• Here is a real world certainty every design educator must confront: the majority of design students will not go into professional practice. What is our responsibility to them? Does design care about anything other than producing more designers)? An education through design rather than in design should be the goal.
• A shift in education away from a professional emphasis may also benefit students dedicated to a career of making
• Design’s vital aspect of craft is a product of a cognitive awareness
• A liberal arts model may also exacerbate the anti-intellectualism rampant in the field
• Designers occasionally talk about “educating the client.” But if designers are so dismissive of their education—by designers—what makes them thinkclients will take lessons?
• Just as the profession can’t form a critical writing, it’s unable to best represent its own interests
• Design constructed itself as professional service—formal speech to commune with industry. Business styles itself as rational, tangible, and methodical. But a glance at any day’s business news shows that those are affectations
• Mismanagement, indecision, and fantasy are the prevalent attributes
• Design is just a job to most of its practitioners. The majority of studios and corporate art departments are factories. How would certification rectify this?
• I’ve previously suggested that the AIGA should reconstitute itself as a union
• Professionalizing design is a mechanism to cover the bizarre nature of the activity. Design is a dislocated art form born out of industrialization
• The idea of professional artists is fairly implausible, certainly as a way to consistently generate fresh insight
• activity inevitably becomes routinized and formulaic when required to be on demand. The product turns distant, abstract, and impersonal
• we get a lot of admirable, formally accomplished work
• It’s no mystery that the most celebrated, expressive, and inspiring design is either self-motivated or when the designer is truly empowered and entrusted. You must have a personal stake. This is the norm. Its the itinerant artist model that’s an aberration. Why else do designers have creative side projects to, as they describe it, gratify their creative urges? Shouldn’t this tell them that they’re in the wrong business? Or that design shouldn’t be a business?
• Design must join the culture and abandon attempts to seduce, party with, or ride herd on it. Those projects are doomed to failure, as they should be. The results of the modernist program—decay into formal gestures, creation of “merely a designer-culture”—are a proof

Research Readings #5: Why Designers Can’t Think

Michael Bierut

• as structurers of the world’s communications, graphic designers partake of in many fields of interest as they can have clients
• men and women who invented graphic designer were self-taught (no design schools existed), yet prospered without 4 years of typography, visual problem solving and advanced aesthetics
• today most professionals are alarmed at the growing number of graphic design programs with an increasing number of high school graduates want to be a graphic designer
• american programs fall into two categories: process (swiss) and portfolio (slick)
• process schools favor a form-driven problem solving approach
• first assignments are simple letterform drawing ones, translating 3-dimensional objects into idealized high-contrast photos and basic still life photography
• Intermediate projects include relating the drawing of a flute to the hand drawn letter N, combining it with a photography for example
• Graphic Design: the letter N plus flute drawing plus ballet slipper photo plus 42 pt Univers
• Process school traces their lineage back to the advanced program of the Kunstgewerbeschule in Basel, Switzerland
• Swiss style schools thrived largely as a reaction against perceived “slickness” of the portfolio schools (have been around since 1950s)
• The portfolio school has a more mercenary aim, to provide students with polished books that will get them good jobs upon graduation
• The problem solving mode is conceptual, with a bias for appealing, memorable, populist imagery, product is king
• unlike full-time teachers of process schools, portfolio schools are staffed largely by working professionals who teacher part-time, impatient with idle exercises that don’t relate to the real world
• best-trained graduates of both schools are equally sought after by employers
• identity firms love process school grads while packaging firms love the portfolio school grads

So what’s wrong with graphic design education?

