May 17, 2011 / katiemaybe

Long time coming

RIGHT THEN. This is it. The real world. It starts here.

I handed all my work in yesterday. What a weird feeling. 5 years of design education really have flown by, particularly this last year. It’s quite a quantity of stuff we’ve all ploughed through – four major projects, a 7000 word dissertation and an academic report on all of it. But we made it. So here, all together in one giant post, are the projects I’ve worked on this year:

1. EmployAbility

A live brief for Participle - a small part of a larger scale project running in partnership with Lambeth and Lewisham councils.

Employability is Participle’s new vision for a sustainable working life. The project is developing a new social organisation rooted in the local community that can help support individuals and families to acquire the aptitudes, relationships, confidence, and the soft and hard skills that make people more employable. I took a specific focus on the effects of peoples’ social networks on their employment opportunities and met and interviewed three individuals of varied employment histories. I worked my way through the three networks, interviewing a total of sixteen people across two degrees of separation.
I created visualisations from the data collected and, wanting to develop my insights into something useful, I designed and tested a printed ‘diagnostic tool’ that uses a clear, Isotype style. Individuals select statements that best describe their working life, the structure of their network, and how their network supports them. Each answer corresponds with an insight and ‘score’. Scores are recorded by using coloured stickers, and the results are displayed in a coloured bar, where hotter colours indicate higher results. The individual can compare their results with the stories of people we’ve already worked with and the steps they took to improve how they used their network, and the employability advisor is able to suggest the most suitable network-based actions for them.

2. Translation : Embrace

This brief, starting with just the word ‘translation’, is really the only project I’ve blogged about this year. It is an exploration of human social behaviour. The anthropologist Robin Dunbar says that, though human language may have allowed societies to remain cohesive while reducing the need for physical and social intimacy, we continue to express our closest relationships through body language and touch. I was interested in materialising and scaling this human social response for this project, and began studying the form and impression of an embrace between two figures.
Having been inspired by talk of Rapid Prototyping during my short time at CIID, I decided that I wanted to use this technology to materialise the form and impression of an embrace between two figures. Using facilities at the London College of Fashion, UCL and the RCA, I was able to use a 3D body scanner to collect the data of the figures in various stages of an embrace.The scanner was built to measure just one figure, so the presence of four legs and four arms resulted in a beautiful merging of the bodies, with areas missing or complex data where shadow had been created on the skin. I learnt the software 3D Studio Max and used a haptic pen to repair manipulate the scan data into watertight 3D models. Where there were areas of no data, I capped the holes smoothly to indicate this. I took the files to the Rapidform team at the RCA to clean and print into finished pieces in a SLA shell, which maintains the ‘data capture’ appearance. The sculptures reveal the essence of the embrace by contouring the contact zones of the figures both together and individually. The pair of figures visualise the embrace over time, with small movements indicated by ripples on the surface, while the separate figures reveal ‘booleaned’ impressions of each others’ presence as a souvenir of that moment.

3. A Kaleidoscope of Sound

This project began with an aim to create a visual representation of the evolution of musical genres and their influences on each other, and developed into a study of the evolution of music as sound. A Kaleidoscope of Sound is the visualisation of musical and colour-based harmony theories. I wanted to create something that expressed the human perception of music, but did so in an playful and delightful manner rather then becoming heavy and theoretical. This engaging, interactive requirement led me to new ground with its use of the open source code ‘Magic Circle’, created by Alex Rulkens, which has been an invaluable resource. I devised a colour harmony system based on Colour-Music studies and the musical ‘circle of fifths’, and built this into the Processing interface that responds to notes played by the user on a small keyboard. The system allows both musically-trained and untrained users to intuitely visualise and respond to musical structures.
The circle of fifths forms the foundation for studying harmonic structure and key signatures in Western music. It functions by placing each of the twelve notes of the octave around a circle so that the distance between each note clockwise is a harmonic 5th. Keys that are positioned closer together on the resulting diagram are more similar in harmonic value than those that are placed further apart.

4. The Story of Economics

This project was a rapid, fun collaborative brief with Lal Hay. Lal and I explored ideas surrounding economics, commerce and trade in the history of civilisation. Working with BBC Radio 4 podcast material, ‘The Story of Economics’ by Michael Blastland, we created an animation that illustrates the evolution of economics from its beginnings in the last social primates to its role in society today, discussed from a number of perspectives. The aim of the animation was to act as an educational overview that would appeal to a varied audience, so we used tactile hand-crafted materials, a geometric illustration style and a stop-frame technique to put together the story in a colourful and vibrant manner.