The key point I achieved from this session was the possibility of looking into other modes of learning and how/if that plays an impact on child development. After this, I researched further on the topic and found that Norwich has two montessori schools which I'd like to contact in order to hear opinions from both parents and staff there about choices of education for children.
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I developed the idea of experimenting with chocolate further with the idea of branding and creating a historic identity logo for Chapelfield in my head. I thought by using chocolate I'd gather that same authentic smell that the tour guide spoke about when visiting Norwich. I felt like I captured the essence of Caley's typography and created my own twist to develop one for Chapelfield, however I'm unsure how to use these designs to create a final outcome. I think these need more development to show the consumerist links with Chapelfield and the chocolate factory. The tiled chocolate bar instantly reminded me of tiled flooring which is seen inside Chapelfield. Re-creating the tiled flooring gave me a sense of creating a foundation that the chocolate factory had created for consumerism on that plot of land. When we walk in Chapelfield, we're walking on the remains of the old chocolate factory. Using Ryan's photos, I attempted at manipulating them in order to visually show the concept of the combination of the links between Chapelfield and its chocolate-making history. These to me resemble the designs made when marketing how a building will look when 100% completed and in use. I feel that these could be used to create representations as to how a re-design of Chapelfield when incorporating it's history if we were to create a final outcome based on that concept.
Based on the idea of hand gestures and movement communicate through sign language, we thought it would be both fun and appropriate to produce a pop-up style book for the publication brief. We decided to aim it towards children as we believe that if it was taught whilst young, it'll be something they can carry on throughout their lives.
Hervé Tullet - Blind Children Workshops
I came across this illustrator looking for pop-up and interactive books and found it fascinating that he does a load of workshops and interacting with children through his books as a platform. Below are a few photos from his website (linked above) of his creative workshop with blind children. Although this is about blind children, I still believe it's relevant to creating work for deaf children as it's about overcoming what people may view as a handicap (losing one of their senses) and still being creative in a tactile manner. Instead of using their sight, they're using their hands to feel and create something visual in their own right just like how instead of using hearing, deaf use their hands to gesture and communicate. Though this may be pushing it a bit far from ideas around sign language, I could still use this thought process towards my research report as it is relevant to my current topic surround child development.
Marion Bataille - ABC3D
I find Bataille's innovation inspiring when I was researching pop-up books. The engineering behind each page turn and the simplicity in the design is something I'd really like for our book to have. By keeping the design basic, we concentrate solely onto how we interact with the book in order to read it, and I think for us that's important because our book is suppose to be informative of sign language and easy legibility in understanding out to perform the sign.
Oliver Jeffers - Jeffers, O. (2009) The incredible book eating boy. London: HarperCollins Children’s Books.
This was one of the books that we saw physically and it became our foundation for understanding how to create paper mechanisms. We gave the book a very close inspection in order to understand why certain pop-ups and interactions behaved the way they did when performing the action needed. By understanding these, we were able to create the mechanisms ourselves.
TigerCreate - Digital Publish Suite for Interactive and Animated Books.
Whilst looking into interactive books, I came across this software that can turn a book made for print, into a digital interactive book. I though this was quite intriguing to look into to because we are in the digital age and thought of it as a different perspective if we were to develop our publication further, perhaps for the event itself. App's on touch screen devices is becoming more and more popular and could be an outlook we may want to approach because it still involves hands to be tactile and moving, alike sign language. It would also make it accessible from their own devices, making our work portable and mobile to be looked at again in the future, and not only at the event. ![]()
Above were prototypes of how to incorporate relevant paper mechanisms to the question words as seen in Oliver Jeffers book. The group were happy with my contribution for 'Why' and 'How', but found that 'When' lacked the right mechanism for the gesture. I went back to the book and thought that the 'flip-book' style mechanism would be more difficult to craft but appropriate for presenting the gesture needed to sign 'When'. I drew this digitally with inked lines to keep it uniformed with Yury's styled hands that he drew for the publication. The reason why I chose digital was because I found that it would save time by erasing and redrawing the fingers individually quick using layers in Photoshop rather than tracing each frame.
