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IDP - Belbin results and Egg saviours

After assigning team members, we asked for an experiment to protect eggs. This is very novel for all of us because we didn't know what the point of the event was at first. But I found out later that the event was also a good example of the responsibilities of each of our team members.

Although when the event started, we were all in a very confused state of each other. But after identifying together what we needed to do, we didn't start right away, but instead got to know each other's strengths. Our goal is simple, make a shell for the egg with some paper so that it falls under the protection of the shell and doesn't break.

It has to be said that with the help of the team, we have come up with a lot of solutions. For the team members who are good at handmade, they are very skilled in cutting and have very good ideas. Even though I don't know the field, what I do is keep assisting and try to achieve our goal within the limited time. Fortunately, our idea is very effective, although the method is a bit simple and crude, but at least the purpose is achieved, and it is also very fun and interesting in the process of cooperation.

Back to the Belbin test, I get the Co-ordinator and Monitor Evaluator role. On the other hand, this test does make some sense. I sometimes lack a good start when it comes to ideas, but when an idea comes up, I can always think of other solutions and get inspiration from them.

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Interior Design - The Storytelling method

My final post on place & narrative falls with a design company named Rooot Studios. https://www.roootstudio.com/roootstudio-story-profile

This design company focuses on a method of storytelling with their design work. Which provides a unique and meaningful method towards design. Researching into this method has inspired me to drive my creativity towards narrative design and tell a story via creation of space rather than using specific words to link a story together.

We see spaces and interiors as a way of creating emotion towards each other. The act of transferring between space and specific rooms will change our emotion, e.g. Kitchen to living space we become more relaxed from what we see, hear or smell. This changes the narrative.

Image by: Rooot Studio.

The client is the final chapter of any interior architecture story. Their reaction is the key ingredient at the end of the project. This finalises the story. A design story must have a happy ending in order to fulfil the clients needs. I suppose issues along the way will be documented to suggest dramatic effect within the narrative.

‘Design appears to be very similar to personal narrative as both integrate a complex variety of human and environmental phenomena. Design narrative theory provides a practical and dynamic system for acknowledging the importance of human meaning in interior space.’

(Ganoe, C.J 1999)

References:-

Ganoe, C.J. 1999, "Design as Narrative: A Theory of Inhabiting Interior Space", Journal of interior design, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 1-15.

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Place & Narrative - Interior Design - Creativity Inspiration - Commercial Hospitality

We see various new hotel chains and difference styling around hotel design around the world. Most of the design work is inspired by the local culture of the countries. However, hotel brands such as Marriott Bonvoy sub brand their hotel chains into different levels of luxury categories and design work which follows. Example, The W hotel chains around the world feature flamboyant, exciting futuristic design to inspire towards younger crowds. This is inspiring to me as this can be described as a commercial narrative.

’W design is all about taking risks and breaking boundaries. We look to the destination for inspiration and then turn it on its head, shaking up what you think you know about iconic locales from the Mediterranean to the Maldives, South Beach to Shanghai.’

https://w-hotels.marriott.com/about/design/

Image of W Hotel Panema

My research into this hotel chain you can clearly see the narrative of influential creative design. Design which tells a story with rich history to back.

Another example of this would be The Manderring Oriental chain. This Hong Kong based hotel chain focuses on its narrative on its collaboration with the Oriental Chain in Bangkok from the Manderin in Hong Kong. These chains feature its Asian heritage within each location of each hotel around the world, featuring unique design work. This inspires me to have my own idea of design work around the world to tell tale of a future narrative design theme.

Image of Manderin Oriental Guangzhou

These unique commercial ideas within design have allowed me to research into the different sectors of the Hotel industry and designs. This will ensure my future practice stays unique and signature to my own style.

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Place and Narrative - Interior Architecture Thresholds

Interior Space is a journey which entails a narrative between each space. Between these spaces we have thresholds. Thresholds within the architectural sense describes a passage or doorway within the space.

