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Creative Prompt: Nail Your Colours to the Mast!
No full textThis book section showcases 'Nail Your Colours to the Mast!', a project brief written for undergraduate Graphic Communication Design students at Central Saint Martins. The brief is presented as a Creative Prompt encouraging designers to critically engage the history of flag design, as well as the history of a particular chosen cause or place. The intention of the book as a whole is to challenge the canon of Graphic Design history.
Graphic design has a paradoxical relationship to history. While it claims to promote originality and innovation - ideas that emphasize the new and unique - design practice is deeply embedded in previous ideals. Too often, design students encounter the past in brief visual impressions which seduce them to imitate form rather than engage with historical contexts. Even though it has claimed to be objective and even comprehensive, graphic design history has focused largely on individual careers and Eurocentric achievements.
Yet the past swells with untapped potential. Graphic design history can serve the field of today and tomorrow, but its narratives require updates. History, like design, is always changing - and like design, history is driven by present-day questions. This book shows how students and practicing designers can enrich their work by thinking historically about design. With thoughtful analyses, stimulating creative prompts, inspiring case studies, and perspectives from designers all over the world, this book challenges our traditional understanding of graphic design history, and the very notion of the design canon, offering ways to shape socially engaged, critical practices
Supervillains are the real heroes
No full textThis chapter discusses how superhero stories differ from most other forms of Western storytelling comply with Joseph Campbell's "universal myth", whereby an inexperienced hero is called away to adventure, endures trials and eventually returns home changed. By contrast superhero storytelling favours a hero who rejects change and works to enforce the status quo. Thus the agent of change in such stories is the villain - or supervillain - who must be foiled by the superhero.
This is partly due to the transtextual nature of superhero storyworlds, in which many different storylines rely on the storyworld remaining more or less the same. It is also due to the many transmedia adaptations and especially merchandising deals which rely on characters looking roughly the across different media formats and merchandising.
Occasionally stories are told where superheroes attempt to change the status quo for the better, but this invariably goes wrong, with the heroes shown to be no better than their supervillains. Conversely, when change is actively required supervillains may be called on to act as the heroes. Examples are given of these phenomena, using Doctor Doom as the prime example of a supposed supervillain who has all the traits usually associated with superheroes, including a sympathetic back story, stirring origin, and desire to make the world a better place... even if that better world is one in which he alone is ruler
A Companion Object: Materialising a multispecies sensibility through creative practice in an ecological crisis
Get PDFHow may multispecies fieldwork expand creative practice to promote a decentred human relationship with nature? A case-study using citizen-science moth recording in the UK.
This practice-based research develops concepts and methods for decentring the human in relationships with the natural world through creative practice. I use citizen-science fieldwork recording moth species as an entry point to think through ecological entanglements with other species. I then critically reflect on how this process may inform a creative practice rooted in craft. I contextualise the practice through a theoretical framework that synthesises understandings from feminist environmental philosophy (Plumwood, Haraway, Puig de la Bellacasa), post-anthropocentrism (Braidotti) and social science thinking on care (Tronto, Gilligan). From these relational ontologies I construct a conceptual and thematic framework for communicating a multispecies sensibility. Informed by multispecies ethnography (Kirksey and van Dooren, Kohn), I develop an autoethnographic methodology that presents relationships with the more-than-human as a series of ethical encounters, which becomes the basis for an expanded creative practice. Outputs include creative writing, moving image, collaboration and textile works.
Citizen-science provides a theoretical and methodological basis from which to extend craft and visual arts practice towards explicitly ecological forms of expression. Creative practice communicates those findings beyond the didactic confines of scientific scholarship through the presentation of alternative relational narratives. These in turn can magnify cultural discussions, unpick anthropocentric views and build ecological literacy. The aim is to re-engage human emotions in curiosity, sensitivity and empathetic connection with the more-than-human.
The thesis contributes concepts, methods and practices that untangle the intentions, form and content of craft-based practice to redirect what is materialised through the act of imagination. Decentring the human in ecologically-engaged creative practice also decentres object making as a primary goal, redirecting energies through an expanded practice that includes public engagement, activism and conservation work
How to Become a Digital Citizen: Using the Digital Economy and Digital Literacy to Understand Digital Citizenship
Get PDFThe following chapter draws on qualitative data to look at two aspects of computing education: the digital economy and digital literacy. Finally, the chapter compares these to the concept of digital citizenship, considering how ‘digital citizenship' can be used to draw the other two together and give young people a deeper understanding of having power and agency in the digital world. The data presented in this chapter is based on fieldwork conducted as part of the author's PhD. While the original fieldwork was conducted in 2016 in a discipline where relatively limited qualitative fieldwork is conducted, it adds valuable insight and perspective. The chapter consists of a brief review of the concept of digital economy and digital literacy before using the data to look at how young people viewed both concepts in the context of what they were being taught as part of ‘computing'. The data from the field works followed by a discussion of the findings and takeaways from the data before giving a brief introduction to ‘digital citizenship'
User Generated Soundscapes in Counter-Strike: Source
No full textThis paper considers the modding of custom sounds into Counter-Strike: Source (CSS) (Valve Software, 2004) dedicated servers as an example of participatory culture (Jenkins et al., 2009, Sihvonen, 2011). While the modding of custom audio into a game has been subject to research before (Freitas, 2021), the motivation to do so was identified as a desire for the game to better satisfy a set of players' idea of immersion. With the nature of the typical sound modded into CSS being totally incongruous with the theme of the game itself, the same explanation cannot apply here. The custom sounds in CSS were typically internet memes or sound effects from other games, the use of which can be considered examples of textual poaching (Jenkins, 2012). Neither does the remixing of the games soundscape compliment the gameplay, with the existing sounds they obscure important for skillful play (Reeves et al., 2006).
