A Day in the Life: Project Process Journal

A Day in the Life

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Contents Title - 1 Contents - 2,3 Course Context-- 4,5 Project Brief- 6,7 Subject Research - 8,9 Ethnographic Research - 10-14 Design Opportunity - 14-17 Design Experimentation - 18-21 Development - 22-27 Final Product - 28-31 Reflections - 32-33

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Glasgow School of Art 2015/16

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Product Design Year 1 Icebreaker /// 21/09 to 25/09 Evolution /// 28/09 to 16/10 Cross School /// 19/10 to 30/10 Layout /// 09/11 to 13/11 Guerrila Interventions /// 16/11 to 11/12 Semantics /// 4/1 to 15/1 Make/Remake /// 18/01 to 12/02 Interactions /// 22/02 to 18/03 A day in the life /// 18/04 to 13/05

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Brief Synopsis: Document the working day of a person of interest. Identify a design opportunity through ethnographic analysis. Design a ‘tool’ that responds to this opportunity and implement it within the working environment.

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Participant Occupation:

a day in the life

What do they do?

Director of Art Gallery

Individual Subject: Who is the individual you have arranged to shadow?

Michael Corsar, Roger Bilcliffe Art Gallery

Relationship/Connection: How have you made contact?

I regularily work in the gallery’s exhibition openings, serving wine to attending customers. I am already in contact with Michael often, and asked his permission to allow me to shadow his work

Agreed Research Activity:

What has your subject agreed to, and how are you going to document it?

The subject has happily agreed to my observations, under the agreement that I will help with the physical workings of the gallery. I will document it by taking inconspicuous notes occasionally, recording conversations and quotations, while also taking photos and videos of movements where possible.

Initial Research Focus Themes:

Which aspects of their day do you imagine are of interest to you and how will your research generate useful insights?

I’m particularily interested in what it takes to keep the gallery going. I imagine there won’t be a great deal of obvious motions, and expect to look for hidden signals and unspeaken codes and understandings. I hope to examine the processes involved in running of the business.

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Michael

Director - Roger

Billcliffe Art Gallery

Michael is a quiet and reserved person. His shy manner hides the wealth of experience he has attained from 20 years working in the gallery.

He paints as a means of escapism, often going long periods of time without painting at all and then producing a large body of work in one big whirlwind of expression. His paintings build on light, and its interaction with landscape. Painted from memory, they are often a window in to an experience, an ethereal moment capture in time.

•Michael, 44, from Giffnock •Art Director •Full-time Employee • Practicing Artist/Painter •Paints ethereal landscapes from memory

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MICHAEL’S PLACE OF WORK DIRECTOR

ROGER BILCLIFFE ART GALLERY

=Time Spent

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We were introduced to infographics as a method of presentation of ethnographic research. Brian Dixon and Brian Loranger gving two very different talks on the subject. Brian Loranger emphasing the usefulness of the research itself, using ethnography to build qualitative and quantative data.

Brian Dixon was more helpful in advising on the presentation of the data, an insightful method being through the medium of an infograph.

The layout of the gallery was a contributing factor to the behaviour of its employees on an exhibition opening night. These three ‘zones’ mark the areas of which a different employee would be responsible for covering and representing.

Michael’s Zone

MICHAEL’S DESK

DISPLAY CABINETS

Roger’s Zone DRINKS

My Zone STAIRS

The infograph on the left is a simplified indication of how Michael spends his time in an average day of work in the gallery. As can be seen, the majority of time is spent at his desk, while a significant expenditure is also on the physical hanging of new paintings.

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The Proces

JOURNEY O

PERSON ATTENDS EXHIBITION

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PERSON LIKES PAINTING

PERSON APPROACHES MICHAEL TO BUY

ss of a Sale

OF A SALE

DEPOSIT PAIDMICHAEL PLACES HALF RED DOT ON PAINTING: UNDER OFFER

FULL PRICE PAIDPAINTING SOLD

FULL RED DOT PLACED ON PAINTING INDICATES ACQUISITION

This particular infographic looked at the vital core of the art gallery- the selling of its work.

Understanding this and practicing it’s depiction was a helpful exercise in both senses.

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Identified Opportunity

Michael will lay out all the paintings the evening before the opening of a new exhibition in preparation for the bulk of the work the next day.

The ones to be taken upstairs will be left in a stack and taken up together.

These will then be placed on the floor beneath a suitable wall space.

Their placement is dependent on the colour, texture, tone, size and how they complement the adjacent paintings.

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Michael continually shifts the paintings around the room, trying to visualise how they might look in certain spaces.

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Hanging the paintings is easy It’s a manual, unskilled task I wonder whether there might be another way to visualise the paintings on the wall without having to shift them every time?

As seen before, Michael spends a good amount of time hanging, taking down and replacing paintings.

“I just want them off the floor, I see things better off the floor”

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DISCO

In the same way as a disco ball illuminates a room by projecting it’s light around the surroundings, I hoped to project images around a room by this central source of light.

