GRAPHIC PRODUCT CHIARA AMBRO
CONTENT PAGE PROJECT BRIEF TITLES 1. Design Tool Box 2. Oral Health 3. 3D Typography 4. Visual Grammar 5. Typography 6. Grid Structure 7. Taxonomy 8. Drawing Methods 9. Alterego 10. 100 Doors 11. Boxing London 12. Navigating the City 13. Wayfinding 14. Pictographic Narrative 15. Affordances 16. Sensor Walk Taxonomy 17. Sensors 18. Prototyping 19. The Way We Eat 20. Handover Gift 21. Systematic Failure
DESIGN TOOL BOX We got given a brief on idea generation, were we created a fun box containing all the necessary focal areas for designers to refer to, whilst brainstorming for a project or brief. This was our Thinking Box, which then developed into something more complete...
DESIGNERS BLOCK
This is especially designed for designers. Its purpose is to equipe you with all the tools you will need to complete a design brief. From idea generation techniques to how to pull off an interesting presentation without hiding behind powerpoint slides. The design itself is key to the way you can work through each stage of a brief. It comes in 6 different layers one for each stage of the working process. The individual layers can be stacked up in any order that you feel most comfortable in working.
Our six layers are represented by six colourful trays, divided into: finding the problems to be solved, research and analysis, idea generation, refinement of your ideas, design development and presentation. In the idea generation (the white layer) there are many tools to help you come up with a variety of ideas. The most famous technique we included is the Six Thinking Hats process by Edward de Bono, which resembles different perspectives of a situation.
ORAL HEALTH
For our oral health brief we had to redesign an oral health experience with the aim of calming down the nerves of the patient and encouraging them to keep the appointment. We decided to focus on creating an oral health pack for children.
3D TYPOGRAPHY
The objective in this brief was to choose a sentence that was significant to us and find a way of representing it three-dimentionally. I took two-dimentional type and turned it into a 3D piece of work. I then had to photograph it, to bring it back to 2D. Words convey a meaning, so the purpose of this project was to approach it literally. In other words we had to make sure that the way in which we made our 3D type was linked to the meaning our sentence conveyed. My quote was: “The simplification of anything is always sensational.� from the artist G. K. Chesterton. My final outcome was a large rectangle made out of plaster with my sentence positioned in the middle, in relief. I decided to join the letters to one another as much as I could, in order to give a more simple overall effect.
VISUAL GRAMMAR
Photos of my visual grammar workshop exercises.
Visual Grammar is about space and shapes in space. It’s a fundamental exercise for Graphic Designers. These exercises open your eyes and make you see the abstraction behind everyday objects. It helps you see, understand and operate as Graphic Designers do. These skills gave us as a result: deeper understanding and a finer judgment of what you’re actually dealining with.
TYPOGRAPHY Type has a dual purpose; on the one hand it attracts and creates impact through its dynamic form, on the other it must impart critical information with clarity. The purpose of the exercises you can see through these images is to examine how emphasis, structure and hierarchy can be created within text-based information. various means such as: contrast in size, weight, position and typographical colour, as shown in the variety of images. In the images you will see how I’ve played around with the text information to put emphasis on different things, asking myself the 4 following questions: What? Who? When? Where?, varying with size and width.
GRID STRUCTURE
Grid structures are designed specifically to create order through a formal mean. Grids are invisible, but essential, and are determined by the object within it. The main types of grid structures are: Manuscript grids, Column grids, Modular grids and Hierarchical grids. I went around London paying particular attention on landscape scenarios that could recreate those kind of grid types.
TAXONOMY
Classifying objects visually, through Taxonomy and Typology. There are five ways to classify information: Location, Alphabet, Time, Continuum (Hierarchy) and Category. Taxonomy and Typology is something you can apply to anything. You classify, organise things,by similarity or relatedness,chronologically or spacially, etc... with the purpose to give order.
SIZE
INDIVIDUAL COLOUR SHADES
COLOUR: GENDER RELATED
SIZE
An example of another object I decided to classify through size.
DRAWING METHODS
We had to draw objects within a box and cube, in order to draw the objects proportionally.
ALTEREGO
Whilst working with an everyday object, we had to analyse what specific aspects make the object what it is and what ‘personality’ this object has.
How do you change its personality? What qualities would the object aquire, and how do we create an alterego in an object?
1OO DOORS
I decided to concentrate my archive on doors seeing as they have always fascinated me. Doors are seen to be “moveable barriers used to cover an opening. They are used widely and are found in walls or partitions such as a cupboard, cage and container.�
To me, a door represents and offers so much more than just this. There are so many different types of doors, each one of them with a specific purpose.