‘How does the experience of turning a door handle, opening a door from one space into another, affect us? It is no wonder that the door, one of the most elemental architectural forms, has such metaphorical richness. But even on a purely physical human level, the cold touch of a brass handle or the swish of a sliding screen gives rise to an emotional reaction, sometimes modest, occasionally profound’.

Plummer, Henry (2016) The Experience of Architecture London, Thames and Hudson

Image by: Raisearchitects.com

The image above decodes spaces into different experiences. This can be seen as a narriative and story upon each space entered. This is important towards my future practice to understand the relevence of architectural places and the campaign to follow.

Thresholds define an experience for a person. They ensure the person has transferred from one place to another via a bridge or link between each space. This is a key moment in interior architecture to define how we can bridge places with a narrative to continue the journey throughout the space.

This is something I’d like to proceed with within my own personal architectural design. To include a narrative based theme when connecting space together and using threshold experiences to bridge these connections. I leant various methods of thresholds in previous design lectures and have previously learnt from other architects the importance of why we use narriative in space and design.

References:-

Plummer, Henry (2016) The Experience of Architecture London, Thames and Hudson

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IDP - Save the egg! and Belbin results

After our first session together as a team I can tell we will work together well, and hopefully create something amazing!

We started with some team building exercises, the end result was to create a contraption that would allow an egg to be dropped out of a 2nd story window and land without cracking. As a team we quickly got to work creating the necessary parts for our device. Vicky, Maria and Zirui where cutting and folding creating a box for the egg, and I took it upon myself to wrap the egg in layers, and layers of sellotape, in an aim to create a bouncy 'suspension' type contraption to hopefully reduce the impact of the fall.

As you can see our device worked! the egg survived, and therefore our group the egg saviours was born! This was a great introduction to our team members and helped us decipher what role we would play within this team.

- Belbin Results -

After completing the Belbin personality test I was able to see what roles where best suited to me.

As you can see from my results my highest percentile was with 'Plant' Defined as creative, imaginative and original, whilst quickly solving difficult problems. I felt this was fairly accurate as I have always been able to concept ideas quickly and solve any underlying issues that may arise.

I will refer to my team members results, and we will discuss the best approach for team roles in the future.

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IDP - Place and Narrative - Games Art and Design - James

- Clarity in Place and Narrative -

Without a clear direction for the player they can become lost as to where to go, or what to do. Well designed games use a deeper understanding of Place and Narrative to help guide the player through levels and choices. This can be achieved through the use of colour, light or following other NPC's (amongst other methods) and it's common for games to use on-screen indicators to show where the player should be headed. However, if a game relies completely on these indicators, the level can lack the ability to hold its name, the player will spend their time staring at the icons, instead of taking in their surroundings. Making it hard for players to form an attachment to a place. Take DayZ for example, with a GPS I may never look at the surrounding fields and their defining features, instead just head the indicator marked on my screen. Without a GPS I will take time to look at the landscape, to help understand where I am going.

Poorly designed video games are full of non-inventive invisible walls that block a player from taking the wrong path. Often breaking immersion and leading the player to disappointment as they cant explore the area they can clearly see in the distance. TLOU did a great job at guiding player through levels, by using a mixture of foliage and cleverly placed lights to draw the player to the correct direction, whilst making any other direction seem difficult or impassable.

- Citations -

Dean Hall, 2013. Arma II: DayZ Mod. Game mod. Arma II: Bohemia Interactive.

Naughty Dog, 2020. The Last of Us Part II. Video Game. Sony Interactive Entertainment.

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Location, Location, Location (Vicky)

We have found out the starting location must be the art gallery for our project. This has made us reconsider the narrative of the story as originally we were planning to start at The Key. During one of our meetings, James suggested that the cat had been inspired by the art work in the gallery to try his hand (paw?) at art. This idea has given us a new narrative that has a flow and a clearly defined start and middle.

My task in the group is to take photos of the locations so the cat can be placed within them. I need to do this quickly so Mariya and Zirui have the basis for what they need to complete their tasks. So as a group, we planned out a narrative for the story and identified the remaining locations.