• Both schools are the same. What is valued is the way graphic design looks, not what it means
• in many programs it’s possible to study graphic design for four years without any meaningful exposure to the fine arts, world literature, science, history, politics or any of the other disciplines that unite us in a common culture
• The new graduate doesn’t need to know economics but needs more technical skills yet 5 or 10 years down the road, how can a designer plan an annual report without some knowledge of economics?
• Layout a book without an interest or even passion in literature?
• But most mediocre design today comes from designers are who faithfully doing as they were taught in school, worship altar of the visual
• pioneers of graphic designers were more well-rounded because their work draws its power from deep in the culture of their times – they had no intensive specialized programs
• modern design education is value-free, every problem has purely visual solution that exists outside any cultural context
• nowadays passion of design educators seems to be technology, fear illiteracy will handicap graduates
• designers will end up talking to themselves

Hmm. This article is kind of sad because I do feel Ocad is one of those schools that do not really educate its students on other areas besides art and design. I come from another university so I guess I feel a bit more well-rounded and I try to take the few liberal courses here that don’t relate to design or art. In the meantime, I try to learn other topics as much as I can. I loved and hated the courses I have taken before yet I will never regret taking them. I have to agree that being a designer is not just about visuals. Economics is something I find important as literature is to myself. Being integrated within culture is important because how will we design then? What context will we be designing in? I feel that students in the design and art faculty do not really interact or communicate. Design students mainly talk to other design students and vice versa. Is this going to change?

Research Reading #4: Graphic Design Thesis: A Survivor’s Guide

• Thesis is the cumulation of a student’s design education at CCAC
• created by michael vanderbyl to challenge and broaden our understanding of what it means to be a designer
• self-directed, allows you to identify an area of interest and investigate, using design as a vehicle which to present your findings
• Students are graded by 4 components: proposal, research, thesis project, and process booklet

Thesis Proposal

• a proposition or argument based on original observation, which you support through research
• details anticipated research, addresses potential implications of propositions

Tips

1. start with what interests you - what are you obsessed with? Passionate about? What do you like reading and thinking about?
2. Make sure you have a point, what are you arguing?
3. don’t base your proposal on obvious
4. shorter is usually better
5. think about claims, are they true? Logical? Do YOU believe them? What are the ramifications if they are true?
6. do not make sweeping statements for dramatic effect or without supporting them with documentation
7. define your terms
8. do not claim you will prove anything
9. be aware you will revise your proposal as your research dictates and your process evolves

Research

• purpose: to understand how to evaluate what you see and read, to develop your own opinions and critical frameworks based on informed judgements, not simple on what you like and don’t like, to acquire the critical skills to discern reliable useful sources from the ukn, to evaluate your own work in light what you learn through the reseach, to develop your own understanding of the relationship of history theory to practice, and ulitimately to have the chance to explore a topic that interests you in a more indepth fashion

Tips

1. let your topic dictate the type of research you do, and have an idea of what you are looking for
2. maintain level of cynicism, be critical of sources
3. consult with an expert mentor in your field of study
4. develop a system for note-taking as you read
5. footnote sources
6. avoid reading pseudo science
7. interviewing all friends is not intellectual merit

Thesis Project

• physical manifestation of and conclusion to thesis proposal
• form it takes determined by nature of proposal and its content
• should be aware that you are creating a narrative, engaged in process of making an argument, what is your core message?
• what are your secondary messages and its relationship to core?
• If your project is so personal that it fails to communicate, it fails lol

Tips

1. do not have preconceived ideas about what form your project will take
2. create a written outline of your narrative/argument diagramming your core and secondary messages, serve as a guide along with visuals
3. give audience multiple access points to your content – quick view or overlook
4. visual language should be appropriate to content
5. if unfamiliar with chosen medium, allow more time for learning curve
6. if installation is chosen, approach with trepidation

Tips from other students

• 3 tips (don’t believe rumous about teachers, original topics will allow interesting angle, and get better response and be more fun, must make a point)
• make a schedule(
• make connections
• research
• trust yourself

Research Reading #4: Wonders Revealed: Design and Faux Science

Jessica Helfand and William Drenttel from Michael Bierut, William Drenttel, and Steven Helle