Doors also have incredibly powerful connotations. A door can be wide opened to welcome people in,or it can be closed and locked securely with latches and locks so that no one can step through it, damaging or stealing what is beyond it. A shut door can suggest various emotions such as tension, curiosity or possibly threat. What do these doors tell you?
This is the poster I displayed for our exhibition in London College of Communication at the end of our second term.
OO 1DOORS Private View 6-8pm 16 th March 16 th -19 th March 2010 London College of Communication Lower Street Gallery
BOXING LONDON
Borough High Street was the street we were assigned with for this brief. Our objective was to document it as fully as possible and find a way of boxing it, representing the specific features and qualities of our street. We used a multiple tray cup, collected from Borough market, and in each cup tried to portray the history,geography and typography of the street and market.
NAVIGATING THE CITY
I navigated around the city exploring it through different eyes. I documented aspects of it that aren’t normally ‘‘seen’’ and considered, as our eyes are so used to seeing them that no longer detect them, to pick up on the details. Something ordinary and plain-looking ‘things’ such as the pavement are actually rich with typography, shape, colour, texture and patterns they seem to create.
WAYFINDING
We had to design a system that would make people find their way around the Elephant & Castle roundabout. We came up with a solution inspired by Yo Sushi!, by imagining an upside down sushi conveyer belt. Each colour has the name of the destination printed on it. It goes through all the underpasses and allows you to follow it, depending on where you want to go.
PICTOGRAPHIC NARRATIVE
We were told to represent through pictographic drawings our day, in 24 hours.
We were asked to complete various exercises, such as: drawing an object with our right hand, then repeating the same exercise but using the opposite hand and repeating it again without ever detaching the pencil from the paper.
AFFORDANCES
Affordances in design are what give the design an understandable meaning. They are necessary indicators that tell us where to look, click, grab etc... “Complex things may require explanation, but simple things should not. When simple things need pictures, labels, or instructions, the design has failed.� Donald A. Norman
Our task was to take one of the photographed artefacts and to modify it. We could change it in different ways, such as: modifying the use and meaning of the affordance, adding or subtracting the affordances or changing it either slightly or drastically. What had to remain clear was the way in which the user is supposed to use the product.
SENSOR WALK TAXONOMY
least understandable
most understandable
SENSORS
This project is all about how we interact with non-digital objects and how you can modify that interaction through the introduction of a digital element. The object we chose to work on and improve are chopsticks. In these images we are trying to find out how a potential user, unfamiliar to chopsticks, might interact with it.
PROTOTYPING
Prototyping is fundamental in Product Design, as well as being able to visualize our ideas. In this project we are prototyping objects through the simple use of paper and learning how to improve our technical drawings by using Ortographic Projection techniques.
Making paper become 3D is very simple and incredibly effective. By just cutting and folding paper you can reproduce anything.
Constructing a cube, and consequentially defacing it by cutting it open again.
For this Prototyping brief we had to make a model of an area of our choice, and consequently project on it a campaign from our local coucil. I chose to base it on my local shopping area: The Brunswick, seeing as I think a shopping area is the perfect location to spread a Viral Marketing campaign.
These are some photographs I took of my cardboard model.
This is a photograph of my final model with my viral campaign based on recycling shopping bags projected on it.
THE WAY WE EAT
For this project we had to look into different aspects of Eating. With my group we decided to start looking into the way people set their tables. We found it interesting to see how this reflected their different traditions and habits.
We also filmed the way in which several different people would eat the same food. In this case it was a cream egg. Not one person ate their cream egg in the same way as another one did.
In the end I decided to focus my research on colour. I chose to look into this direction as I feel that every day we are influenced by colour whilst deciding what food to eat. You probably never realised but when we enter a cafĂŠ or restaurant, great part of our sudden appetite is caused by the colours specifically chosen to cover the location.
“Colour can sway thinking, change actions and cause reations. Colour and the appeal of food are closely related. There have been studies performed on how the perception of taste is affected by colour.�
Warm colours such as red, orange and yellow are known to stimulate your appetite, whilst cold colours supposedly suppress it. Red- increases our heart rate, and acts as the strongest appetite stimulant. Orange- increases oxygen supply to the brain and stimulates mental activity. These warm and welcoming colours make people feel comfortable in the environment they’re in, encouraging them to eat.
