Concept Development by Laura Bretman

concept development laura bretman

CONTENTS 4...............99 luftballoons 10.............mapping: real and virtual 18.............psychogeography 40.............conditional design 44..............rules based design 54.............URLS 5

#1: 99 luftballoons “This task is designed to get you thinking quickly while exploring and developing scamping techniques. You are required to visualise on post it notes 99 different creative concepts, each post it should represent 1 idea.”

This was the first in-class workshop for the Concept Development module and it involved using the process of Concept Fanning to explore ways of problem solving. The task was to imagine a scenario (a helium balloon caught on the ceiling for example) and then create 99 solutions - these could range from practical and sensible to complete madness and nonsense. Although the original task was completed with several of my peers, it was still extremely daunting and so the idea of creating 99 all by myself was even more impossible. Because of my reluctance to do it I put off the task for longer than I should have, leading me to procrastination as my scenario.

I was stuck thinking inside of the box and getting my brain to give up it’s hold on “logical” was not an easy thing to do. Another challenge for me was the use of “scamping” - scamping is a method of jotting down sketches in a quick manner so as not to interrupt the creative thinking process in an attempt to make things “look pretty”. Using this technique allowed me to create something closer to graphic design while simply having a bit of a workout for my creativity but again, letting go of the desire to make things look “right” made the task drag on for a bit longer than necessary. However, I think by the end of all of that I was a lot more comfortable with quick sketching.

It took me several days to come up with all of the ideas I have - getting stuck at around 25, then 50, then 60 etc meant the process was a very long and frustrating one. As soon as I began this task it became clear to me that my concept development needed some work;

After (finally) creating my 99 ideas I organised them into categories – things I needed to do

anyway, things I didn’t really need to do, things that aren’t really anything and things I probably shouldn’t have done. I had to see the funny side

of procrastinating coming up with 99 ways to procrastinate and it reminded me of the work of one of my favourite artists at the moment who goes only by “rubyetc” online [photo below]. She creates humorous scamping-style cartoons about her daily life living with depression and anxiety and annotates them (because you wouldn’t really know what was going on if she didn’t). I was slightly unsure of how to develop the ideas/sketches I produced for this task because although it was a great learning experience

and a useful task to complete, the outcomes were a bit messy and a bit weird. I came to the conclusion that poster prints would be the best outcome for what I created but have attempted to show how they would look in other scenarios as well. It was interesting to have a task like this at the beginning of the module because it allowed me to reconsider my methods of thinking and gave me time to improve my skills before receiving the majority of briefs for this semester.

Above: sticky notes from both scenarios Across: itemised list of solutions Pages over: “Useful Ways to Procrastinate”/”Bad Ways to Procrastinate” poster prints

#2: mapping: real and virtual “Using Concept Fanning, work out all the different ways that mapping can be used to explain and describe information and relationships. Use your imagination, your solutions can be as realistic, normal, surreal, funny or dangerous as you like. The aim is to have a vast array of concepts and to find a visual language to describe information in a useful and easy to understand way.” Although when we say “map” we think of a diagrammatic representation of a piece of land or sea showing us transport links, points of interest and road names – essentially a map can be any kind of visual representation or communication of information. This opens up the theme of “real and virtual mapping” to many other solutions. As this was a one week task, it was suggested that maps using personal information would be easier and more time efficient. Using information I already knew or information about myself means the maps I produce will be much more personal and give the viewer an insight into my life, personality and more. I began by breaking down the kinds of outcomes I could produce that are considered types of “maps”.

