EX-CHANGE | Week 2

Today was our first EX-CHANGE session which I surprisingly enjoyed.

My group included 3 VCD students (including myself) and 1 Photography student. We started off by sharing what our majors did and then got into the kind of nitty gritty about individual projects.

When discussing my project I got a lot of great feedback from Bethany who used to nanny and had some really useful insights into driving with children on board and dropping them at schools.
She mentioned the stress of safety and how at primary schools and where there are young children around you have to be super alert as you never know if a kid's gunna run out in front of you and there are so many variable that could go wrong. She also told me about a rule that she'd heard of from family's with lots of children, where when getting out of the car there was a "hand on the car rule" in which all the kids would stand with one hand on the car until the mother was out and ready to go. She mentioned that there is much more to it especially if you're dealing with really young kids and you have to unbuckle them and get out strollers etc and still watch the other young children.
To be honest she made it sound like a nightmare, and that was a super useful insight for me.

I also shared with them some design for good that I had brought along to share which was a beautiful campaign called Comic Sans for Cancer. I had found out a lot about this and I really loved the campaign. The idea that a typeface designers avoid like the plague was celebrating it's 20th anniversary and in doing that was supporting a really good cause. It was great to see design come together with such a worthy cause and such an unexpected cause. And the ways in which designers were responding to their love or hate of comic sans in relation to this subject of cancer was really really cool.

Something really interesting that came out of this was how Comic Sans was designed for a cartoon character and it is not a font commonly used by designers because of it's visual style and connotations. All of the pieces in the exhibition were bright and playful which reflected the lightheartedness of this font.

What blew me away was that Bethany then pulled out her 18+ card and went look at the sub header's type face and it was Comic Sans! We were all shocked that such a proper/legitimate document would use such an inappropriate font. She even mentioned that when she received a letter from them the whole thing was typed in Comic Sans which I find absolutely shocking.

I really enjoyed this first EX-CHANGE interaction and am looking forward to discussing the insights Bethany raised with Hannah.

Week 2

This second week has definitely been more helpful in terms of starting to get an understanding/feel for the project.

After Tuesday's class Hannah and I were able to identify that we were both interested in looking into working women as a group and how the stress of driving impacts them and we went away and each looked into a different age group. I looked at young professional women, and Hannah looked at working mums.

When we came together in class today and looked at our journey maps the discussion came up that I had identified the young professional women doesn't give us as many opportunities as the working mum and she also didn't reflect the issue of equality that kind of spurred our desire to look into females as a group so we decided that working mums was going to be our direction. From here we discussed how the shift of women moving into the workforce has been a great thing for female independence, but as well as having these new work responsibilities women are still expected to take care of the home - managing both her personal and professional life when there are not enough hours in the day, and not enough opportunities to enjoy personal time/hobbies.

The ability to do more has resulted in women having more to do!

A woman's work is never done.

We then formulated some questions that we'd like to chat to the mums in our lives about in order to better understand our audience.

I'm feeling much better about the project now that I feel a sense of direction.

In terms of the class structure though I am still frustrated at how the tutors seem to be on the same page but also not fully on the same page. Every time there is discussion they all add things on at the end of what the last person has said and it tends to really drag on!

I also felt that a comment made today that we had not done enough work was a little bit unfair as everyone in the class was probably in the same situation of not really understanding what was going on and it's not been until today that I feel I have direction and know what to be doing in my independent study hours for this studio.

Week 1

After the first week of this paper I was very apprehensive as to the project. The brief was withheld from us, I didn't know my partner, the lecturers didn't all seem to be on the same page - all adding things at the end of each others points, and I wasn't really sure what I was meant to be doing to try and begin working on this project. The angle I initially liked was that of looking into driving stress for tradesman so I did a little research into this, but also some general research as I wasn't sure whether my partner would be interested in this angle.
It's only week 1 so I just kinda went along with it to see what will happen in week 2, and hopefully we will consolidate a better direction.