Last year I was exploring in my research, diaries, journals and how we record personal information. I developed this interest after having a Visual Diary for a year and realising how different my experience with my own information was after having alternatives to the digital and common ones. I started some research about the evolution of these methods of recording, and how authors used diaries in the past and tracked this evolution with the appearance of digital technology and how this was a game changer. At the end of my project I felt overwhelmed about how social media platforms dominated this field today and shaped information, for me this information was much more impersonal than what is nature entitled it to be, personal. I asked myself a question:
If this was the past, and this is the present, How is personal information going to be in the future?
I have always been interested in Critical Design and the way the projects related to this field make me dream and be excited about the future, a far more poetic and sensible future. How do we humanise technology? It all started by reading an article from Paola Antonelli in Domus Academy Magazine in 2014. Where I understood that the future of design was sensible and intimate.
I believe there is an opportunity in exploring speculation and the future through critical and speculative design, and this is a field that doesn't need to be answered only by product design and engineering. I believe we can create responses through visual and communication design.
So I arrived to this question:
How can I through Graphic Communication Design, respond to the challenges that the future, science and technology impart to personal and intimate information?
But with this question arrived many more:
Why is it important to record? What is the difference between recording history and personal information? What is Personal Information? How to Speculate with illustration? What is an immersive experience? Am I measuring something?
Some of my current interests with this project are:
- Personal information and Data
- Recording and registering
- Maps and visualisation
- Storytelling
- Aesthetic Experience
- Illustration
- Analogue or Human hand
- Intimacy
- Speculation;
And this are other topics that cross my investigation: Imagine the future, imagery, utopia, femininity, science, science fiction, female body, biology, beauty, luxury, rituals. Visual Metaphors.
And these are some practical interests I have: Analogue Illustration, Typography, Independent Publishing and Fanzine, Editorial Design, Web and Digital Design, Interaction Design, Bio design and Tech, Digital Illustration, Maps and Cartography, Information Design, Experience Design, Surface, Installation Exhibition, Illustration as Identity.
Feelings, Pictures, Body Data, Stories, Experiences.Layers of Information. Data, Information, Stories. Diaries and Journals.
My approach and Method so far:
I want to read each week about something that interests me and is relevant to my research and alternate this with visual explorations and experiments framed and documented as scientific research. At the end of each week I will have a research, experimentation and conclusions documented in this blog. (restrictions and rules)
For this experiments I have chosen a series of topics that interest me and are for me related to personal information and I want to speculate and respond to this topics through graphic design:
- Personal Information - Intimacy
- Femininity
- Female Body - Biology
- Beauty - Chemistry - Rituals - Luxury
- Female Utopia Imagery.
How do I measure this experiments?
Here are some of the references that I'm watching:
Speculative Everything - Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby
- Paola Antonelli (add description)
http://digitaledition.domusweb.it/domus/books/131201domus/#/1/ - Lucy McRae (add description)
http://www.lucymcrae.net - The Designer as Author.
http://www.eyemagazine.com/feature/article/the-designer-as-author - How to Build a Metaphor:
https://aeon.co/essays/how-to-build-a-metaphor-to-change-people-s-minds - Julia Born Title of the Show Exhibition:
http://gfzk.de/en/2009/inform-julia-born-title-of-the-show/ - Marion Fayolle
https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/03/13/in-pieces-marion-fayolle/ - Domestic Data Streamers
- Dear Data