I was most interested in the idea of maps that would allow me to illustrate more freely as that’s what I most like to do. I liked the idea of creating humorous “how to guides” as I had recently developed my scamping techniques and had been drawing inspiration from rubyetc and her work. Because of this, my maps or infographics (whatever you’d like to call them) have taken a different turn to many of my peers. Although I do see comics and certain illustrative works as types of maps, I understand it’s a more obscure way of looking at it. Because of this I felt the need to break down my thought process in coming to the outcomes I did and show some examples of other illustrators who take the concept of mapping in very different directions.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;How To Make a Pancakeâ&#x20AC;? by Paul Forman; an illustrator and mindmap artist

Sophie Corriganâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s humorous work on mapping the anatomy of animals

Noelle Stevenson a.k.a“Ginger Haze” relationship flowchart for Lord of The Rings characters or “map of feelings”

critical reflection I wanted to try and stretch the term “map” to as many definitions as possible, taking it as far away from the original meaning of the word as I could. Coming up with concepts involved a lot of googling other artist’s work and I came across two that had a large impact on the style I chose. Sophie Corrigan’s work really stood out to me as something that resembled a typical map or diagram but managed to be extremely funny with just simple annotations. I decided to create humorous how to guides on anything I thought for sure I knew how to do (or at least do well enough to illustrate a guide on how to do it). I was a bit stumped for ideas for a while

unfortunately, but I think that only added to the comical style of what I was doing. My work process on this project was a bit disorganised in that I jumped straight in to creating the final products once I had settled on an idea. Because of this I have little to no development work and have found it hard to develop these graphics beyond what they are now. That being said, I think I achieved what I set out to do - creating satirical illustrative works is something I always wanted to do but avoided because I didn’t think my work had the right style, but I really enjoyed this project and would love to continue work on this ideas in the future, hopefully before the end of this module!

Solution #1: “Tim Burton Films and How Good They Are” (a graph)

Solution #2: “How To Roll a Cigarette”

Solution #3: “How to Avoid Going Outside”

Solution #4: “Why I Like Getting Out of Bed Before 10am” (a pie chart)

#3: Psychogeography “This challenge requires that you conduct a one hour dérieve in any direction and try to record, note, draw, photograph and observe and experience an unplanned journey. Virtual and literal mapping are to be considered - this is more than just photographing - it is about finding and creating out of immediate experience, in and around a location.” My first psychogeography walk was around the area of Willesden Green in London. I’ve had to spend quite a bit of time in that area recently but have never explored it freely without purpose or destination in mind. I’d always noticed the area is quite poorly cared for; there are many houses and buildings in disrepair or under construction as well as massive amounts of littering and fly tipping. Without any particular route in mind, I left the house I was staying at and began my hour psychogeography walk. Regularly taking photographs, sketching and noting down my exact GPS co-ordinates (because I thought it might come in handy).

- I couldn’t help but capture many of the unusual scenes I saw; fridges on the side of the road, piles of rubbish topped with mattresses outside people’s houses, broken furniture discarded wherever was most convenient at the time. Not long into my walk I saw something across the street that immediately drew my eye - a huge collection of the strangest assortment of objects I had ever seen. It turned out to be a salvage yard owned by a lovely Irish man who talked to me about film studios renting out different objects and props he had collected over the years, as well as mentioning to me that there was another salvage yard just a 10 minute walk down the road.

Although I remember noting previously the state of the area, I was still shocked to see the massive amount of illegal dumping in the area, despite walking past several “dumping is prohibited” signs

Although the second one was an industrial salvage yard, I think I managed to capture a series of even more interesting images and would love to spend more time there in future collecting data for graphics.

Left and above: Nicola Twilley “Scratch ‘n’ Sniff NYC” a scratch-andsniff map documenting the smells of New York City Below: an example of Dahlia Elsayed’s work which she refers to as documentation of both external and internal geographies

A collection of sketches from my first psychogeography walk

A collection of my favourite images captured on my first psychogeography walk

Image from my first psychogeography walk

Stills from my first psychogeography walk photo reel and my sensory video “Birds”

I documented my first walk with upwards of a hundred photographs, which I compiled into a video photo reel and uploaded to Youtube. I was also able to capture something really strange I witnessed on the journey - a huge flock of birds on top of a row of houses making so much noise I could hear them from three streets away. I decided to capture this in both an audio and visual way and then tried to recreate the atmosphere of

walking around at dusk and the disorientation of hearing the birds but not being able to find them for a while. These videos can both be found on my Youtube Channel and will appear if you search for Concept Development / Psychogeography. I also converted the sound file from the birds into a visual soundwave to explore the different ways to communicate the dual visual and audio experience.

