PGD term overview

In one sentence, this term, to me, was amazing, hard, mind-bending and life-changing.

I plan the next one to be even more so, but I can confidently say that since the contextual review is mostly over now, there is also going to be a lot more ‘fun’ there, as designers call their work nowadays.

Joy, of course, is basic to life; it wouldn’t be worth it otherwise. So let me state straight away, that I enjoyed the PGD term, hugely, too.

The amazing thing about it, was the amount of knowledge and information gathered in my head, accompanied by the personal-record-long list of the most books and articles I’ve ever found and read in such a short time. Among the most handy items that were not in the reading list provided by the university, was Roderick White’s “Advertising”, Andy Maslen’s “Write to Sell” (on copywriting), Macionis and Plummer’s “Sociology”, and Oxford University Press’s “A Very Short Introduction” series. On-line documentary-films finding and watching has also been critical. The BBC is making it seem like the issue I’m researching into, is one of the most current ones about.

The hard bit was the intellectual friction and the resulting (re-) definition of my research and purpose in the MA course. Organising thoughts and ideas, distinguishing thinking and meta-thinking, and prioritising issues, are difficult things to handle. Language is the key to everything here and using it right makes all the difference. I am still a long way from mastering English as good as I would like to, but I’m getting there. I can’t ever thank my supervisor, Stuart Hodges, enough for his patience, understanding and support. I know this isn’t the Academy Awards ceremony and it isn’t over yet, but I feel it necessary to hereby also acknowledge a few more persons in the NTU staff for their helping me overcome the hard bit: Carol Jones, Simon Perkins, Steve O’Brien, Ruth Coward and Stefanie and Gabi at the administration office. I guess, that’s what they’re there for.

What was mind-bending and life-changing was what I’ve learned and experienced. The amount of things taken for granted that I had to question was vast.

The internet inter-linkage of the world is a ‘miraculous’ platform. For every inquiry, there is shared information coming in from all disciplines and sciences: graphic and advertising designers, creatives from all commercial fields, business and marketing people, ideologists, politicians, celebrities and/or their managers, journalists, sociologists, journalists, psychologists, anthropologists, design academics, philosophers, linguists, endocrinologists, human and computer scientists, archaeologists, and even masters of the occult. Every stone can and has to be up-turned, nowadays. There is no longer need for compromisings with “meta-physics”, mystical dark sides and taboo blank spots. But this isn’t easy to cope with. I would have never been able to do the research I’ve been doing, outside the academic context limiting and containing questioning.

The Master Class series offered by the university, were the PGD term’s greatest revelations. To re-iterate Tibor Kalman, from Jonathan Barnbrook’s one, “I KNOW NOTHING”.

The first one of five, Jonathan Barnbrook’s Master Class, was the greatest kick I’ve got in all my years as a student. I can’t begin to describe why, suffice it to say that disideologisation is a great thing and reality is so worth living in that not doing so is devastatingly wrong. Barnbrook is also the most important key-figure in my research, having been amongst the First Things First Manifesto 2000 group and the best known activist-graphic designer within the “citizen designer” concept. Spot on relevant to my subject.

The second Master Class was probably the disappointing one out of the five. Bruce Ingman, like most illustrators, was happy to talk us through the story of his success, pointing time and again, how he “got lucky, really” and “had a bit of fun, really” and made a lot of money by being at the right place at the right time, really. And I wasn’t interested, really. I have a long story of my own as an illustrator and I would rather not remember it. Really.

The third Master Class was a compensation for the second one. Ilona Gaynor showed her work in moving image and stage light design, and delivered a small workshop on applying the Six Degrees of Separation, or Small World Theory, to design research. I wasn’t aware of these before so this class was a nice revelation. With a little exaggeration, it helped me understand networks and social media in one afternoon.

The fourth Master Class was branding to the core. Chris Spencer was brilliant, demonstrating and teaching how branding is handled. For the first time, I had the chance to insight on branding as it is done by the leaders of the genre. And I was amazed. Everything has its contextual formula and mental toolkit, and can be engineered and designed to detail. In relation to my research, it was proven to me that brand and myth share the same semiotic platform, and a lot of loose ends started finding their way home.

The fifth and last of the Master Class series was Hazel Macmillan’s. This was brand strategy orientated and it offered me a good summing up of all I had learned about branding since the beginning of my research. I discovered in the afternoon workshop, that the ethics and social responsibility issues are kept in distance from the strategy designs, even when the brand has already caused considerable damage. The morning lecture benefited from the good quality of the DICE conference room, as did the rest of the Master Class morning lectures from the Bonington Lecture Theater, and I would like to comment here, once again, on the poor design and quality of the other seminar rooms and lecture theaters I have seen so far in this course.

Douglas Wilson’s Staff Seminar on Illustration was also in the same room, but I would rather not comment on this.

The Contextual Studies seminars, delivered by Dr Chris Brown, were very condensed and mostly theoretical, Design History lessons. I enjoyed them, in a nostalgia sort of sense, and I had some interesting time realising that, in the presence of a group of people void of opinions, two contradicting opinions look identical. However, no opinion is also an opinion, as my investigation into ideology showed me. This is probably how post-modern, corporate academia is going to be from now on, I guess; a boringly non-opinionated social majority imposing silence to the occasional opinionated radicals, just like in the world outside academic education. Well, tough.

Before I move on into my research findings and progress, I would like to mention briefly, the two projects that are not assessed for the degree, but are important attributes to my reflection of the PGD term, and parts of this journal.