After knocking over some paint in the gallery and being inspired, the cat (now being known as Pawcasso or Picatto) will go to the LRC to learn how to paint. So for this location I will take a photo of a desk with the books behind him.

Next, after all his hard studying he gets hungry and strolls over to the Oval to try to catch some fish in the pond but this proves unsuccessful. For this photo, I have used the top of the sculpture to give Picatto a view over the fields in front of the oval.

Picatto then smells some food coming from the student accommodation and goes to investigate. Luckily, I live in halls so I took a photo of my kitchen.

Lastly, Picatto goes to The Elehouse to catch some night time entertainment. I took the below photo, however after talking to the group about it, we decided it would be better to have some people in the location. So who better than us! Celebrating the end of the IDP.

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Place and Narrative - Illustration (Mariya)

Narrative Illustration In Medieval Art

A history of story telling through pictures. Single images introduced at intervals throughout the narrative were one of the most prevalent ways medieval artists depicted stories. These narrative sequences, however, were more than just glimpses. The scenes depicted were carefully picked, and visual suggestions were frequently used to aid the audience in imagining what happened before and after. Artists have sometimes blended various stages of an event into a single image, creating a fictitious moment.

These fictitious moments bring out the narrative scenes depicted by the artist. In modern times this kind of art can be found in the comics and story books.

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Group Post: Concept #2

Mariya had the idea of using the campus cat as the main character for our narrative. It would work well as he is instantly recognisable and a much loved member of our institution. The story would follow the cat around the campus documenting what he gets up to when the students aren’t looking. It would be told from his perspective so low camera angles and buildings would look bigger.

At each location there would be a piece of a story illustrated in a comic book style way. One of the locations could be the student accomodation and the cat could witness the students having a party. Another could be a couple sharing a romantic moment on a bench outside the LRC. As the cat looks generally quite grumpy his narration could be communicating his disgust for the student population and his loathing for sharing his home with such noisy neighbours. This will give the comic a comedic aspect and engage the participant.

As this project is only three weeks long, we have agreed that although we want to produce something ambitious, we want to be realistic. This concept is achievable within this timeframe. Mariya and Zirui can use their strengths to develop the character of the cat and what he is going to look like in each comic web page. Vicky can take photos of the locations and the cat can be superimposed into the scene. Kristian can design a map for the participant to follow, guiding them to the next installment of the story. James will be in charge of the constructing the webpages and designing the QR code posters.

After the first tutorial where we pitched both concepts, feedback was positive. Both concepts are strong but very different, this reflects the diversity of our subjects and how we approach a brief. The next step would to try to incorporate some of the ideas from the other concept into this one. James had an idea of the QR code posters being lost cat flyers. Also we need to think of a clear beginning and end to the story.

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Group Post: Concept #1

The first idea the group came up with was based on Vicky’s research on the Jejune institute’s interactive game. Using the website that documents the game as inspiration, we could create something similar in a collage style which features photography, illustration and voice clips.

The webpages will tell the story of a woman who is feeling lost. It will look like her diary, the voice clips will be her talking directly to the participant of the game like a diary entry. She could use quotes from famous philosophers and writers that investigate feeling lost or not belonging.

A black and white photograph would feature on each webpage, inspired by Francesca Woodman. They would invoke an disoriented feeling, the woman in the photograph would be blurry, existing in between time and place, a visual metaphor for feeling lost. The photos would be taken in various locations around the campus. For example, one location could be the car park behind the arts building. At night the lampposts create circles on the floor, the woman could be walking around these circles, to reflect the idea of not getting anywhere, not having an end point in sight. Another location could be in the woods by the student accommodation. A piece of string could be tied between two trees and the woman blindfolded would be using the string to navigate her way through the forest. When you scan the QR code at a location, the photo on the webpage would be a clue to where the participant has to go next, the voice clip could refer to this and ask the participant to meet them there or help find her.

