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Extending Design

20 credit course


Selecting work

Potential candidates I have in mind that could be extended for the public audience are these projects. I also give little brief ideas.

After some consideration, I am going to go with Audiovisual to develop further into a “pitch document”. I continued work on it to show at an exhibition last year and I was proud how well it seemed to be received. People at one point formed a queue to see it, and people sitting in there sat and watched it for quite a while. I feel it could be even more engaging if you knew that the texts and visual/audio was submitted by people around you.

Learning InDesign

Adobe InDesign was the suggested program to use to create the document. I’m going to spend some time learning this. Currently I am a bit stuck on where to start, but there’s a meeting on Thursday so that’ll be helpful. I started an online InDesign course and it appears good so far. It is updated to 2024 and has lesson resources so that you can folloow along. I feel I am picking it up fairly quickly. I found myself struggling with Adobe products like Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign, I didn’t feel it too intuitive, but it only seems to take a little while to learn the foundations of it.

Feedback Session

I got valuable feedback from Cat and Paul during this feedback session. They were suggesting that I could utilise archives from libraries for the writing, which I think is a brilliant idea. This would be interesting to intermingle that idea with crowd-submitted writing, which could both have random writing appear. The idea of it floating along by, probably projected, was suggested. The benefits of doing this is that multiple people across the space can read the writing as it isn’t focused at one location.

Selecting a location

Finding a library with good space to do it is important. If all the walls of a library are lined with ornate stately details it may be difficult to find a space to display projections and whatnot, though it still could be done. Perhaps looking at previous exhibitons at libraries will give me an idea of spaces available.

British Library

I found these images of an Cartographer’s Exhibition at the British Library. This was done by Northover&Brown, which seems to be a pretty good resource as they list all their works at different libraries and museums.

I found some more from same people about Magna Carta

This shows the British Library has quite malleable spaces depending on the purpose.

An exhibition in Cambridge had a photo series exhibition of 26 libraries in Cambridge. I thought of a possibility that maybe instead of being directly in a library, it could be in a space such as this and show off library collection archives of the surrounding libraries.

Birmingham Library

Although not a seemingly obvious place, the installation could be installed so it appears on the underside of the escalators. There is lots of space for projections and such.

Sir Duncan Rice Library

This library suggested by my friend has a lot of estate for imagery. Projections could be put on each level so people can read it from the bannisters.


Feedback session

I had a tutorial with Gillian and we discussed different places in which it could be. We came to realise that spaces like Birmingham and Duncan Rice would not suit the locations as they lend themselves to passing through the locations that I suggested, like under the elevator. I would want it to be a static location, as I initially said that it is quite intimate and people seemed to be engaged with it when I presented it previously.

Spaces such as V&A Dundee have extensive archives of many things, but it also includes book archives with would fit with what I want to do.

I do need to select a space as a priority as I cannot start the rest of the project without doing so.

V&A Dundee

I ended up selecting the V&A in Dundee. I travelled over to Dundee to get a feel for the space and to take photos. There are plenty of possible spaces in the V&A, with many different galleries inside.

Here are the 40 photos I took of the interior. I took a few photos of the ceiling too to get an idea of how the space operates in mounting projectors and other equipment. It seems quite a mallable space.

Starting

I began creating the media for the proposal. I used a photo I took at Dundee and used numerous programs to begin creating what it may look like installed.

I used a program called fSpy to mimic the camera position in the photo. I then exported this to Blender using fSpy’s blender addon.

In Blender I used a couple of free models online to create a table and monitor set up with keyboard input. I am not entirely sure if this is what I’d want but I don’t know how to 3d model really. I tried to mimic the lighting.

Within AE, I created masks and put the objects on top of the photo.

For the Processing part, I used a library called jBox2d to let words collide with each other.

I created this in Processing, filling a CSV with random responses from a prompt about the sea. These responses were generated in a list from ChatGPT. It felt obvious, the contents weren’t important, just that it conveyed the idea of people entering responses.

(Thumbnail may be black)

Creating the staff interface

I needed to create an interface mockup of what it’d look like for the people working at the V&A Dundee to add events and be able to remove entries they deem unsuitable (if it makes it past the proposed filter system!).

I used Figma to make the interfaces, it seemed quite intuitive and I am happy with how they came out. I also redid the interface that visitors will interact with when they can submit writings.

Renders


PDF Progress

Checkpoint 1

I added all the images in that I created in an order that I felt it would make sense. I added small captions to explain the images. The first image (a thumbnail of the video) prompts people to scan the QR code to view the video. The video is stored on Google Drive but can be viewed by anyone with the link.


Checkpoint 2

The feedback was good! Paul even said he was starting to get convinced!

After a feedback session, I went away with the physical keyboard. Even though personally I prefer physical, it makes total sense to have a virtual. Easier to clean, way cheaper, more accessible for all ages, can easily be interated in if needed. It also just takes up less room.

Some more feedback was about cutouts of people. This demonstrates the accessibility of the exhibition by putting people in differing circumstances into scale and context. I added someone in a wheelchair using the touchscreen and a mother and child. Even the child can reach up and type. I am imagining a parent helping read out the prompt and asking them their answers and helping type.

I started more experiments with formatting the pages and adding descriptions to go with each image.


Checkpoint 3

This checkpoint has more proper formatting of the images and text. The text being larger and easier to read with consistent layout of headers.

Final

I added figures into captions and at the end, I wasn’t exactly sure the preferred format but all the needed information got across.


Conclusion

I am quite happy with it and feel it professional and a convincing proposal. I feel very positive about my attempt here.

May 2025