Postigo (2007) argues that a key motivation for modders is to be able to create a game that they more strongly identify with. Sotamaa (2010) agrees, adding that "modding is obviously just one example of the ways of acquiring "gaming capital"". Following these approaches to modding, I argue that the use of these custom sounds was to set a social vibe and to demonstrate familiarity with a genre, rather than to serve a ludic purpose, or, that players modified the soundscape of the game to strengthen and confirm their identities as gamers.
This paper also seeks to gain a better understanding of the context that mods for CSS were created in, the distinct practices of the community, and will perform a technical analysis of the mods themselves and the process of getting them in a custom dedicated server
Framing COVID-19: How UK Government and Media Narrated the “Crisis”
Get PDFThis article aims to interrogate how narrative elements were used in the communication of policy by the UK government and media during the 2020–22 COVID-19 pandemic, using the lens of the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF). Contrary to homo economicus of the rational universe, the NPF contends that homo narrans navigates the world through stories; comprised of setting, plot, characters (heroes, villains, and victims) and, critically, the story's moral. The study aims to show how these narrative elements were employed as an effective framing strategy designed to sustain public attention and compliance through the playing out of a securitized script, in which archetypal characters—the policy actors—perform a moral story. This study also innovates the plot element, utilizing a theory of circular narrative—story circles—from outside the extant policy literature, it is hoped that this conceptual exploration of narrative dynamics can lay the foundations for future empirical research
Communicating Sustainability to Children through Fashion Retail Third Places
Get PDFThis paper investigates the potential of retail third places to educate children about sustainability and explores how these spaces can enhance sustainability awareness and positively influence children's attitudes. Research was undertaken through secondary sources and a qualitative research design using focus groups. Thematic coding analysis was conducted. Children aged 10 to 16 demonstrate a strong awareness of sustainability and express positive attitudes and intentions toward it. However, these intentions rarely translate into sustainable behaviours. While participants showed limited understanding of third places, they responded positively to the concept of educational third places. This paper proposes a theoretical model: 'Children’s Sustainability Awareness Stages Enhanced by Educational Third Places. This paper addresses gaps in the literature on young consumers’ attitudes and intentions toward fashion sustainability and third places. It offers preliminary empirical insights into the ideal forms, functions, and features of third places that childrenswear retailers can implement to promote sustainability education within their retail environments
‘The Matrix Now’: Liveness and artisanal labour
Get PDFFree Your Mind was a dance adaptation of the Wachowskis’ 1999 film The Matrix, positioned as a response to current anxieties and excitement around artificial intelligence. Here I offer the aesthetic context of a range of post-cinematic live performances. Theoretical contexts are from film theory and studies of contemporary labour. By contrasting explorations of contemporary screen-based labour and consumption with the visible, physical work of live performers emphasized in the show, this article is intended to show how live performance can be offered as a luxury to audiences more accustomed to screens. The article also includes reflections on what this means for culture more broadly
‘If I can change’: multigenerational cinematic franchises, retconning, and the spectre of Rocky IV
Get PDFMinimum Viable Interiority
Get PDFDebates about collectivity have become increasingly prevalent across computational and philosophical approaches to the modeling of intelligent systems. This paper explores whether these prevailing conceptions of collectivity adequately account for the “individual” as it emerges in the context of AI applications, which consist of distributed systems coordinating to give the appearance of a unified agent. Taking collective intelligence as a given, our thought experiment explores a functionalist approach to the construction of the individual, focusing on the feature of minimum viable interiority as a necessary precondition for cohering a model of collective intelligence from the bottom up. Building on functionalist experiments from p-zombies to non-player character design, we leverage Oliver Selfridge’s “pandemonium architecture” to construct a theory of functional closure suited to explain the mechanisms under which a unified individual emerges from a collective. We propose a speculative application of this theory that utilizes DeepMind’s Concordia library, schematizing an experimental framework under which interiority is established as an emergent phenomenon of functionally closed systems. Contrary to prevailing theories of collective intelligence, we argue that, rather than the collective being greater than the sum of its individuals, the individual is greater than the sum of its collectives. Such an individual, when composed of functionally closed collectives, is contradistinguished from open collectives such as flocks or swarms, often deemed synonymous with collective intelligence