The illustrations that surround the photo and voice clip would give context to them. For example, the photo set in the woods could have drawings relating to the trees, they could contain dried pressed leaves collected when we do the shoot. Or they could reflect feeling lost, symbols like a compass and parts of maps. The aesthetics of the web page would be as if it was aged, similarly to the dated animation and font on the Jejune institutes website. There would be a contrast of using modern technology of the QR codes, websites and smartphones with the vintage feel of the diary, like it is a time capsule stuck in virtual form on the internet. A muted colour palette and a hand made feel would contribute to this aesthetic, similar to Deborah Turbeville’s collaged photos below.

The posters for the QR codes would address the participant, they would just contain text. They will ask the participants questions like, ‘Will you find me?’ Or ‘Are you feeling lost?’ This will engage the participant but the lack of context will give the posters a surreal edge, hopefully provoking the participant to see what they are about.

After discussing this concept as a group we decided that it might be too fine art based. We might struggle to involve the games art and IAD members of the group with what they could contribute. We also wanted the project to be something more lighthearted and fun. Which leads us to our next concept….

-Citations-

Fig 1 Francesca Woodman, 1976, https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/94686 [online] Accessed 13/02/22

Fig 2 Deborah Turbeville, Passport, 1977 https://www.muuscollection.com/essay-templates/deborah-turbeville-passport [online] Accessed 13/02/22

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The Egg Saviours

Before we started with the session for practice design 2, we were asked to do the Belbin test. I was wondering for what this was. So many questions went through my mind. Like, will I be with the same people who have the results as mine or will it be a different set of people.

After taking the Belbin test, I attained the designations of specialist and coordinator. And it made sense when I thought about it. Learning is something that I keep doing even if its not something that I am specialising in. I'm keen to learn and mostly I get curious with everything that I see. I used to mange a team as a sports captain while being at school or during my bachelors as a class rep for my course and even during my work days. I could see why coordinator popped up when I did the test. I certainly am a person who likes to build others up while I am building myself up.

The test made a lot more sense when I was put in a group with students from other disciplinaries, at first I was quite nervous about how it was gonna look like. But, somehow we had to break the egg instead of the ice.

Yes, we were given a task as a group after we went through each of our Belbin test results. The first task was mainly to understand and to know each other and our strengths. For the second task, we were given an egg with few other materials that we were supposed to use it for " safe landing " of the egg from the window of our class.

As, we planned out a way to do that, I could see how each one of us was capable of different things but when we came as group we could bring in different ideas and inputs and imply them with each others. We, understood that we might be from different practices but we had a similar mindset. Each one of us was focused to same goal, but laying out a proper plan, who does what, time management were the important key points that was visible while doing the activities. Which made it is easy for us to save the egg. And by the end of the day with saving the egg I could find myself between a bunch of talented yet joyful people.

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IDP- Place and Narrative - Illustration (Mariya)

During the session when I heard about place and narrative as an Illustrator, "Narrative" when put with illustration gives us a wider meaning to the term. Narrative graphics are based on a story and explain it through visual cues. Every story has a certain character or a particular object where the whole story keeps revolving around it. But it is an artist who makes the choice of how much the viewer gets to imagine. Each artwork has a different perspective. While the art is being created the artist has a different narration to what he produces , but if the same artwork after being made is given out to the audience without an narration, the imagination one perceives would be different from what the artist might have had while creating the art work.

Rune Fisker is a visual artist and illustrator, his works kept coming to my mind when place and narrative was being mentioned. His works leave an impression where one could instantly understand the narration behind his work.

Rune's illustrations have a semi-abstract, surrealist, and colourful aesthetic to them. He masterfully blends geometric shapes with a wide range of lines and vibrant colours. He has a way of tying the space he creates to the location in such a way that it leaves a sequence of narrative stories in its wake. I could see how a location may convey a story in several ways as a result of this.

Citations:

Image 1- https://runefisker.com/Above [Online]

Accessed 09/02/2022

Image 2- https://runefisker.com/Tidsskrift-for-Den-Norske-Legeforening [Online] Accessed 09/02/2022

Video 1- https://runefisker.com/Unilever-Every-U-Does-Good [Online] Accessed 09/02/2022

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Place and Narrative - Fine Art (Vicky)

The final artist I will be researching for this project is Julie Mehretu. Mehretu paints, draws and prints locations. Her work is a mass of information that depicts the modern landscape and inner city chaos.