The Robert Violette project was a reality check for me, at the best time possible: the beginning of the term. It tested my work capacity, basically. And it got me back into an alertness mode, after the previous period of passive (but passionate) data gathering and theoretical review. I think that matters. I enjoyed it as much as I worked for it. And I worked my butt off for three plus one days. My role in this project was: a. to lead the theoretical review team and put together an introduction, as well as a guide/souvenir, for the project’s exhibition; b. to assist with the exhibition’s curatorship and with the entire project’s management. I made brief acquaintances with Robert, Melanie and Sandra and I had a great time working with them, as well as with my editorial team, Ismini and Mandi, and with the other 92 MA students co-participating.

The live wayfinding design project with David Quay, MA GD study trip to Amsterdam, was the zenith of a great term that was the PGD one. Not so for practicing failing to deliver a design of my standards, as for tasting a culture that represents itself with the triple X in the Christian year 2010. The three Xs, I’ve been told, stand for pride, heroism and standing strong. The Amsterdam one is a culture that communicates in two languages, permits and takes full advantage of cannabis use within its borders, and offers the consumer the chance to consume the sexy girls in the window instead of just desire them but consume something else instead. The weather being chilly but bright when my group was there, contributed to my perception of Amsterdam as the happiest city I’ve ever seen; according to the city life I experienced and the people I encountered and talked to, of course.

In paralel to all the above, and a few more things mentioned in the contents of this journal, my research went through a roller-coaster adventure.

In the beginning of the PGD term, I was still finding it difficult to articulate the exact nature of my project. This was evident since the previous term. The trouble was partly me confusing ideas in thinking and meta-thinking, and partly me insufficiently speaking the appropriate word-language to express those ideas. A design/symbolic language could have helped, but it proved arbitrary when I tried to apply it into three mini projects that my supervisor and I set myself to do for this purpose; three visual case studies on existing campaigns concerned with ethics and social responsibility. It led to confusing matters even worse, when the first designs appeared, and they didn’t quite work, and everyone got to think that my project research was on climate change. I was so confident that design language would do the trick, that I persisted trying to communicate using it, even beyond schedule and I kept failing. Like the campaigns I was case studying. The design language could only form around given, already existing notions. This process was dragging me down a path that I was neither interested in, nor it had more than a tiny relevance to my investigation into branding and ethics / social responsibility, so far. I realised it early enough to take precautions before ruining my time management irreparably. It still took some effort and time to come across to my supervisor and stop the decline.

I had hardly completed one and a half of the intended work at the end of the period dedicated to the mini projects. It became obvious to me that design or other sort of language should urgently be borrowed from the other disciplines, that my contextual review was passing through.

The afore-mentioned Master Classes (and Contextual Studies) played a major role at this point. Had it not been for them, I might still be struggling with unsuccessful campaigns. But with these along, I discovered specific vocabulary and language forms that made it possible for me to put my ideas in some order and start clarifying things. The methods I learned there, pulled together all the rest of my contextual review, and I started making correlations between schemes from the different disciplines I had been looking at, trying to fully comprehend the issue presented in my research question. Beginning with Branding and Advertising, I lifted off, into the spheres of Philosophy, Ethics and Sociology, and I reached all the way to Archaeology and Biology. And then I was finally able to see the greater picture, the forest lost for the trees.

My great discovery (it feels a bit like what I assume must be seeing the earth from space, in X-rays) was the body of the organism we call civilization. Within this body, brand communication works very much like the endocrine system, using advertisements in a very similar way to the endocrine using hormones. Advertisements and hormones are both wireless messages, targeted at specific units, specially programmed to respond to them. Advertisements are crafted by designers. So I was back on ground.

Then it followed, that in order to find a way to use branding and brand communication design for promoting a more socially responsible / ethical / non-consumer lifestyle in today’s society, I needed to look at how it would work in the metaphor. And there I found the answer to another question: how do I define a more socially responsible / ethical / non-consumer lifestyle in today’s society? This is really a philosophical matter, and I humbly admit that I am not disciplined in Philosophy. But my research is located in the Graphic Design context; my project isn’t aimed at philosophers; it is aimed at designers.So I focused on making things easy for designers.

A designer is asking how can branding be used ethically and a designer will answer.

So the answer I’m prepared to give is not an entirely unexpected one: Branding and Brand Communication Design can be used to promote a more socially responsible / ethical / non-consumerist lifestyle in today’s society, if and when the people practicing them are aware of the full system which their work is affecting. It is by understanding implications beyond purely, temporary atomistic profit ones, that a designer can make his product promote a more socially responsible / ethical / non-consumerist lifestyle in today’s society.

The beauty really, and essence of my project now that it cleared up, is in the symbolic world model for designers that I’m about to design (symbolic world models are also used in artificial intelligence and computer science). The anthropocentric mental representation of the full organism of civilization; this is going to be my contribution to the world of knowledge in general and to the design discipline in particular. And it will come in a manifesto, published as a web-site and hopefully as a printed book too. At my level of English, this is a very good answer to my research question, and intellectually, a very successful result for my Masters degree course.

The name, No Brand, is given to the project to reflect the utopian concept of perfection against which all brands can be measured. The No Brand project is now clearly aiming at providing an illustrated, symbolic world model, that brand identity and communication designers can use as a philosophical platform for making and arguing decisions in moral terms. The target audience is ‘Citizen Designers’: that niche of influential, forward thinking people found amongst practitioners and students in all ‘creative’ work fields, which is aware of, and concerned with, the impact and effects of branding to its broader societal, cultural and ecological environment.

There was no way I could have known, foreseen or planned all this, last term. Unless maybe if the Master Classes and Contextual Studies seminars had been given then. But I might have not been ready to receive them then. Anyway, I got there now, out of the maze I was at the end of last term and for half of this one, and I’m quite proud of it. In consequence, of course, I’ve had to revise and re-submit my Learning Agreement, which was a lot easier this time, that a strategic brief was added to the hand in, as a separate document.