We’ve been working hard for the past couple of weeks to get it all done in time, curating, branding, cleaning, painting, measuring and hanging our space and I have to say it’s paid off.

The Information Design work ranges from the classic posters and books through to sculpture and animation, so we were careful to design spaces appropriate to each format. Our regular studio has been transformed into a ‘hanging room’, using wires across the ceiling and walls to suspend posters and other artefacts that need space. Our small third year room has been blacked out with boards and kitted out with benches and a projector to become a quiet space for screening moving image work. Across the corridor in the Illustration studio, we’ve taken over to create a ‘reading room’ featuring two open square arrangements of bar-height tables at a perfect height for perusing the books made by this year’s graduates. In here we also displayed currency designs in perspex-topped cabinets and larger sculptural or standing print work on glass shelves in the naturally-lit windowsills.

As per usual it was a complete bunfight, brimming with the chatter of fellow students, tutors, friends, colleagues and professional contacts. But unfortunately for me, one attendee saw an opportunity to thieve some of my work. I’m really quite pissed off. Especially as my business cards were right next to it, and we had been welcoming people photographing our work. I’m sad because it was the last of that particular paper stock, and I will never be able to make a matching replacement. It tuns out I wasn’t the only one – two other students had a book and a flickbook pilfered. The lack of respect this shows to the amount of time, care and energy that we’ve put into our work this year is disgusting, especially as the aforementioned thieves were probably students at LCC themselves. I hope they get caught. But they probably won’t. What an upsetting end to an enjoyable evening and a brilliant year.

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.

The LCC BA (Hons) Graphic and Media Design final show is running in the college from 30th June – 8th July. Come and have a nose around.

Here are some highlights:

Shomil Shah – Information Design – Letterpress posters for an Amnesty International project

Mayanne Trias – Information Design – Interactive typography using an arduino & light sensor. It responds to proximity by altering the weight/exposure of the type.

Clement Van Vyve – Information Design – Screenprinted experiments with CMYK half-tone printing.

Amy Lewis – Information Design – Re-interpreting Walter Benjamin’s Art in the age of Mechanical Reproduction according to the underlines, annotations and contributions noted in all the copies in LCC’s library

Dominique Sherwood – Typo/Graphics – Re-designing the 2012 London Olympics

Oi Ying Wong – Typo/Graphics - Re-designing the 2012 London Olympics

Jack Stevens – Typo/Graphics – Re-designing the 2012 London Olympics

Charlotte Knowles – Typo-Graphics – A yellow pencil clock

Randy Yeo – His slightly tongue-in-cheek take on the Typo/Graphics pathway

Katie Smyth – Typo/Graphics – Visualising extracts from Black Books

Jack Stevens – Typo/Graphics – Exploring the concepts of Inception

Ginny Cooper – Typo/Graphics – Visualising a Herbie Hancock 16-bar-blues

More Typo/Graphics work (but I’m not sure who this belongs to…)

And my own body-scanning work in the Information Design studio

Since the whole point of the project is to try and measure or capture human interaction, I didn’t want to manipulate the original file too much – the pure data that the scanner collected was interesting, bizarre and almost abstract. So I’ve been joining the figures together using flat ‘bridging’ planes to fill in the areas that the scanner didn’t recognise. Hopefully there will be a clear distinction between the slightly more organic surfaces that were captured in data and the smooth joins that weren’t. I’ve now completed the first pair, which shows the embrace over time (around 30 seconds) and you can see the slight indications of movement/breathing on the backs, shoulders and arms. I didn’t reconstruct the heads as I felt it wouldn’t be true to the original study – the scanner captured the corners of cheeks, which seemed more important. Here they are:

And now I have 2 figures remaining. I’m expecting these to be a little more taxing as I’d like them to appear more complete. They are individual scans of the bodies, which I’ll manipulate by positioning the individuals together in an embrace, and cutting the form of one away from the other to leave the impression of that contact. For these it seems sensible to reconstruct the forearms, hands and the back of the head to create a realistic interpretation. These scans are slightly more accurate to work with, too – I even have a complete face and fringe in this one:

I’m hoping to have the final 2 models completed over the next week or so, and then I’ll be taking them to be rapid-prototyped in a hollow Nylon material, most likely using the facilities at UCL. The advantage of using Nylon is its translucency – For maximum effect I want to light the models from inside.

I’m really enjoying myself with this project. It feels like a big step forward from any of my previous work, and if all goes to plan will look quite striking displayed in the final show.

I’m viewing them in an opensource software called Meshlab, and tomorrow I’m going to begin manipulating the files for 2D and 3D print.

I’ve been trying to decide on the best way to indicate which areas of the bodies have shared contact within the moment of a hug – It would be amazing to show a thin layer moulded to the form inbetween the bodies. I have no idea how this would be possible at real size (apart from costly bodycasting methods), but I’ve been experimenting with PVA and calico, see below:

And then I realised it reminded me a little bit of Rachel Whiteread. Her Pink Torso is a sculpture made by filling a hot water bottle with alginate (dental plaster). The negative space reveals a new and interesting sculpture.

So, though I would love to be able to create just the abstract form between the bodies, this seems difficult and costly to do.
What can I do with the scans? My initial idea was to go back to my previous inky methods, and to overlay a plain scan of my body with another scan after being hugged by an ink-covered other. This would leave a black print on my body of all contact areas, and then I could inverse these areas, overlay them onto the original scan and hopefully possibly maybe combine the scans to raise up the areas of contact above normal skin level. Like the ghost of an embrace.  Given that I know nothing of 3D modelling, it might be impossible. I’ll see how it goes…