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This idea of a pegboard came to me in a small donut cafe. The sign has always been used traditionally to display menus, being incredibly easy to adjust and quick to move. There is potential in using this, applied to paintings, in order to move them quickly and readily. The wallpaper being this pegboard material, it would always be easy to adjust.

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The opposite alternative to adorning the walls in projections of images is to have the images being held in the viewer’s eyesight itself. This is an example painting by Michael transplanted on to the lenses of a pair of glasses. The idea being that through this method, the paintings can still be seen and understood as a fixture on the wall. By the option of interchangable lenses, this presents an interesting option in working out how to build an exhibition.

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“I wish I could just ‘throw it up’” This quotation from Michael himself was a reaction to my proposed design opportunity. In highlighting the futility of always pinning and unpinning the paintings, he exclaimed that he would love to be able to just throw it up and it stick there.

It was from this idea that I began to consider the texture of the wall. The top left picture is the current wallpaper, a very soft and malleable material heavily scored by past indents.

The bottom left is black magnetic frame, thinking of if there were to be a a sort of magnetic wall, the paintings could literally just be thrown up and easily moved every time. This was a suggestion by Michael himself. While optimistically simple, it would be unfortunately unrealistic.

A similar solution would be to adorn the wall in velcro in order to just ‘throw it up’.

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2 Phases

In bulding an exhibiton

Planning

Hanging

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From feedback following the first presentation of my opportunity, we deduced that the process as a whole involved two different stages: one being the preparation and decisions made in where to hang the paintings, and the other the physical manual task of hammering a nail in to the wall and putting the frame up.

It was decided that the planning stage of the exhibition would be more useful to Michael to be improved. If this were perfected, the pain of repeated hanging would be eliminated and the paintings could be put up in to the right place firstly every time.

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This piece on the left is the exhibiton brochure for the most recent exhibition at the Roger Billcliffe Gallery- the works of James Fullarton. I noticed the value of being able to stand it up and open out the side pages. From the original catalogue-like layout, to become three-dimensional would allow a better understanding of the paintings placement in relation to one another.

I experimented with a scale model, in which the paintings would begin as a flat representation of the paintings on offer, like that which might advertise the exhibition. But when stood, it becomes respective of the Gallery’s exact layout, each page representing a wall. The leaflet would be able to stand and fold in to the gallery’s layout, indicating to the viewer exactly which wall each painting will be on.

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Development The design idea I settled on was a handheld brochure, one which capitalises on Michael’s experience and knowledge.

The hope would be that it reflects his expertise whilst also complimenting his process.

These pages are experimentations in it’s layout There should be a photo clearly displaying the wall, one wall presented on each page It also must fit in to the aesthetic of the gallery, here I have chosen to adobt the turquoise blue, a relation to the gallery wallpaper

Left Hand Wall Central painting receives maximum light Slight obscurity by Michael’s desk Left hand painting clashes natural with synthetic light Wall 9m x 5m 6 side paintings average Lighter tone shows best on this wall

Size: 9m x 5m

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Right Hand Window Wall Obscured slightly by waiter Natural light clashes with synthetic Well punctured wall, very weak Customers look for attraction after drink Natural line of sight from window

Stairway Side perspective, texture important, High wide, canvas Little room to stand back, clarity important

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Gallery

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y Notes Further Notes:

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Gallery notes are the complimentary accompaniment to every new exhibition.

With the receival of a new catalogue of artwork, gallery notes is the consultant by which these new paintings can be visualised on the walls.

By mapping the galley walls, this assistant allows Michael to load his given artwork directly on to a scale representation of the gallery layout.

This eliminates the previous unnecessary labour of repeatedly hanging and unhanging heavy frames.

Available in both digital and physical forms, the real product is the template.

The option is presented to literally ‘stick’ small paintings on to the brochure walls or to transpose them in digital format.

Throughout this process, Michael will be reminded of his own notes on the attributes of the space, as well the layout of past exhibitions. By making these continuous improvements the product is ever evolving and building in strength.

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Reflections This project proved contrast to the others

a of

refreshing this year.

While a lot relied on the digital, in being able to present articulately my ideas, the most valuable asset was the ethnographic research itself. By being forced to choose a subject, a member of the public, and maintain a good relationship throughout the project, I was forced to continually present my ideas in a social context and justify them to those in the specialised field. This was very useful in that I was continually self-evalutating.

While I feel the research stage of my project was successful, in retrospect I would have liked to have allocated more time to the refinement of the final product.

By the timings of tutorials and presentations, the timescale was more heavily weighted on the discovery of a design opportunity than on the real, useful solution to that presented problem.

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In reference to the year as a whole, this being the last product of my first year of study in Product Design, I am proud and content to have seen my evolution as a designer.

Having come from a background completely foreign to this field, I have grown in competency in many ways, most notably in the ability to use the Adobe Creative Cloud suite, and now feel far more confident in my abilities as a creator.

In my next year of study I would like to build proficiency in physical use of materials, as well as experimenting with aesthetics.

I look forward to the coming years and hope to advance in the subject of Product Design far further.

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Edward Allbutt Glasgow School of Art 2015/16 Product Design Year 1 36