A talk by Dines from Studio Blup (Creative Convos)

Monday marked the first day of the Creative Convos week curated by Alec and branded by both James and Sammy. This is a week where a range of different professionals come in to give their insight and knowledge on the transition from study to professional work life and their experience of that so far. Mixed in with this is a couple of different day briefs/ tasks to get us more involved with the speaker and those within the studio.

First up: Dines from Studio Blup

Rolling through into the studio with his bouncing enthusiasm and positive attitude was Dines, a guy whose passion for all things design shined through from his first slide. He started with how Studio Blup first came about for him which was during his later years at university, designing bits here and there for a club he used to go to. For him, this was the start of something big, although it only seemed small at the time he had visions for something more expansive than just him in his own bedroom designing. He mentioned that creating his so-called studio at the time, even though it was comprised of just himself, meant that he had a professional facade that made him stand out from other competing designers at the time. Having a regular email such as ....@gmail.com just didn't seem to cut it for most so by having a professional email such as hello@studioblup.com, straight away it created a much more sophisticated visual identity for him, which he claimed is a key to getting work, internships, opportunities etc.

Another thing that I took from his talk was to be multidisciplinary isn't necessarily a bad thing, contradictory to other designers who sometimes argue this point. Having a range of different skills whether analog or digital and being able to apply and adapt these to your ideas and concepts makes for a much more versatile designer, another thing he claimed helped him take on and get more client work in the future. Regardless of whether he had the knowledge of particular programmes, he set it out for himself to learn these during the process of the project as a means of becoming much better equipped for other potential projects in the future.

The second part of the afternoon was made up of a short pitching session, which later went on to become 'Dines Den'. Each of us would pitch a past project or upcoming idea/concept for a project that he would then give feedback on both the work and our presentation skills. Although somewhat daunting, it was interesting and helpful to get this feedback as it's now a means for me to expand and continue working on a project that would have just been left behind in the second year.

All in all a chilled and insightful afternoon.

RSA Engage Leeds

Last night down at the Whitecloth gallery was another one of RSA's Engage events which is a combination of speakers pitching their ideas and the chance to network with like minded individuals. RSA is ultimately all about coming together to create/ share/ talk about ideas for social change. As this is what a lot of my practice revolves around this year, mostly my CoP but also my extended practice, it was a good chance to potentially get involved in some live briefs and to make contact with those with a similar mindset to myself.

Got Your Back

John from Eskimo Soup, a social marketing agency, discussed his idea to create a trusted social platform that people can turn to when they are dealing with issues of mental health. The network is to be for students and co-written by them also, by getting other students involved it creates a more accurate database of information regarding any issues users may encounter. I feel like this idea will work well purely because of how most current, social media networks are a battleground where any goes, public or not, people can often feel subjected to criticisms and judgement from others within the network, friends or not.

Me and John both spoke briefly one to one about his idea and about the potential for me to be involved within it, as this could become one of my live briefs for my extended practice. Not only that but will give me the chance to get experience of a real world brief and to make both friends and contacts for the future.

Fuel for School

Fuel for School was set up by ex headteacher, Nathan Atkinson, who stumbled across a few separate problems during his time there that he thought he could solve through one idea. 

1. Remove hunger as a barrier to learning

2. Highlight the importance of nutrition and the associated benefits linked to learning

3. Highlight the vast amounts of wasted (yet perfectly edible) food across our local and wider communities.

The concept behind this is to feed school kids using food that would have unnecessarily gone to waste otherwise. There are currently 10,000 children signed up who benefit from his programme.

The Soft Road

Melanie and Neil Kirkbridge created The Soft Road in the hope to bring light to the benefits of meditation in everyday life. 

'The Soft Road is a platform for personal and cultural transformation that helps people and groups thrive in creative action. On The Soft Road we set out an Experience of Life that unwinds stress, unlocks creativity, develops intuition, and builds resilience. These inner resources create a foundation of stability and adaptability that deepens over time and brings greater ease to every day.'

They spoke a lot about bringing meditation into the workplace to improve overall well being for each individual which is something that really resonated with me and some of my work from previous years. This links in perfectly also with the RSA student awards brief I intend to do about well being in the workplace.

I spoke to both Melanie and Neil after their talk about our experiences with meditation and I felt like they had a lot to offer, so much so that we discussed them potentially coming to the university to do a small talk/ session about meditation.