Green- relaxes you mentally and physically, acting as an appetite suppressant. Blue- lowers blood pressure, calms you down and slows down your metabolism. Pink, however, goes against these ‘rules’, as it relazes the muscles and relieves tension, acting as the most efficient appetite suppressant. It is infact used in diets. Due to the characteristics of each colour we can say that having darker coloured plates, cups and bowls, should encourage you to eat less.
I decided to test this theory. I picked 4 foods with different textures and colours and positioned them in 3 very different coloured plates; blue, red and yellow. I asked over 30 people to pick the plate in which they would have their: apple, cereal, pasta and strawberries. According to the Colour Therapy research I was expecting the majority to pick red, as this colour ‘invites you in’, but the most popular coloured turned out to be blue, followed by yellow, and ultimately red!
Most people chose to have their cereal in the blue bowl - stating it was the most peaceful colour to use in the morning, as well as the one that most appealed to them because of the contrast between the food and the plate. Blue was the most popular also for eating the apple, whilst red was chosen to eat the pasta and yellow for the strawberries. Does this mean that we subcontially pick blue to try and eat less or is it all just a big cohincidence?
HANDOVER GIFT
For this project we had to create a model representing the city of London, to hand at the major of Rio de Janeiro during the closing ceremony of the Olympics.
I decided to represent London through its skyline. I started drawing silhouettes of Londons cityscapes, including symbolic buildings such as the London Eye, Big Ben, Westminster, Tower bridge, St Paul’s cathedral, BT tower and many more.
This is the shape I slowly developed by cutting out quick cardboard prototypes for my final model. Onto this shape I will be adding London’s cityscape silhouettes, and projecting on to it 26 different pictograms of the olympic sport categories.
This is my final model, showing one of the sides with on it drawn the cityscape of London. The circual stripe at the bottom of it represents an LCD screen, where 26 pictograms of the olympic sports cathegories will be lit up and shown on.
SYSTEMATIC FAILURE
We had to find a physically interactive system that we felt wasn’t working successfully. We had to observe systems such as accident and emergency room in hospitals, coffee shops, public transport, voting, navigational systems, car parks and so on. Systems that use invisible, unspoken, rather than visible and spoken rules, or are collectively decided on, rather than being imposed by an absent authority. We picked queuing.
In such a big and busy city like London human traffic has to be coordinated. If we could make long queues of people flow in the quickest way as possible, everyone could reach their destination within a shorter period of time. We thought of creativing paths of humour dots in bus stops, tube platforms, tills and shops - for people to stand on and follow the line in an orderly manner. It is visually pleasing and entertaining, attracting the users to follow it.
Another solution we came up with for our systematic failure project was to re-invent the space inside telephone boxes around London. The telephone box network system has been forgotten about and therefore failed with the invention of mobile phones and smart phones. However,the telephone box itself is still incredibly popular and symbolic... so why not think of other ways of using it?
Imagine the opportunity to have a space for shelter when it rains and you are waiting for the bus... Or a public toilet, a quick sun tanning room, a locker room to put all your shopping bags in so that you don’t have to carry them all day long...
These are just some of the best examples of our ideas on how we thought of re-inventing the thousands of un-used red telephone boxes around the city.
BRANDING BROAD OAK FARM
How do you define a brand? Is it what is being sold or the experience around it? Is it the product or the marketing of that product?Is it a logo or an idea? Is the brand more important than the product it represents? Broad Oak Farm is a small, almost family run business, delivering a very specific product onto the market - sausages. At the moment the company doesn’t have many ways of communicating its brand and linking its products together. Our task was to improve Broad Oak Farm’s brand visibility and their customer’s experience.
We decided to focus on the packaging of the sausages of Broad Oak Farm, as we found their packaging resembled more to a packet of crisps- so we decided to improve it. We decided to keep in mind the convenience factors of when purchasing meat. My group and I came up with a box of sausages rolled on to a bar to sell in the supermarket. The sausages in it come out as a roll, but can be ripped off individually, allowing the customer to buy however many they need and want. The packaging of the box will stand out in a supermarket as it is very different to the rest of sausage packagings, and it should attract people’s attention because of its interactive aspect.
1. Grab the sausage roll
2. Pull the sausage pack
3. Pull out however many pack of sausages you want to purchase
4. Wrip off the last sausage pack you want to purchase
This was the finished prototype of our final outcome.
October 2009 - June 2010
A collection of work by Chiara Ambrosoli Š
INNOVATION OSOLI Portfolio 2009 - 2010 Chiara Ambrosoli London College of Communication Graphic and Product Innovation Year 1