Real science

• science is revolutionizing the world, as a cultural influence, its reach is pervasive
• affects what we eat and breathe, and where and why and how we behave the way we do
• it’s the connecting tissue linking past, to present to future, its relationship to visual communication is critical
• it’s through graphic design and complexities and wonders of science are revealed
• why are so few designers participating in the articulation, expression and dissemination of these new ideas? Why isn’t there a more central, intellectually relevant and creatively meaningful role for designers – one that revolves less around aestheticizing preexisting content and is based instead on inventing new ways to visualize these new ideas?
• small response from design profession except superficial appropriations in design annuals, school critique
• is new style of idiom, designers using its visual accuracies, language/vocab – but only a cosmetic enhancement, but lack knowledge of discipline itself
• design lacks instant validation and seriousness of purpose
• new seeking after scientific style – faux science – antithesis of modernism: it’s a form awaiting content or worse, serious form retrofitted with interchangeable content

Faux Science

• science is all about clarity and specificity and rationalism, about charting DNA strands and analyzing chemical compounds, about physical density and gravitational pull and a reality that is anything but virtual
• in today’s anything-goes world of relentless self-expression, science has become the designers’ safe haven. It’s the new look and feel
• It’s easy one to imitate

False Authority

• appeal of info design is it offers instant credibility
• its rational and authoritative, classified and controlled
• looks serious and scientific
• but its false authority because we buy into form so unquestioningly
• most look alike, swiss modernism that remove that chance for a more expressive content driven form
• ignores earlier sources and ignorant of alternative models that produce more original point of view
• form masquerading as content

Panaceas

• morphology refers to basic form and structure of organisms without consideration of function, in biology
• in graphical realm, organisms are not only function-free, they are little more than ornamental, they are graphic panaceas, a visual cure-all
• also a mathematical morphology that concentrates on stochastic geometry, random set theory and image algebra and even in linguistics, form and structure of words

Documenting

• in documenting, designers dutifully observe the minutiae of their efforts, recording with a detail-conscious bordering on the absurd
• designer is so busy organizing that is unlikely she/he will have time, distance, or objectivity to transcend the work through insight, observation, scrutiny, or point of view, any of which might celebrate the power an original idea

Cataloguing

• full-bleed image saturation abounds: it is an attempt to create an immersive context which, upon closer inspection, is little more than a theoretically staged set of aggressively cropped images meant to create an indelible impression
• not science, but artifice

The New Vernacular

• designers have long been drawn to the vernacular, appropriating found artifacts and celebrate the texture of street
• overtime, become a way to create instant nostalgia, surface style that looked authentic but was anything but
• because it belonged to everyone, resonated as real, familiar, and accessible
• art of the everyday, beautiful in its ugliness
• faux science is new vernacular, a methodology, highly disciplined in a formal sense but still about appropriation
• at core of this critique lie serious questions about role of education, ex. why don’t they study science?

Research Reading #4: On (Design) Bullshit

Michael Bierut

• starts with an event: the design of the Getty Center in Los Angeles between Richard Meier and Artist Robert Irwin. Irwin creates the central garden but does not regard the orthonography of the building and is this whimsical organic form. Meier and his team begin a reasoned, strongly felt critique and because Irwin already sensed that the client liked his proposal, he responds to the critique with one word, “bullshit”
• What is the relationship of bullshit and design?
• It’s been a subject of inquiry with Frankfurt’s (Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Princeton) volume, “On Bullshit”
• He’s careful to distinguish bullshit from lies, bullshit is not giving audience a false belief about what state of affairs may be the topic but that its primary intention is to give its audience a false impression concerning what’s going on in the mind of the speaker
• Follows that every design presentation is at least an exercise in bullshit
• Design process combines functional goals with countless intuitive even irrational decisions (needs a bathroom vs I set headline in Bodini)
• Theories about the symbolic quality of colours or typefaces; unprovable claims about historical inevitability of certain shapes, fanciful forced marriages of arbitrary design elements to hard headed business goals
• must only be desire to conceal one’s private intentions in the service of a larger goal, getting your client to do it the way you like
• both Irwin and Meier could be accused of being single-minded and obstinate during the endless process of designing and building the getty and proposal of the garden