Mehretu has called this piece a portrait of a city. It is a painting of Istanbul. The lines on this images suggests movement and reflects the passage of time. This work captures the city as an active, living thing. The blocks of colour can be seen as a map and represent buildings but there are other signifiers that identify this as Istanbul, for example the flag and symbols that are found on Islamic architecture.

To make these large scale pieces Mehretu layers architectural blueprints, maps, photographs. She projects these images and draws fragments of them to create an expressionistic version of the landscape. She selects source images that interests her, which may be political, conceptual or visual. By doing this she combines the history of the place with the visual. She has described her works as psychogeographies, her own history of immigration and diaspora are translated into her work.

Mehretu has developed an interesting way to visualise how we relate to place and space. She shows an alternative to the traditional mapping to record location.

-citations-

Image 1: Empirical Construction, Istanbul,(2003) https://www.moma.org/collection/works/91778?artist_id=25414&page=1&sov_referrer=artist [online] Accessed 01/02/22

Image 2: Congress, (2003) https://www.thebroad.org/art/julie-mehretu/congress [online] Accessed 01/02/22

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IDP - Place and Narrative - Games Art and Design - James

- Linear Narrative -

In contrast to my previous post revolving around the game DayZ which features a completely directionless gameplay loop. Many other games feature a singular linear narrative. Games such as The Last of Us design this well, presenting the illusion of free will, when actually you will always end up in the same place no matter what actions you take.

This is a gameplay loop that my Father struggles with. During his playthrough of Fallout 4, he was given the choice of joining one of two factions, both with opposing ideologies. The game however did not force him to make this choice, and he disagreed with both factions. However, without making this decision he could not progress through the game. Although, it appeared as if he had a third choice to roam freely, he did not. The game required him to make a linear choice to progress through the game. He proceeded no further with the game, as he refused to make this choice. This issue once again arose with his playthrough of The Last of Us Part Two. Whilst the game again creates the illusion of choice, you are forced to follow through the story of ellie, who is relentlessly hellbent on pursuing a path of pure violence and hate. Again, my father struggled to continue through the story, as he continuously tried to take the peaceful option, which did not fit the storyline, and therefore did not allow him to progress.

This Highlights a few of the issues with a linear narrative. Although it does create a rather difficult problem to solve, as creating a whole array of storylines to accommodated different moral choices often leads to an extremely complicated web of narratives which would take an extremely long time to create and perfect.

With this said, The Last of Us is telling a story, whilst we are in control of the characters, we are not in control of their morality and choices. It begs the question as to whether we are creating our story as we go, or simply spectating their story, as we are dragged from cutscene to cutscene with displays of violence in between. This contrasts massively to the gameplay loop of an open world game like DayZ where players are given the opportunity of creating their own stories and deciding on their characters own morality, which can often lead to some interesting communities being created within the more serious 'role-playing' servers.

- Citations -

Dean Hall, 2013. Arma II: DayZ Mod. Game mod. Arma II: Bohemia Interactive.

Naughty Dog, 2020. The Last of Us Part II. Video Game. Sony Interactive Entertainment.

Bethesda Game Studios, 2015. Fallout 4. Video Game. Bethesda Softworks.

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IDP - Place and Narrative - Games Art and Design - James

- Lost and Found -

After the lecture we had on Wednesday It got me thinking as to how place and names played its role in video games. I immediately thought back to the days where I would play Arma 2: DayZ with my friends. This game has no storyline, no given goals, and no real direction. Players are dumped onto a large map with no clue as to what they are doing, and no help with that either. This requires the player to quickly become familiar with their surroundings. Which places where safe to loot, which places where teeming with hostile players, where would a good place to set up a base be? All of these questions where solved by an understanding of the map. Players would often swarm toward the large cities or military bases, for better loot. Whilst others would stick to the rural shacks in hopes of surviving longer.

