After being given the brief, and discussing our thoughts and getting acquainted with the group we thought to work to Marcu’s advice and split of indidvually to research before coming back together. This was to prevent us from mindmapping for ages and ensured we could start making quick. Below are some scans of my research.
Drawing from my personal areas of interest and things around me I then began researching online which could potentially help us respond to the brief.
In the past I’ve struggled with the concept and challenge side of the course. It’s a slightly unnautral thinking method for myself. To get in the mood a bit more, I got some books out at the library just to have to hand. I took a book on speculative design, “Speculative Everything” after just having a flick through in the library. The examples given all seemed quite attuned to the Concept and challenge outcome. There was lots of physical 3D objects which I know are quite successful.
I also took out “Planet B: Ideas for a New World” which caught my eye on the new releases table.
Similarly to Speculative Everything, this book contained pieces of design that had such a strong but creative concept behind time which often worked to answer a question or solve a problem.
When back together to discuss what we found we honed in on Raph’s idea of communication. We talked about how this could take a visual form. We thought this was an interesting accepted order that would be exciting to disrupt. We were drawn to the “product truth” that all doctors have bad handwriting (specifically when signing their names on forms). We researched this and found out the reasons why – they have lots of paperwork to fill and the legibility isn’t particularly necessary etc… We thought there was an interesting contradiction between the authority and importance of a medical document, for example signing off for medication for a serious illness, and the scruffy signature left at the bottom.
This led us to think about legibility in a written form. We experimented with the readability of group member’s handwriting adopting a Chinese Whispers style approach where a message would be taken and gradually degraded as other members tried to interpret this handwriting.
We refined our experimentation method and had someone external create the sentence. This way, the person in the experiment has no clue what was originally written so the semi-legible message presented to them is completely new and they have to guess more without the context.
We had a talk with Max and presented our experiments to him. Below is a scan of the notes I made during the talk:
He said we have two concepts. That of written miscommunication but also official documents. We thought how context is vital for clear communication. He suggested we could look more into official documents and authoritative typography. He told us to think about how we could engineer a limited communication. He told us to look into an installation in the “Eco visionaries” exhibition at the RA.
It was lucky, I had previously visited this exhibition so had a sense in what he meant because it was a quite complex installation. This was followed up by a chat with Zelda.
Following this our experiments quickly moved into a digital space where we utilised technologies such as google translate and text to speech in order to invoke a disruption to the order of communication. Below is my experiment series:
Google Translate experiments
It was interesting to see just how accurately google translate translated back and forth into different languages. We remembered it as being far less accurate, the technology behind it must of improved recently.
Siri Experiment
Raph’s Reflection:
I explored Text to Speech softwares.
These provided more room for miscommunication and there was the nice process of digitsing something very human and individual our own voice. I took the same sentence and put it though a text to speech generator. I then was intrigued to see if a speech to text software such as the ones used in word could pick it up. Interestingly enough the slow stuttering computer voice wasn’t recognised by the other computer software. To me this was the beginnings of another outcome for my techne brief which run alongside this. I will have to explore this finding more, but because it didn’t generate any communication it wasn’t as relevant to this project.
As an extension of this I used this same technology to record me speaking on the phone with my sister. When there were Two people speaking at the same time the speech to text picked up either me or my sister, or a mixture in a between and translated it into what it thought it heard.
We received feedback from Zelda which seemed to push us more into the route of verbal miscommunication. We thought about a more meta approach. We thought we could set some rules for ourselves we could only communicate about an outcome by sending letters to one another. In a sense we cut ourselves off from instant and easy digital communication and see the effect. We also thought we could get the people in the crit to form a big game of Chinese whispers. We could design the circumstance and conditions of communication and disrupt them in the crit.
This culminated in a proposed outcome to disrupt how we communicate in a crit. This would have been a theatrical performance that took place within the crit where we would explain how to communicate whilst communicating very poorly.
This was shut down due to the fact that it was quite abstract and there would be nothing physical to show. Prior to this, I was trying to steer the group away from this idea as it seemed to have a similar flaw to my last concept and challenge brief.
Cameron Aitken Graphic Design 