Elevator pitch

Today's task was to ultimately learn how to write concisely about our work as this is key for things like our websites/ Instagram/ portfolios etc. We had take a favourite past project of ours and write in one sentence for each what/ how/ why?

I chose my self initiated brief from the end of last year, the Cocoon.

What is the core idea?
How does it work?
Why does it work?

Initial Pitch

To help reduce stress in everyday life. By giving people isolated, quiet time to themselves. Because stress has been proven to be prominent in working environments.

Improved Pitch

Cocoon is a low cost, high quality piece designed for IKEA that helps to reduce stress in academic and professional environments. It creates a private, isolated area where individuals can take a break without leaving the work space. Tackling stress on a daily basis, creates a happier, healthier workplace.

Doing something this has proven helpful for me in understanding the very basic core of what is needed when writing/ talking about a project. Often I find myself writing too much, some of which is not always that relevant or necessary. But by following this structure of what/ how/ why helps me to be as concise as possible which will useful in the future when describing portfolio work to potential clients etc.

You've got (real) mail

The week long task was to create a list of people/studios/ whoever it is that we admire and to choose one or multiple to contact. This did not mean sending over an email to someone, we instead had to physically create something tailored to the person on the receiving end, whatever that might be.

Just to name a few, my list included:

Craig Oldham
Andy Puddicombe
Brian Eno
David Berman
Nancy Bernard

Out of these I was most interested in Andy Puddicombe, he's someone who I admire for a number of reasons. Being the co-founder of Headspace, a meditation app I use on a daily basis, his whole attitude towards life is something I aspire towards being like. Even just a conversation with him would be ideal, which is why I aimed my project towards making contact with him.

He brought meditation to the masses, without the stigmas surrounding it which made it more appealing to a wider audience. In short, whole concept behind the app is to be more mindful in everything you do, which ultimately brings about it's benefits; reduced stress, better sleep, less negative thinking.

The one thing I thought of that could be a way to contact him was to put to life an idea I had as an extension to the app and propose it to him. Currently Headspace is only contained within the app, but he does suggests doing smaller exercises throughout the day which is where my idea came in.

I haven't made this yet simply because I didn't want to just settle for an idea for the sake of ticking a box. As this idea only came about last minute I figured if I was going to do something I wanted to put a solid effort into it. I feel like this could become a bigger project than just this task in itself.

THE IDEA

The idea is to bring the mindfulness exercises that are part of the app into the physical world with a set of small cue cards. In a way like Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies. If you're stuck creatively, these cards are little suggestions on how to spin the problem around, help you out in one way or another.

So I thought that these could be little physical reminders that would assist with day to day life. Phrases that would evoke a physical/mental response.

These are something that could also be embedded within environments so that every time you open your laptop or go to brush your teeth, it'll hopefully make you a bit more mindful in everyday tasks.

My plan from now is to develop this basic design further and actually produce these as a small pack, which will form part of my proposal of the idea to send off to their headquarters in the hope to spark conversation.

Summer plans

This summer is something that I aim to utilise much more than I did last year, with third year fast approaching, soon will come a full time job within the industry and this is something I want to experience long before going into it for real. After having made contact with two industry professionals, so far there has been a discussion of an internship with an old friend of mine at M&C Saatchi Berlin for this summer which could be very beneficial to me. Moving away to another country again, being much more independent and most importantly getting a feel for how the creative process works within the industry.

My own personal design work is something I've always somewhat neglected within my own time, but something I plan to do over summer is to work on a couple of projects that I've had written down for a while that I think could help to build up my portfolio of work. Linked in with this is S.O.D, the exhibitions are taking place over summer which will have both mine and Jon's work within them. There have also been talks of potentially Yann, who runs S.O.D, coming over to LCA to run a workshop on social oriented design to give people more of an insight into how it works and also give people the option to build up a team over here in England. This could ultimately lead onto setting up a S.O.D exhibition over here which would help spread the word of the collective.

Having already decided what I plan to do for my dissertation in third year, this is gonna help to give me a head start on the essay and the large amount of research I aim to do. I plan to take out books for the duration of summer to get a start on looking more into my dissertation question. If I can aim to get a large chunk of my research done then come the start of first semester in third year, it will give me more time to manage other briefs and to work on them alongside CoP which is a big portion of my overall grade.

Future plans with Craig Oldham

Unfortunately I wasn't able to organise the interview for before the deadline of this module as Craig has been busy being down at D&AD festival along with lecturing and a few other things but I hopefully plan to still organise a time and date to do the interview.

