Dissertation Topic

My group once again came together to help one another discuss and further develop their topic, chosen specifically for their dissertations. Some of us decided to stick with the subject we used to create our wikipedia page and others went for a completely different approach. We all gathered in the usual graphics room and talked about the topics we all were interested in.

As you can see this was all our mind maps put together, demonstrating the outcome of our session.

Below is a close up of my individual mind map coverage of Fair Trade. As i found the last assignment to be of interest i decided to carry on from what i had already discovered and further develop this as a dissertation topic.

RSA Project: Modern Age

Recently we were given a project to come up with a design response towards the RSA Modern Age competition. The brief is to design a domestic product or living environment for older people that surpasses conventional expectations. We were given four weeks at the start of our third year to dedicate to this project and get to grips with what we were being asked to do.

Modern Age is based on the elderly and how they are seen within society. We had to create a response that either helps a person growing older in the home they made and know or design something for a purpose built home for the elderly that evokes the qualities of a lived-in home. From my own research and investigations i realised how important it is for society to accommodate for the elderly and treat them as equals and not as a burden. This also brought me on to the area of housing accommodation and from this it was very clear that the elderly want to be able to keep their independence at all costs and therefore want to stay in their own homes as long as they can. From this i came up with my 'Staying Put' concept.

Knowing this, i knew i then wanted to design something that could help them do this and so gave me great inspiration to do so. Seeing as it was for elderly people, i purely wanted to base my design on just growing old in itself as there are issues you have to deal with as your body ages. The main example of this is balance and so i took this forward to to create an idea that helps with this problem.

As you can see i developed an idea of a support bar that would help them move throughout their home. As it is still early stages i have yet to determine what the final outcome of the product will be but it will hopefully tackle the problem of the elderly staying in their home and help with their balance.

Mind Map

This is my finished mind map showing the breakdown of my chosen topic, Fair Trade. This brainstorming session definitely helped me gets to grips with Fair Trade and explore aspects of the topic that at first were not so obvious.

I think, therefore I blog!!

It’s the start of a new year and the start of my third at Duncan of Jordanstone, which can only mean one thing… back to blogging.

Our first week back was packed full of course work and no doubt will continue through out this busy year. Design studies introduced us to an interesting approach to our new task. Mixing up the full year of design students, and separating everyone into several groups created a closer bond between the year. My little group of eight – a mix between girls and guys- all came together to discuss the task and to choose our own topics that we want to research further.

Fair Trade and Design appealed to me and seeing as issues relating to the environment are a big part of my course I thought the relation to this topic would be of great relevance and would hopefully give me some valuable knowledge I could use in other class projects. We all came together to brainstorm our individual topics in a small room in the graphics studio.

The session turned out to be a lot more successful than I had thought and I achieved a lot from listening to other students from different disciplines. My topic was broken down further and was a great help to me in understanding the ways in which fair trade effects design. From this I then took the information I had recovered and then created my very own mind map showing the breakdown of my topic. This was an interesting task as it highlighted a lot of issues that as a designer you have to take into consider whatever discipline you are in.

Images from our group brainstorming session.