“Birds” soundwave Across: GPS coordinates from the walk making up the text “Willesden Green”

GPS coordinate map experiments

Planning my GPS map - remembering the route with and without a map

After I had collected all of my data, I wondered how I could translate that into different kinds of graphics. I first began by trying to retrace my route on a map by memory only - it took me a while to figure out a shape I was happy with as my route was slightly odd (stopping at the salvage yards for a while caused the spirals in the line). I wanted to relate my personal memory of the route to the accuracy of the GPS co-ordinates I had written down, and so I created these images combining the two. Although they are interesting images, they didn’t feel at all final or like they communicated what I wanted them to.

While I was thinking this over, I came across an artist in the book Visual Research by Ian Noble and Russel Bestley who does something quite similar with the concept of maps – Denis Wood has released several books on cartography and uses some really interesting techniques of note taking and mark making to create maps of where things like road signs, graffiti and colours of objects are in relation to the shape of a “regular map”. I decided that the problem with my graphics was that here wasn’t really enough varying information to form much of a “map” – I didn’t walk far enough for the GPS co-ordinates to change

drastically so it tended to appear like a long list of repeating numbers. I decided to recreate my first psychogeography walk, using roughly the same route so that I could collect data on the objects I found on the street. The first map I created with this information was just the word of the object placed on a recreation of my route, but I wanted to develop that idea even further by creating icons for the objects instead of using words. The graphics on the following pages show my development of this idea and the final images I was able to create.

Top: Visual Research by Ian Noble & Russel Bestley. Above: an example of Denis Woodâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cartography work

A collection of some of the images I collected of fridges and mattresses

A collection of some of the images I collected of mass waste and strange objects

Image from my second psychogeography walk

Experiment in documenting the illegal dumping in Willesden Green using words

Experiment in documenting the illegal dumping in Willesden Green using icons

An infographic style poster print of my icon map recording the illegal dumping in an area of WIllesden Green

critical reflection This is not the first psychogeography project I have completed during my studies over the past several years, however it was definitely the most enjoyable. I felt like my ability to develop this concept beyond the original derive was a lot stronger than it has been on previous projects as I felt I had a very strong sense of what I wanted to create using the data I had collected, as well as the fact that an obvious theme appeared throughout my work which has made it feel much more like a completed project than many of the other tasks. If I had more time to work on this project I would develop my icons to even simpler forms to make the map as easy to read as possible. I would also have loved to re-do the walk documenting other things such as car colours, noises, graffiti and many other things. I feel like it would create a really interesting body of work to retrace my steps along the same route documenting all the different experiences and sights in as many different ways as possible. It has become clear to me that Denis Woodâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s techniques and style had a big influence on my own work in this project and I hope that is something I can carry with me and use in other aspects of my design work in the future.

#4: conditional design “Conditional Design is a design method formulated by the graphic designers Luna Maurer, Jonathan Puckey, Roel Wouters and the artist Edo Paulus which foregrounds process over finished products. As a design strategy, it is defined by playfully designed sets of rules and conditions that stimulate collaboration between participants and lead to unpredictable outcomes.”

This was a workshop focussing on a task from the Conditional Design Workbook by the Conditional Design group, Andrew Blauvelt and Koert van Mensvoort. The book is full of examples of the Conditional Design method and takes you stepby-step through each “workshop” or game, each of which can take over an hour to complete. We split into teams and my team selected workshop II: Hatching. We didn’t quite understand the rules as they were rather complicated but we enjoyed the process and created a unique and interesting image nonetheless. The process was to start with each player drawing a dot on the page, after which you take it in turns drawing a line and a dot - the line must connect one dot to another. When you use lines to connect a full enclosed shape of any kind - you must fill it in using “hatching” or straight lines in the direction of the last line drawn. Where we got lost was the book’s directions to draw using

