Loz’s Reflective Diary

I finally found a quote for my info graphic that i think its really powerful. Even if its not powerful, it’s by Confucius, so it must be deep. But i think it represents exactly what i want to use it for.

“When courtesy is better understood and appreciated, there will be no war”

Confucius

I finally found some pretty alarming statistics that are relevant to my project. Before was searching for statistic on human decency, courtesy, social behaviour and some other buzz words but I wasn’t really getting many relevant results. So I started getting a bit more specific with my search, looked at how many mobile phones are in Australia, how many trains, etc, so I could then somehow relate it back to my study. But I found even better. As a random idea I had a look at ‘assault on public transport’ on the ABS website and found a really good document Crime and Justice News, 2007 that had some alarming stats. Three that I found most hard hitting were that 50% of kidnapping/abduction victims were taken from a community location, with a further 35% taken from their home. If that wasn’t bad enough, over two and a half million (2,613,400) incidents of assault were experienced in a 12 month period. Finally I also discovered that in 2005, 85% of woman felt unsafe using public transport alone after dark. So hopefully those statistics can put into perspective what I’m trying to say about society pretty much going to shit.

This guy has a ‘friggin’ problem with society’s lack of courtesy.

OMG i can’ believe this woman. There are so many things wrong with this situation. The kids talking, the lady yelling, the whole train listening, the swearing, name calling and talking about the other’s mothers…. WAY TOO FAR. It gets a lot more interesting at the end so stay tuned.

And we thought Sydney trains were bad….

Here is just some more little examples i came across in ‘Design Studies’, of things that made me stop and think. I’m not even 20 pages into this book and already its making me really think. I’m looking forward to what the rest of the book has in store and i will share any more interesting parts i come across. The theme in common with these excerpts is that they all relate to understanding your audience before you design for them.

‘It is in our contemporary society that a need to understand the audience becomes a major concern for the designer. This need to consider the audience and include them in the design process, particularly in regard to the design of interactive media, may be what motivated graphic design practitioners to adopt research methods instead of relying solely on their intuition… defines graphic design as an activity that organizes visual communication is society and urges designers to re-examine their craft through the lens of social science in order to measure the impact o their work on society… the audience is an active participant because they possess cultural beliefs that influence their interpretation of visual language. Thus the visual communicator cannot shape the audience’s belief without first understanding them.’

I’ve started reading a book called Design Studies: Theory and research in graphic design edited by Audrey Bennett. In a foreword written by Steven Heller (who is fast becoming my favourite design author) he explains why research helps design. ‘a proposition or theory that requires proof must be examined from various vantage points to achieve an outcome, and the outcome governs how a design solution will be executed.’

I had to read it twice because i was reading at about 2am, but after it actually sunk in, it kind of sums up why design is influenced by research. So as much as it may pain us to do research, no matter how extensive, without even realizing it, it actually ends up sending us in the right direction towards a more successfully designed project.

The fact that I’m creating an organization/ awareness campaign that is directly related to people and their personalities/actions, my research will be more on a personal level.

Interviews: I want to develop an interview that is solely based on opinions of the general public. The responses will include opinions of our society in general, people’s attitudes, awareness levels and if demographics has any impact on overall courtesy. This will definitely be a qualitative research practice.

Observations: I believe that to prove my ideals and thoughts, observational research will play a vital role. This will include drawing and writing about incidents in the public eye, on trains, walking in the street, and also at work where i serve customers in food retail. This will expose how poeple act around others, without them being aware that they are being analyzed.

Ethnography: This is a way of researching if there is a link between human behaviours and their culture/religion. This will involve discovering certain cultural upbringings that affect conflicting cultures. This study will introduce certain stereotypes and what makes them so in regards to common courtesy.

Secondary: My secondary research will include case studies on incidents of courtesy and how people perceive the level that is acceptable in this day and age. This will also include extra research from the internet, books, popular magazines and any academic journals that are relevant.

After i heard on the radio the other day that Australia now has the equivalent of just over one mobile phone per person, this is a very timely article that Kimberley found and passed on so generously. Due to the extremely high prevalance of mobile phones, their usage has also sky-rocketed. With increased amounts of people with them, and increased usage, this creates increase noise for everyone else, especially in confined spaces like train carriages. Mobile phones are just one area that my awareness campaign will deal with, especially taking into consideration their popularity in this day and age. The main gist of the article is as follows.

Taking a cue from France’s national railway, which offers phone-free “zen zones” on high-speed trains, Austria’s second-largest city this week began ordering public transit commuters to keep their phones on silent mode.

To read the whole article, please go here.