After the briefing lecture, I went away and started to think about potential ideas for this project. The lecture as mentioned before I was quite overwhelming and full of examples. I am very interested in social design and focusing on things that are important to me by this way I feel like I approach the project with more enthusiasm and feel more motivated. However, this might not always be the case in future which is fine too. As theo said, this project is all about what we want to do and we can approach it in any way as the deliverables are not specified. there are no list of outcome which is what we are used too since first and second year. This was scary at the beginning as I like working with a brief which tells me what it needs at the end as it’s a way to start. However, the purpose of this brief is push our boundaries and try something different. It was suppose to allow to make decisions ourselves and decide what is best suitable for our project.
The first initial idea I had was focus on how we all have a perception of different cultures and these are mainly stereotypes. I could relate to this as I know that when I tell someone I am turkish they instantly have a several assumptions. These assumptions are created in many ways. I think for this project I could critize these asssumptions and challenge peoples thoughts. As the project is suppose to challenge something or disrupt. This idea I believe can be developed further. I want to discuss it with Carol in the group tutorial which hopefully I can get some feedback. I am not sure what kind of outcome I can create for this idea but I think it will be interesting.
The other idea I had was focusing on gender ideas, as this is also something I am interested in and never really focused on it in any of my projects. The idea would focus on challenging expectations of women which I think is overwhelming and a lot. This would be like women have cultural and social expectations they are expected to fulfil these roles throughout their life. There is pressure from family and also other social factors, such as fitting into a “good girl” doing well in school, getting good grades, having a good social life, looking pretty and well, having a perfect body. I find all these expectations quite overwhelming even personally. I thought about these expectations vary depending various factors such as social class, culture, educational background, family type. the place you live. These are all factors which effect expectations on women. I thought about focusing on Turkish women and how they have cultural expectations on them. Culturally Turkish women are put into a lot of pressure form their family and society to fit into the roles they construct. These roles are “good wife” “good daughter” “good girlfriend” etc. They are require a certain types of behaviour which the society accepts and if you don’t accept these norms you are then seen as a rebel or “bad”. which results in neglect.
The third idea links to the expectations but this relates to contraception. Women are expected to protect themselves after sex by using pills or other types of contraceptions. These contraceptions effect women in so many different ways as they have side effects as you are altering your body and hormones. Many girls hate being on the pill and on social media often people share their experience where they mention things such as mood swings and how it changes their body. This made me think about we are altering our body to protect ourselves whereas the men doesn’t have to do much. It’s like a “bad drug” where we have to take it but it has negative effects on us. This seemed unfair to me and many girls can relate. I think the purpose of this idea is to challenge the way women are expected to alter their natural state of body. I was speaking to Georgia, we had a teams call where we spoke about our ideas and tried to help each other as we both agreed, due to pandemic we will so isolated and disconnected form university and our course. Me and Georgia liked working in our studio and would spend a lot of time working and exchanging ideas this helped out creative process which motivated us. This year has been very tough and I wish we had the normal studio space to motivate us.
The other idea I had was focusing on social media, this started from the last project how from my research I realised we are all in our eco chambers on social media platfroms just like bubbles where we see the things we want too and ignore the things we dont want to see or doesn’t fit into our beliefs. We have easy access to everything and also there’s issue with fakeness how everything is played around to perfection. However, I know that many people will focus on this and it is a common issue which many people always bring up. So for this I decided to stay away from social media issues and focus on something different. Also, my RSA brief I had to work on social media issue anyway so I want to develop myself and try something different this project.
I had loads of ideas and I just feel so confused as I had no idea which one to go with, I had a meeting with Carol which she really liked the idea on cultural stereotypes and perceptions as she said it’s different. She suggested I should also look into ethnicity boxes, she said they are always problematic as it puts people into categories and if it doesn’t it issues them to “other”section. She said that there was issues on Arts council funding on cultural groups as people had presumptions on some ethnic groups and this had a negative impact on funding groups. There are loads of things I could focus on and I want to research on them as I think they are interesting.
Critizing gender issues – body image
For couple of days, I focused on gender issues and wanted to do some research onto existing work for designers. How can I critize these issues using the critical design approach. I am stuck between two ideas either women issues or culturral stereotypes. I was leaning more towards the gender focused on women so I started to do research to give me inspiration.
Anja Kaiser – To Whom Do I Owe My Body?
Kaisers work is very critical and i found it so interesting. She focuses on various issus related to women and their bodies. Her website is so unique and she came up from one of the artciles about critidla designersm she combined her design with research with various didferetn examples. Kaiser focuses on issues such as body image and how womens body is used in several different ways. This would be to indentify you as a costumer and detect each part of your body for a data or your body as a corporate product.
“Bodies become a matter for detection, to track the distance of facial features and the facial contrast to succeed in predictive marketing by new information technologies. Human-made algorithms performing the heterosexual norms, to address men and women in their traditional roles as consumers. The palette of diverse self-expression is denied by basic binary categories of being either male or female — a technical process of normalization that allows a certain target group to access a predetermined choice. Technology so far cannot take into effective consideration a body that sticks out from the standard algorithms. The body and its features are pressured to conform to or be excluded from the system, which uses outdated “traditional” patterns from which the models take their shape. As soon as human expression becomes quantifiable, it will be recorded and optimized for any economic, bureaucratic or ideological purpose.”
After a lot of thinking, I decided I don’t want to focus on gender as I spoke to Carol I told her I was struggling with outcomes, she adviced that I have good ideas just to focus on one single one and move on to visuals.This was due to time issue but also I was thinking about several different ideas and concepts it was so overwhelming. She said my cultural assumptin idea was really good and that there was things that I could develop from them. So I decided I will be focusing my project on critizing cultural assumptions and stereotypes focused on turkish people But, using my experience, I have created work similar to this issue in the past but not from a critical designer perspective. This project has been very challenging and tough, which Carol said it was suppose to be as they are pushing us to figure things out just like how we would in real life if we work in a studio. I have struggled with decision making and I guess after the meeting with Carol I felt really stressed out which made me just pick something on move on which was positive I guess.
The next step is to research on cultural issues in critical designers, which I already have one artist which I really like and I know it will be beneficial for me. After the research, ideation for the outcome and visual making.
references:
https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/anja-kaiser-undisciplined-toolkit-graphic-design-160420
Busra Yildiz 