“The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.” – Ben Okri
As life is not flawless, this project is going to tell that true perfection is in all the little imperfections. Jean Tu whose perceptions or consciousness are at the root of the narratives, the story is about change in character, evident yet subtle. By adding a certain dimension to Jean Tu, the audience can look at the character perform, feel and care about it. In the comic strips, there are connotation and denotation of the messages, which will be a reflective process for me as a creator, and for audience as well.

BIO – Born in Hong Kong, 1987. Currently studying in London. Graduated from BA Visual Communication in The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, 2009 and worked as a part time designer in a French Studio. She was also exploring ways of making learning materials for children in an art therapeutic approach. Stella’s works has explored some conceptual ideas, taking a seemingly factual topic like the number zero and elaborating on its meaning. Her illustration works are simple and colorful; she likes drawing weird creatures and making little bizarreness with them. Through drawing, painting and writing thoughts, she explores a more cohesive aesthetics between objects. She is recently working on character design – Jean Tu as the root of narratives to tell a story about imperfectness. The workshop in Florence is going to base on her study – Character creating and Story structure, to introduce audience an imaginative way of making their own stories.

China has developed at an unprecedented rate in the past four decades. However, this development causes some serious issues in China, such as the lost of cultural lost and worship of money. The impact of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is representative of one of the changes taking place in China. This thesis will study how to promote TCM to young Chinese adults between 20 to 35 years old. People’s values and tastes have changed while TCM still holds the old styles. Therefore, TCM cannot meet young adults’ requirements. Moreover, inconvenience and not fashion are the crucial reasons for people being unwilling to understand Chinese medicine. Therefore, it is necessary to provide an approach to encourage people to understand TCM. Furthermore, dietary therapy could be the start point, because it is familiar to the audience and convenient for people to try. It is necessary to study the audience and find the appropriate communication design methods based on the target groups and the intention of encouraging more understanding of TCM. By using the communication design methods, especially information design methods, a Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) Self-Service System was designed. The system has been published on a website, as a communication channel. To popularize TCM dietary therapy and to encourage young people understand TCM theories is the main aim of this project.

There are three reasons for TCM’s declining:
1. There are some misconceptions of TCM. Some people don’t really understand TCM.
2. TCM is not convenient; it is not fit the high pace of life
3. Some people think TCM is out of fashion

As a designer, I would like to use visual language to deal these problems.
Target audience is: Young Chinese aged from 19-35 years old, with high education.
I am designing a new TCM information system for people to understand the concept of TCM. Also this system is a self-service clinic for people to deal with their symptoms by TCM therapy, like diet therapy and points massage. The system is clear, easy to use, save time and with stylish design.

Biography: Graphic Designer, Illustrator

Social Publishing is a new form of participatory publishing that is emerging out of the technology and culture of the ‘networked age’. Drawing on a mixture of practice based experiments and case studies, and using Pierre Bourdieu’s model of economic, social, symbolic and cultural capital, Social Publishing is analysed for how it changes the relationships between reader, writer and publisher and creates a new category of producer-consumers. It is suggested that Social Publishing creates a virtuous cycle of sharing cultural capital and thus could be a model for increasing horizontal social mobility. Finally, it is suggested that Social Publishing also offers a new participatory approach to research.

“We face only one truly existential threat: that is climate change, the great moral imperative of our era. We have a duty, a responsibility, to play our part in changing minds, opinions, and policies. We have a clear message. We want nothing less than to build a grassroots movement for change, now.” Ban Ki-Moon, January 2009: Secretary-General of the United Nations.

With a starting point in theory of human irrational behaviour systems, this project explores how these systems can be used to approach communicating current challenges of climate change through design. This project is based on a range of ideas for how to approaches this challenge and concludes that we have to start build new systems in our society in order to stabilize the global mean temperature by lowering emissions and keeping them down. This reaches in to many aspects of our society, as energy and consumption is a main part of how our society functions. This project proposed a set of activities meeting the need for motivation, information and enabling, aiming at reaching audiences at each stage – in the public and the private space. These activities is connected through a communication platform which function as a people driven facility made to share, and engage heads and hearts around how we can adapt to climate change.
This project is a journey of comprehending the full scale of climate change, exploring how behaviour theory and design interventions can help mobilize and communicate the needed change.