a certain colour at a certain angle only. We sort of went free with it and used whichever colour we liked, but I don’t think that interfered with the process of creating the image too much. This workshop was an introduction to the idea of conditional design so that we would be able to create our own “games” and so the outcomes were a bit thin in places. I managed to create a timelapse video of myself and my team creating the image (you can view this on my youtube channel if you search for “Concept Development / Conditonal Design”) as well as a digitized version of the completed graphic that I transfered into Cinema 4D to experiment with lighting and extrusion paths. This workshop was a lot of fun to complete but my creative ability to come up with my own set of rules was really tested in the following task regardless of this practice.

A still from the timelapse of myself and my team completing the workshop

A page from the workshop we completed from the Conditional Design Workbook

Digitized final outcome from the Conditional Design Workshop

Cinema4D experimentation with the results from the Conditional Design Workshop

#5: RULES BASED DESIGN “You are to develop up to three of your own “Conditional Design” games, then play these games with your peers and document the results. Develop your games further, test them again and identify the various outputs and formats your conditional design could work with for further development.”

This follows the last task for Concept Development; Conditional Design, in which myself and a team completed a workshop from the Conditional Design Workbook. I was then asked to go away and create 3 games of my own with a set of rules easily written out and examples of the outcomes you can produce playing the games. I found this extremely challenging for some reason – my ability to think about creating the process before creating the outcome is not particularly strong as it’s not something I’ve really had to do in the past. I would say that the first game and possibly the second that I created do fall into this category of conditional design, however my third game is more of an already existing method of creating graphics, although

not usually intended for the purpose of visual art. I completed each game with a team of people to test how they would work – none of them went particularly smoothly or produced the outcome I had expected but each was a learning experience and was interesting to take part in. The Conditional Design manifesto talks about how “the process is the product” and I believe my process needs some work. For now these rule based design methods work well enough but if I were to work more with this idea in the future I would need to experiment more and learn more about how conditional design works to better get myself into the mind set of producing “formations rather than forms”.

Game #1: “1,2,3 etc”

Game #2: “Blind Squares”

Game #3: “Parabolic Curves”

Game #1 outcome poster print

Game #2 outcome poster print

Game #3 experimentation

Game #3 outcome poster print

Mock-ups of phone cases, t-shirts and tote bags for games 1 & 3

critical reflection I unfortunately wasn’t able to get a video of completing the game like I did for the in-class workshop, and so I scanned in the test results from my games and played around with them in Photoshop and Illustrator to see what other kinds of outcomes I could produce. I have created a series of poster prints showing examples of the outcomes - black and white images on block colour backgrounds. This process worked really well for the first two as you can see on previous pages, however; the third game was not so easy. I experimented with the hand drawn version of the game myself and 2 others had completed together (as I had done with games 1 and 2) but I could not produce the right kind of appearance. Because of this I decided to recreate the game digitally (this made a lot more sense for game 3 as it is based on straight lines and mathematical curves).The downside with completing the game digitally is that it lost some of the roughness and playfulness that the first two game outcomes had. I think this is probably due

to the experimental and process-oriented nature of conditional design and the idea that they are supposed to be completed in groups or teams. As well as this, like I have said previously, I think the third game hasn’t worked so well for conditional design because A) it was already an existent form of creating graphics and B) it is too rigid and “straightline-oriented” to create the freedom and expression born from the conditional design workshops. Because of this I may aim to complete more of the task before the end of this module, however I will have to leave the outcomes as they are for the purposes of this book. On the previous pages you can see my experimentation with game 3 as well as possible development of the outcomes themselves. These are not to the standard I would like them to be because I have very little experience in mocking up designs on items. This is something I’ll have to look into in the future and hopefully develop the skill a bit further as I think it will be useful.

more of my work online http://labretgraphics.co.uk/blog/category/concept-development/ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoTsOCN1mByTcmq8J9hmzpQ/feed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jb8MAaPVEkg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpLhoMjd1PA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IimTN0QtpAs