Both me and Connor are planning to interview him and because of this we discussed potentially organising to interview him together, this could be interesting as we'd both have our different questions and topics we'd like to ask about. It would also mean that we could produce something together from the interview, maybe a practical piece the same as we have done with our individual PPP interviews that would be a combination of our efforts and styles.

End of Module Evaluation

At the beginning of the year I was thrown (through choice) out of my comfort zone and into a completely new working environment with completely new surroundings, ways of living, friends and tutors. As scary as it was to begin with it was what I would consider the best decision I could have made, it helped me to develop as a person in general becoming a lot more responsible for myself and my finances, but also helped me develop hugely as a designer, with my practice. Having the option to experience new culture on a daily basis helped to widen my scope for ideas and insights into how people in other countries live, design and work. Although I'd only been living in Leeds for a year previous to moving away, having lived in a north of England for my entire life, it wasn't as big of a change in comparison to moving to Oslo. The university life itself was much, much difference to here at LCA, the daily schedule, the ways of teaching, the university environment etc. As opposed to working on multiple briefs at once we would typically be working on one brief for 2 months at a time, this had both ups and downs to it. Naturally, the workload was of course much easier but it did mean my creative process changed somewhat drastically. Typically within first year I had the bad habit of rushing into my ideas without being as thorough and conceptual as I should have been, but given the timescale we had for projects in first semester it meant I spent a lot more time going slowly through the research and idea process. This ultimately resulted in every design decision being more concise and informed, which of course had a future impact on this years modules, CoP, PPP & 505. 

It has also meant that I've began to enjoy the research side of things more, which is why I
enjoyed doing the CoP module this year more so than within the first year. Usually research is something I would do for the sake of doing and try to rush through this stage, but when in actual fact I've realised this year it's the foundations for everything you do within design. Reading more into my question this year for CoP meant that I better understood what I was talking about, using more books and research studies which I took an interest to helped me to inform more of what I was talking about. Whereas within my first year essay reading back through it this year, I felt it was much more subjective and less supported than an academic essay should be. But ultimately, my essay this year had a much bigger impact on my practical side of things, the thought process behind my final concept was hugely informed by the theorists, psychologists and existential thinkers that I made reference to within my written piece.

Screen printing is something that I'm glad I've made more of a focus on this year, it's something that I've touched upon within first year when we had the traditional print exhibition last year. Although the piece for the exhibition came out roughly how I wanted it to, screen printing was still something that was intimidating to me; I would avoid at all costs simply because I wasn't too confident in the process as a whole. But over the summer and also for the traditional print exhibition again this year, I created a lot of prints that helped to improve my confidence and skill using the traditional print room to a point of where I was able to help out others within my class that maybe were struggling with certain aspects of the process. I think this has been a big benefit to my practice this year and going into third year since it now opens up the option to have screen print as an option of producing my work with ease whereas typically I would have avoided it all together. 

A big difference between this year and last was the interaction we had to make with industry professionals, having to make contact with one or more people to ultimately interview them and make a create report from. Having really only worked and been within my own little bubble within first year, it was somewhat intimidating to venture out into the real world to make connections and speak to those who have plenty of experience and therefore knowledge behind them. 

My first taste of this for me was becoming part of a collective during first semester in Oslo, the collective name S.O.D was a group of people who come together to design for social issues in the hope to make some form of change to people and society as a whole. Becoming a part of this meant I was able to work alongside industry professionals, tutors and also other students, all of who had their own thoughts, views and experience of design and the industry itself. But this became a much bigger focus in the second semester when I made contact with two professionals from the industry; an old friend at M&C Saatchi Berlin and also Craig Oldham from Office of Craig. Although very intimidating to begin with, both of these were an inspiration to me for different reasons but it was great to make contact with them to learn more about them. Having made these connections hopefully going into the future they're people who I could keep in contact with to ask for feedback on projects, possibly get an internship with etc.

Overall this year has been the biggest change for me in most areas of my practice, it's had the biggest impact but has been the most beneficial. I think going into third year my practice will be more thorough and informed. But there is one area that I think I need to improve in if I want to make the most of third year to utilise the time remaining on this course. This is my time management which is one key area that I want to focus on, balancing out my time so that I don't make the mistake of putting my full effort into one module and less into another. Finding that middle ground of being able to spend an equal amount of time on projects on a daily basis will help to ensure that I can make the most of each brief and ultimately the course.