User:Ssstephen/projectproposal
What do graphic designers do all day and why do they do it and what does graphic design even mean?!????!!1!?
What do you want to make?
What do graphic designers do all day and why do they do it and what does "graphic design" even mean?!????!!1!? is an assessment of what the term "graphic design" means to its practitioners today. Through experimental ethnographic research methods and the development of reflexive tools, the project seeks to highlight, stretch, decompartmentalise, undiscipline, annotate, break, cross, laugh at, question, dissolve the boundaries that exist around this apparent category.
The research focuses on my own practice as well as other people and groups that identify with graphic designer as a label. This assessment makes use of a range of forms of research such as keylogging, performance of personal work habits, and casual interviews. This combination of methods has been chosen in order to uncover less obvious and less discussed aspects of what a designer is and does, ultimately to reveal some of the unacknowledged assumptions of its practitioners.
The research will be published to interested parties such as graphic designers, architects, musicians or other creative practitioners. As part of the process of decompartmentalising the category of graphic design, I expect and aim for this public to become less well defined. The tools will be released in an iterative cycle throughout the process of the project.
The two approaches of ethnographic research and the development of tools currently relate in that the second answers or responds to questions or uncomfortable knots that come up in the first. The research consists of many elements as vague constellations rather than fixed objects or even categories. This is intentional. As the process continues they will respond to and compliment eachother in more squishy friendly combinations that will show up along the way.
More about autoethnography: I have been documenting my own practices as a graphic designer for three months, and will continue to do so. I am experimenting with different ways of doing this, many based on text annotations. I plan to expand the methodology further to get a wider view of the practices. I will document the practices of others, through interviews and using the tools mentioned below.
Undisciplined tools: Software and hardware tools that explore the boundaries of "graphic design" as a category. I want to make small prototypes that make a point. I want to review these prototypes and see what they do. For example at the boundaries between graphic design and other disciplines. At the boundaries between work and play. Taking inputs or sending outputs where they are not traditionally connected. These tools malfunction in order to explore what it even means to be working.
How do you plan to make it?
Interviews I will conduct with designers, architects, musicians, etc. in Ireland the Netherlands and wherever else seems relevant. online and offline. I will record the interviews. I will have prompts to open the discussion such as reading material and weird tools to try with them. I will carry out auto-ethnographic research using experimental methods such as mouse tracking and unusual annotation methods. I will share the results of this research as a publication with a small but selected audience of people who are involved in these processes and who would may benefit from it.
Small prototypes of tools which I will test myself as I build them.
What is your timetable?
- November: Initiate autoethnography and gather preliminary data. Early prototypes of performances and tools.
- December: Conduct interviews with designers, review findings, and plan for tool development.
- January: Prototype undisciplined tools which explore boundaries of what "graphic design" is. Publish early and often, to designers.
- February: Make connections with other disciplines, continue tool development.
- March: Prototype tools, be undisciplinary.
- April: Create and gather content of final publication which reviews both the methods and findings of research developed.
- May: Create this publication and final iterations of tools. Rehearsals of performance.
- June: Finalize publication of research directly to the relevant public and also through performance at the graduation show.
Why do you want to make it?
From personal experience and anecdotal evidence from others, as well as an increasing literature on the topic (Ruben Pater, Silvio Lorusso), there are obviously some problems with our understanding of design today. There is a disconnect between the narratives about the practice and the effects it is known to have, on its audiences, practitioners, and society in more general terms. People are reassessing what graphic design even is and also what it can be. This shit could be better. Its urgent for the people being exploited by it, to break the inequalities it serves to maintain, to expose what it hides, to improve things that are definitely working but not in a good way. Yes I have skin but it is full of pores, it is surrounded by and surrounding hairs, it is completely empty.
Who can help you and how?
Marloes, I dont really know how to write a project proposal for example. Joseph and Manetta, with technical aspects of the tools, and technical approaches to documentation maybe. People involved in other practices (disciplines) who could help me explore crossing these boundaries. Writer contacts in Ireland. OSP. Michael. Jian. Frank. Jonathan. xpubs. There are probably more. Maybe I will ask Meghan Clarke I really like her work and it seems relevant.
why are these things relevant?'
Relation to previous practice
I have worked and been trained as a graphic designer. I have also worked and been trained as a musician, a theatre maker, a teacher, a web developer. The boundaries have never been clear. I'm not sure will this make them clearer or fuzzier. Hopefully bring the fuzziness into focus, without expecting it to be clear.
Needs more previous projects and description of how they relate to this
Relation to a larger context
OSP. Ruben Pater. Meghan Clarke. The context of design studios and institutions I was involved with in Ireland. The context of other workers who relate to and struggle under systems and labels like "self-employed", "freelance", "creative". This also makes me a little uncomfortable as most of these workers including me come from an extremely privileged position of literal wealth and other advantages which allow them to operate in these fields. I dont want to suggest their struggles to be worse than or even comparable to those of many others people currently on this planet. But the topic relates to larger societal developments of precarity that are worth examining and challenging, so I will do this from my own practice and experiences within the creative industries.
References/bibliography
Anteby, Michel. “The `Moralities’ of Poaching: Manufacturing Personal Artifacts on the Factory Floor.” Ethnography, vol. 4, no. 2, June 2003, pp. 217–39. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1177/14661381030042004.
Berlant, Lauren Gail. On the Inconvenience of Other People. Duke University Press, 2022.
Certeau, Michel de, et al. The Practice of Everyday Life. 1. paperback pr., 8. [Repr.], Univ. of California Press, 20.
Hu, Tung-Hui. A Prehistory of the Cloud. 1st ed., The MIT Press, 2015. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262029513.001.0001.
Libre Graphics Research Unit. 16 Case-Stories Re-Imagining the Practice of Lay-Out. 2012, https://gitlab.constantvzw.org/lgru/co-position-catalog.
Pater, Ruben. Caps Lock: How Capitalism Took Hold of Graphic Design and How to Escape from It. Valiz, 2021.
Weiland, Steven, and Clifford Geertz. “The Interpretation of Culture and the Culture of Interpretation.” College English, vol. 44, no. 8, Dec. 1982, p. 784. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.2307/377331.