The World’s 15 Most Bike Friendly Cities

Source: http://matadortrips.com/the-worlds-15-most-bike-friendly-cities/

Title of Website: Matador

Author: Hal Amen

Date: April 20 2009

Europe

Amsterdam

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qk6YxhKH590
• Safe and extensive route networks, serious governmental promotion, and a bike culture that transcends class boundaries are all reasons why 40% of the city’s traffic moves on two wheels

Barcelona

• Barcelona’s Bicing program, one of the many mass bike rental systems that have popped up recently in Europe

Berlin

• 400, 000 Berliners pedal to work each day
• There’s even a website that helps you map out bike-specific routes

Copenhagen

• Nearly a third of workforce bike to office

Paris

• Has world’s largest public bicycle rental program: Velib

North America

Boulder

• Dedicates 15% of its transportation budget to improving and promoting bicycle travel
• Nearly every major roadway has a designated cycling area, and instituted a pilot program to get kids biking to school

Chicago

• Mayor wants to be most bicycle friendly city in the U.S
• Passed a law to protect cyclists’ safety
• More info: http://egov.cityofchicago.org:80/city/webportal/portalEntityHomeAction.do?entityName=Chicago+Bike+Program&entityNameEnumValue=127&Failed_Reason=Invalid+timestamp,+engine+has+been+restarted&com.broadvision.session.new=Yes&Failed_Page=%2fwebportal%2fportalEntityHomeAction.do

Davis

• Said to have more bikes than cars
• Official motto: Most bicycle friendly town in the world

Ottawa

• Claims the highest percentage of bike commuters on the continent
• 170km worth of paths to make it easy to get from point A to B
• More Info: http://www.ottawa.ca/residents/onthemove/travelwise/cycling/index_en.html

Portland

• Considered biking capital of the U.S
• Impressive bicycle infrastructure and commuter stats

San Francisco

• Removes car parking to make room for bike parking, distributes “watch for bikes” stickers
• Pending Bike Share Program
• Founding city of the Critical Mass (monthly bicycle ride to celebrate and to assert cyclists – http://critical-mass.info/), activities bicycle demonstration

Elsewhere

Beijing

Cape Town

Bogota

Perth

Chicago’s Bike Lane Design Manual

Source: http://egov.cityofchicago.org:80/webportal/COCWebPortal/COC_EDITORIAL/bike_lane.pdf

Title of Website: City of Chicago

Author:

Date:

• The Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center is delighted to partner with the City of Chicago and Chicagoland Bicycle Federation to make available this Bike Lane Design Guide
• One critical role of the PBIC is to disseminate best practices; to provide access to the tools and resources with which communities can be changed for the better
• This guide is an example of how facilities for bicyclists can be integrated into the layout of busy urban streets. Shows how bikes can be retroditted into an existing street system

What is considered:

• Line Type and Thickness: what kind of lines would separate the bike lane from the travel lane? Or where is parking prohibited or allowed?
• Intersections: lanes must alert cyclists to the potential for motorists to be crossing their path and encourages safe merging in advance of the intersection (eg. Bike lane with parking, intersection with 2-way arterial street)
• Parking Setbacks: setbacks like on-street parking through Chicago, bus routes – vehicle parking is prohibited, bike lane may be dropped to allow for turning movement
• Bike Lane Symbol and Arrow: Chicago uses a bike lane symbol based on that used in Toronto, design is simple and clearly for bikes and motorists

3 elements of street layout for Chicago

4 Foot Minimum Bike Lane Width –Chicago does not stripe a lane less than 5 feet in width, but AASHTO Guide and some agencies will stripe 4 in certain situations

Defining the Parking Lane: advantages of striping the line to define the parking lane include: striping encourages motorists to park closer to the curb and provide more space for bicyclists in the bike lane like when opening car doors, discourages motorists from thinking that shared bike/parking lane is in fact a travel lane for motor vehicles

Signs and Markings