Child Development Investigation For my research report I want to look into the effect that creativity and play have on educating children about the world they live in. I also want to discover if play has a direct importance on how a child develops. I’m particularly interested in how forest and Montessori school’s curriculum differs to traditional education and if there/what are the differences on the impact on the children behaviour and personality. I find that researching child development will give me a further understanding how children may respond to certain things. As an illustrator who wants to create artwork for children as a target audience, I always want my work to have an interactive element to it that children would enjoy to play and experiment with. I feel that having knowledge about what children need and want from what I could create is important for my creative practice. I feel that the contextual lens that I’ll be looking at this will be very social as I believe theories on how children should develop at a young age is a social discussion. By looking at it as a social issue, I think that my report should be written in an editorial report, because I find that reading about social issues in an article seems most appropriate for the topic. It was also my favourite and most successful style of writing I produced in the previous term. In order to gather my research, I want to use my time over summer break wisely to collect as much as possible. I think this time is valuable to volunteer and engage with children themselves. Although most schools will not be open during the six-week vacation period, I’m looking into finding possible volunteer activities for young people that’ll be happening in Norwich over the summer months. I’m willing to try and become a volunteer at Norwich Castle Museum and take part in interactive activities they may have on over the summer break. I think that by doing this I’ll be able to see first-hand how children interact with each other and their use of creative skills in practice. I’m also going to make time over the summer to watch the Channel 4 documentary series ‘The Secret Life of 4, 5, and 6 Year Olds will prove to be valuable to gathering information about child behaviour and interaction amongst others. The documentary also offers is experts saying how certain actions that a child perform can explain what sort of personality they occupy and what this may develop into when they become adults. As stated earlier, I was also interested in the different impact, if any, of forest or Montessori schools on children compared to traditional schooling. I know that there are two Montessori schools in Norwich. There is Little Peoples Montessori Nursery and The Norwich Montessori School Ltd. I’d like to be able to contact at least one of these schools and hear from the teachers for their opinion on why the need for different schooling technique and what it provides for the children. Depending on their schools’ policies, It’d be great if I had permission to see first-hand how they conduct their sessions and how children respond back to it. It could also be valuable to ask the parents of children as to why they chose their children to attend these particular schools instead of traditional. I know that the Little Peoples nursery is open throughout summer except one week, therefore I’ll use my summer break to attempt getting into contact with the nursery in hope to learn more about this method of teaching children. There are a few books I want to read as well to understand more about creativity in education. Two books I want to read are Creativity, wisdom, and trusteeship: Exploring the role of education and Understanding art in primary schools. I think these will provide a better understanding of how creativity itself is an element to how children learn and discover, and it’ll also teach myself how to ensure I incorporate these elements into my own practice. There are also a few articles I want to read such as Children should learn mainly through play until age of eight, says Lego by the Guardian. It shows another angle at what people’s opinion is to be the right way of educating children to be most beneficial for them. I’m hoping to gain at the end of my research a thorough investigation into what play benefits children when learning and discovering about the world. I believe having the knowledge about how children learn can be inputted into my practice to make it valuable for children to learn from and be interactive enough to be enjoyable. Will cite and harvard reference later. Current Indicative Bibliography
After reading out my current draft, I received some positive feedback from my peers saying that I'm on the right track and constantly bringing my reasoning's for researching back to my own practice. They offered me a range of more sources to look at for my subject which evolves more around people's opinions on the matter. I think this will be a good angle to look at research more because I should hopefully be able to see more than one side to a debate about what is suitable for children.
As a concept we decided to look into creating postcards as we thought they displayed a historical context and the tourism effect that Chapelfield brought to Norwich. From our feedback, it appeared the idea of both consumerism, historical and tourism was a lot to try and work from, and needed narrowing down. Narrowing it down to just Consumerism's two aspects of manufacturing and selling was the right idea to follow as it's what we've been following throughout.
I also designed the book cover using prints of my hands and tried to keep the colours matching the inside of book, but to overcome all the contrasting colours, I changed the transparencies and overlays to digitally create a 'screenprint' style look where the colours change on top of each other. I thought this cover matched our colour scheme, showed a little fun and the idea that this publication is filled with hands for signing. I liked Peter's suggestion of including acetate to the book, it made the cover a little more fun to play with, which works well because that was one factor we wanted our book to have of. We also received feedback of people enjoying our book and what it promotes. The only down-side is that some of the pop-up mechanisms would get stuck or were difficult to move. As a group we believed this was because of how small the book was produced which created more friction than a slightly larger book might had done. ![]()
Feedback on my Pecha Kucha was valuable because I was told I may be looking at not the right sources for the information I'm after because they're aimed a different audience than me. Also my contextual lens wasn't condensed enough by choosing only social. I think what I need to do first is choose a narrowed down contextual lens and then I can begin to think more appropriate sources to follow. Following advice, I wrote down the key words from what I want to research which are revolved around children in a learning environment and how/if play and creativity perform an impact on this. For more opinion based resources, I was recommended to try and find more journals and articles which would be more aimed to be read by the public rather than certain scholars.
After feedback, I attempted to create manufacturing collages of the past factory that showed the element of the chocolate. These were originally DIY scratch and sniff, however that aspect didn't work effectively, although they did smell strongly of chocolate on their own.
I believe these capture the essence of our concept, however, creating these types of collages isn't something I enjoy. I felt a bit like a cheater using already made images and incorporating chocolate onto them. I think if I spent more time on these than what was available, I could had created a silhouette of the factories and workers based on the resource images. I think this would had created the same effect as these and I'd feel like it was more of my own work.
Preparing for our tableau, thinking about the gift and engagement requirements we all liked the idea of creating lino motifs of the alphabet for the public to engage with by printing their names themselves and then taking it away as a gift. Also to incorporate our earlier idea of bringing something digital to the event, Chloe was making animations of the alphabet with a code that can be scanned on the back of the lino prints so that the person can voluntarily learn more signing other than their name. Whilst the other three of us worked on the lino, Peter agreed to make some 3D hands influenced from the model table display to stand up and draw the public to our stand. We also agreed to continue the colour scheme from the publication by using only white to print with onto different coloured card that the public may choose themselves.
Between me and Jaz, we agreed to do 13 letters of the alphabet each, intervening, to spread out the workload. I worked upon A,D,F,H,J,L,N,P,R,T,V,X,Z. On the day of the tableau, we only had my 13 letters to display with but it still showed our incentive for the event. Lino printing and owning original prints is something I like doing within my practice because it can be used to make bold images but also offers the opportunity to create textures I couldn't make without it.
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Chloe's animations and QR code to our blog containing them.
http://www.bslanimations.tumblr.com
Today's feedback made us as a group realise that we had taken the concept of getting the public to lino print instead of learning what is BSL. This did cause a little panic because we were so adamant about lino printing that we all had to take a step back and begin another thinking process. Our table display was too distracting with all the colours and shapes from the table cloth that it needed simplifying down to a more uniformed style. The feedback showed that everything was working well individually, but they believed that we needed a balance of the lino print display and our previous interactive publication to exhibit.
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