Image text
Image 1: Work in progress show
Image 2: Visualization of CET temperature through sound and color – 2 min. video. Framegraps showing the difference between 1870 and 1976.
Image 3: Map of carbon emission by flight from London. The map is drawn by the amount of emission the flight to the destination emits.
Image 4&5: Framegraps from information movie about climate change.

The project investigates how interactive and responsive fonts could help to provide information that is supplementary to the pure content of words. Visual attributes of typefaces, like style, colour or size, have always given an additional meaning to the text’s content. Interactivity can take this form-aspect to another level: By adding behaviour, letter shapes are able to respond to time and usage. Thereby the process becomes part of the given information itself that evolves the displayed data constantly and by doing so provides additional layers of information. Such interactive applications are tools that enable an alternative way of typing/writing as the displayed text is processing, hence enriching while in use – or rather because it is in use. The project aims to raise awareness of possibilities offered by (new) technologies and encourage other designers to explore and use them, hence create individualised tools and applications as an alternative to mainstream devices and software. Therefore part of the project is revealing its process in order to offer other interested makers an access to these tools and applications that are supposed to be developed and customised by them in the future.
Explanation how the logo is related to my project: The “Design with a View” logo/lettering was created as part of Stefanie’s investigations about interactive and responsive type where she explored how letter forms can be designed and used as a creative tool in order to inform in a playful and experiential way.

BIO – Stefanie Schwarz studied Graphic Design in Germany and the United States. Since 2006 she is working as a freelance designer and was an academic assistant in Visual Communications at Pforzheim University School of Design before she started her MA in Communication Design at Central Saint Martins. Stefanie’s work is mainly located in the field of typography and type design. Further information on <a href=”http://www.StefanieSchwarz-GraphicDesign.de”>www.StefanieSchwarz-GraphicDesign.de</a>

An unrestricted multifaceted exploration, requiring solutions considerate of cognitive mechanisms rather than operating with limited means of visual signage. 52 years after its emergence the wayfinding design discipline or wayshowing (Mollerup 2005) now supports acts more complex than directed and motivated course of determining and following a route between an origin and a destination (Golledge 1999: 6) through use and organization of specific sensory cues from the external environment (Lynch 1960: 3). Relevant to books, time-based media and websites to the same extent as to built environments (Gibson 2009: 6-7) contemporary wayfinding might be defined as an unrestricted multifaceted exploration, requiring solutions considerate of cognitive mechanisms rather than operating with limited means of visual signage. Poetic structures are comprehension and experience enhancing devices developed according to human requirements and capacities. Poetic structures originate from literature in similar manner that signage derives from wayfinding. They are not equivalent to verse but rather to mechanisms applicable to verse that might be directly reconnected to cognitive process. For instance: A meaningful rhythm will invite. A meaningless rhythm will dissuade or turning the line (enjambment) will accelerate understanding (Oliver 1994: 57). Therefore poetic structures might be discovered in verbal and even visual arts like: Aborigine singing things into existence (Chatwin 1987), El Lissitzky’s design of Mayakovsky’s poetry or American narrative art of the 1960s. My research project is based on literature review aiming to explore current research on human wayfinding and to examine how desired enhancement to the process might be related to poetic structures used as a cognitive tool.

BIO – Olga Surawska (born 1985) is a designer with background in visual communication, product design, trend analysis and fine art. She studied at Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts and Zürcher Hochschule der Künste and worked as art director and product designer for Leo Burnett and McCann Worldgroup before starting her information design practice and collaboration with Design Against Crime Research Centre and wayfinding design consultancy Applied. She currently lives in London and combines passion for writing with postgraduate research in field of information design.

Contact: design@olgasurawska.com

BIO – Rita graduated in Design from Universidade de Aveiro, Portugal in 2008.
She has been working as graphic designer since then. In 2010 she moved to London to start the MA in Communication Design at Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design. She is interested in social innovation projects and research about the role of design in the development of visual literacy and citizenship, developing her MA project on health communication and information with focus on Alzheimer’s disease.

This project uses an ethnographic methodology to investigate what people hold valuable in their lives by studying their wallets. A wallet is a symbolic and a literal personal object that contains possessions, their memories or capabilities for experiences that a person holds valuable or has reason to value.

BIO – Clarissa San Pedro is a Brazilian designer based in London where she works as freelance and is completing a MA in Communication Design at Central Saint Martins. She has been working for over ten years with graphic and editorial projects across different media. Magazines are her passion and she has been involved with the publishing industry both in Brazil and in the UK as art director and designer. One of her current project is Rubberband Publishing.