Dying was very frequent in DayZ, so it was important to find places or rendezvous points to safely meet up with your friends. In the first builds of the game, a map was not provided to the player immediately, rather you would have to loot to find one. I remember naming places after their features, such as "the town with the large grain silo", or "the field with the crashed helicopter" Wednesdays lecture touched on these points, talking about how we name places after sizable landmarks, or recognisable features.

After finding a map of course, we all became familiar with the names of the towns and cities. But continued to create our own names for parts of the map, parts that had no obvious name. These places then became familiar, and safe. Understanding and recognising the surroundings had taken us from a place of being lost to understanding where we were.

Interestingly, in the later build of the game, a GPS was added to the loot table. Once we had GPS's the need to name these places was extinguished, as we had an accurate position showing where we were on the map. At the time I saw this as a huge help, but now I recognise this may have ruined the immersion and made the game too easy to navigate.

- Citations -

Dean Hall, 2013. Arma II: DayZ Mod. Game mod. Arma II: Bohemia Interactive.

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Save the egg! (Vicky)

Our two group tasks were paper cutting and making a vessel for our egg to land safely from the first storey window. The first task was spent mainly getting to know each other, finding out what kind of strengths we have as a group. By the second task we were communicating much better about a plan though a little indecisive. It will be interesting to see who (if anyone) takes the lead in the future. We worked well and succeeded in keeping our little eggy charge intact.

My Belbin test results show that I’m a specialist and teamworker. I would say these results are pretty accurate. I often want to know as much as I can about a subject and will contribute if I’m confident in my knowledge. In my previous career within the education sector I managed and trained small teams so I can see that these experiences have shaped me as a team worker.

When working in this group I am concerned about the workload being spread evenly. I would like to make sure that it isn’t left up to one person to complete the task. I think all of our group has a similar mindset and have all been contributing to ideas and meeting up in between timetabled sessions. The mood in our group is jovial but we’re all dedicated to this project which makes a great working environment. We’ve realised fairly quickly that it’s going to be difficult to fit the brief to all our creative subjects and some of us may take on different roles that isn’t directly showcasing our subject skills. For example, James is our webmaster and has done an excellent job of setting up the Wordpress site and this blog.

I have also completed the Myers Briggs test and am a INFJ-T, apparently it’s one of the rarest personality types. I’m not entirely sure I identify with it that strongly. The main trait is that I care about people which relates to the team worker result and that I want everyone to be treated fairly. It is a creative personality but related more to problem solving rather than being physically creative. As I’m INFJ-T, the T stands for turbulant and a weakness of this personality is that I’m sensitive to criticism and judge myself harshly. I can recognise this in myself and this sometimes holds myself back from contributing within a group. I need to find a balance of wanting to make space for other people to share their ideas but also sharing my own.

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Place and Narrative - Games Art and Design

When we discussed narrative, we thought about adding a storyline to the teamwork. People need to scan the first QR code and find the second one according to clues on the web page. This becomes our key research object to guide people to find those clues and codes. when we discussed narrative.

Usually, the video game will tell you what backstory happens while players keep pushing game quest progress; dubbing and subtitles is an excellent way to perform that. But there are some unique and attractive ways to tell the backstory. Near the end of the game part in God of War (2018), Kratos and his son Atreus finds many frescoes. These frescoes were used in a traditional 2D way to show his life experience and story before Kratos's wife dead. It is worth mentioning that this game uses a reverse order method to tell the story, leaving a foreshadowing at the beginning of the game and revealing it at the end.

Most players will not focus on the backstory, even with dubbing and subtitles. Those tirades will be skipped probably because players don't have enough patience. I prefer backstory, hidden in-game items that need players to discover by themselves, like Dark Souls (2011). Same as God of War, subtitles will not tell you the whole story. When you kill a boss and get their souls or found an item, you can find their descriptions with backstory by contrast. This is really fun if you try to figure out a character's story, you have to collect everything related to him and piece each paragraph into a complete story like a puzzle. For some collectors, this is a lovely idea.