Day 1 of group work

The final group work started today. We had a lot of brainstorming using mind maps to come up with something. After the meeting with our tutor we decided to do a mini assignment. We googled different keywords, for example "books" and "clothes", and followed the path of sponsored links, adverts and tips to see where they were leading. Our aim was to create some kind of scheme of peoples habits and to see if there were any connections with media influence. It was really difficult to see clear patterns because of the small scale of the assignment.
During our brainstorming we limited ourselves to two keywords that we want to work with; media influence and stereotypes.

In the city, the ballets!

The lecture today was interesting. From the start I felt that this was going to be a fun workshop. The guys from Unsworn talked about crowd-centered choreography which is art of making structures in which movement occurs using the city as action space and the crowd as participants. This basically means that we are creating some kind of choreography in a given area in malmö city, starting at K3. We have only 10 minutes to perform each groups choreography, which isn't necessarily an easy task. We began our workshop today by walking a three minute stretch in 30 minutes. Neither slower nor quicker. That is harder than I first thought. Since we did the walk in the core of the city there were a lot of curious people passing by asking us what we were doing. I heard a man say: " are you doing this because the society is in such a hurry nowadays?" Since the walk had to be in silence I didn't answer him but I started to think about what he had said. Indeed he was right. I became very restless during the slow walk and had to really focus on not picking up speed.
The workshop will be performed tomorrow and our group is the first one to start. It's going to be interesting to see what all the groups have come up with.

Cemetery Picnic

Yesterday we went through with our idea about a cemetery picnic. We made a gravestone of cardboard and wrote a name of a imaginary person on the "grave". Then we sat down on the green outside the entrance of K3 and then we put dishes on a blanket that we had brought. We had also flowers in a vase next to our "grave". At the time of lunch we were ready to start having our little picnic. While eating some good sandwiches and cookies we tried to sense the feeling of eating next to this grave. Actually it didn't feel really weird to have picnic, but I think that if we would have the picnic in an actual cemetery it would probably feel differently. Anyway it was a different experiece that really made you reflect on the cemeteries and death. People passing by didn't really react on the scene that we had set up, but a few looked a little confused even if they tried to hide it well.

NBGNGS brainstorming

Today we met up with our group to discuss the second part of the assignment. We are supposed to change a place or a situation in the visited area by adding or removing something or apply an unexpected behavior to it. We started brainstorming and came up with interesting places to use for the assignment, for example the graveyard, Pildammsparken, a café, a church. We decided to go along with the idea of changing the atmosphere in a graveyard by setting up a dinner party next to a grave of a relative for example. That would provoke the conventional rules that a graveyard is a sad place you go to when you morn someone. Instead we thought that it could be a safer and happier place to be in by having a picnic there instead. One issue that we discussed for quite a long time is the concern of offending the visitors in the graveyard by setting up this scene. Our intention is not to be disrespecting! So we thought that it would probably be better to create the graveyard environment in a park for example.
After a while we realized that our group consisting of twelve people was a bit too big so we split it into two groups of seven and five.
Tomorrow we are going to put the idea into practice.

Second Workshop: NBGNGS

Friday's assignment was interesting. At first I was a bit negative about it, but when the sun came through the clouds, it was easier to walk through Södra Innerstaden in Malmö from 10 am. to 4 pm. I went to places in Södra Innerstaden that I had never visited before and learned some new things. We were supposed to visit and discuss a couple of places in a given area in malmö and I thought that our group followed through with the task pretty well. We visited Pildammsparken, the Flower Garden, Johanneskyrkan, Möllevångstorget and Folkets Park. It was nice to walk together with the group and to speak with people that i haven't spoken with before and to listen to everyones opinions and thoughts about the places we went to.
I look forward to the second part of the assignment on monday.

Presentation day of Uglycute

The presentations of the first workshop were good and interesting. It was nice to see on the notice board what everyone had done. Allthough I thought that we could have added a little description of how the products works because some pictures were not so easy to figure out. Even if we were told to take pictures that shows what the product is used for, for some it was hard, depending on the product.

The Anti-Communicator

The idea: My Uglycute assignment is finally done. I name my product The Anti-Communicator. My idea origins from the fact that I study media- and communication and therefore I thought that it would be suitable to create a product that could help people to communicate better with each other and avoid misunderstandings. Since I don't know what my profession would be I chose this "problem" to work along with. I thought a lot about a solution for this issue but I couldn't come up with anything at all yesterday when we were supposed to draw some preliminary sketches for todays meeting with the Uglycute crew and Kami. Considering the short time frame on the workshop I thought that I had to change my point of view to get something done so I reversed the issue. I thought that instead of communicating, sometimes you just wish to do the opposite; shutting out the world in your surroundings and crawl into your own bubble. The Anti-Communicator offers you vision -and noise blockage when you want to get rid of onforced sound and vision in your environment.

The product: This low-tech product is a combination of non-see-through sunglasses and earplugs. Merged together with touch tape (karborreband) they become The Anti-Communicator.

This product was very tricky to come up with in the beginning and I had my doubts about this workshop considering that I, as a MKV student, shouldn't be designing products. But when I had the idea in mind it all seemed so obvious and clear. Why didn't I think of that in the first place? Allthough I hope that the following workshops will be more MKV relevant.

Uglycute

Todays lecture about uglycute was rather confusing. Or more specifically, the ASSIGNMENT was confusing. I'm not sure I can fully relate the assignment to uglycute. Or is it not supposed to relate to it? Should the product be uglycute? I'm positive that it will be ugly at least..


I can feel the panic inside now, considering it's monday afternoon. I'm sure I will come up with something soon, but now would be great!! :| At least I know I'm not the only one confused, and I'm pretty sure that I'm enlarging this issue and making it more complicated than it is.

The first entry

...over and out...