I understand the purpose of commune but do not appreciate it. The reason is being that I feel that I am stressing so much about trying to plan and lead two other people, rushing to do commune without having a strong research base. I feel it would've just been easier and more effective if I did more thorough research by myself. 

But then again, without having the structure of having groupmates, would I be as stressed and in turn more alerted as I am now? I can't guarantee I will be. But still, it still annoys me. Because compared to all the other students in foundation only graphics have to further plan commune!!! ......

My group mates are Carissa and Diandra. They are both Indonesian and were friends before commune making me feel a little uncomfortable as 1) they share the same nationality and coming from the same city? they have a similar cultural background, making the purpose of commune less effective 2) they sometimes speak in Indonesian and I feel excluded from the conversation 3) They were friends beforehand, so its not an equal getting-to-know-each-other social experience. Unfortunately, we formed this group fairly late in the commune so there weren't a lot of choices. 

I feel that its hard for me to pinpoint a starting point because I'm not sure what I want to communicate with the information I gather. I'm not sure what information is worthy enough to create an outcome from. I feel I'm too confined within my preconceptions of what GCD is and cannot think of a suitable form of outcome to portray the information I gather. 

I was in awe that Diandra prepared the exercise books to document our emotional charts. Although I didn't see the relevance of it immediately, I was in awe that she prepared a lot of things and inspired by her method. Her use of sketchbook is an interesting way for her to see our possible interest in the same subject. But most importantly, this method allowed us to leave evidence other than photographs.

I am motivated after today to create some type of exercise book, just like diandras, but perhaps not in the form of just sketching our surroundings. I was thinking mindmapping and visualisations as answers to questions about childhood would be a good start to indicate where to start in my project. 

This afternoon, I signed up for a individual tutorial in hopes of refining my project 1 brief. Although I already had the draft down already and handed it in, I thought it might be useful to bring it to Pauline and see if there are anything I could tweak or problems that I should solve in her point of view. 

 Other than telling me to change it from third person writing to first, she also told me to that my thinking for the project description was not fluid enough and suddenly jumped from a place to another. I saw this problem as well and reflected that this could be because we only had 2 Hours to complete the brief and I was definitely rushing my thought process. I thought that I need to try to nurture a habit of keeping a record of my thoughts so the tutors or anyone could clearly see my thought process from start to finish.

Found out today that the project was not two weeks as the timetable on moodle said but actually was less than one week's time. This completely affected my proposed idea for the outcome, as this sudden change of time given limits the type of outcome that I would want to do. One of the things that I've learnt over this course was to be realistic with time and project idea. My proposed idea was to incorporate fashion photography to portray characters and add illustrations to create the setting. However due to time constraints, I am forced to drop that idea and think of another one. I am thinking I most likely have to incorporate material sources that were not originally mine. 

 Inspired by Holly Pilot, I wanted to explore collaging. I went ahead without having a thorough plan of what sort of theme or central idea that I was going for. This was because Holly Pilot said that she focuses on and picks at the background details more than the main character and I wanted to see if I could do a visually stimulating as well as ambiguous collage like hers using her method. As I didn't know at this point what I wanted to communicate when re-interpreting the original material, I decided to use her method as a start or method to revisit and understand the original material more thoroughly before making a decision on what to communicate. I thought collaging may be useful as a method when I don't have a clear clue on the message because collaging and ambiguity allows the audience to have their own interpretation.

To find a concept for my collage, I start to go through the whole animation film and picked out scenes with objects or background detail that I was interested in. I found out that afterwards, they are all kind of all over the place and hard to visualise a narrative using these objects. This made it very hard to try to narrow down and select three or four objects that can fit together well.

AFTER FINISHING ONE

As this initial collage trial was done without having a specific theme or meaning behind it, I felt that it was unsuccessful or I am personally not satisfied with the outcome because dissimilarly to Holly Pilot, it didn't create and bring forth a new and ambiguous narrative or meaning. I'm sure if it even looked visually pleasant because I was trying to put as much as possible in it to make it look lively, however, it came out looking too messy. 

From this experience, I've learnt to first roughly plan out what the object matter I'm going to incorporate or have a theme in mind, in order for the next part (fitting everything together) become easier and logical.

My interest towards the origins or backstory linking to authors personal history was sparked because I saw the darker psychological interpretation from the Winnie the Pooh, exploring the classic exhibition in v&a museum. I never realised that there could be a mental disorder angle to look at Winnie the Pooh and the characters. This really made me start to question even the most innocent looking story. I realised that it could always be due to the way we were raised, even though the signs were pretty obvious, we just never realised it. Researching and Looking into the origins were very interesting for me but I'm not really sure if it will in the end be beneficial to my final outcome. Im not sure now, how I can change the large input of information back into creating a GCD product because I haven’t found my centre point/ angle that I want to communicate.

AFTER PROJECT REFLECTION AND EVALUATION ABOUT OUTCOME PRODUCT

(DISCUSSION WITH FRIEND)

I had a discussion with my friend who does not label herself as a feminist or an anti-feminist but disapproves of the feminist's arguments because she thinks that a lot of them lack common-sense, solid evidence. She thinks that many women like to victimise themselves and she also showed me this example where a mother was taking advantage of being looked down upon, as weak and sensitive even though evidence were pointing otherwise. She also said the feminism theory being " men and women being equal " tends to get overlooked and pro-female was more emphasised. Regarding rape experiences, men's experiences were often overlooked and frowned upon as lies or accusations of why they didn't fight back. 

Some of the things that she talked about I agreed. I felt that many people nowadays, even though don't fully understand the concept of feminism always bring it up and overuse them in a different context just to pretend that they are relevant to the recent events. 

She said that my project felt forced as I tried to put two things that weren't connected except that they both had themes of rape in it. The fairytales that I've linked with metoo and times up are just fiction and didn't actually happen, changes the principles of the movement in a way. I was de-sensitising the metoo movement because it was about both female and males putting themselves in a vulnerable situation to empower other people to share their experience with rape. This made me think if I had become one of the people whom she is displeased with due to their fake wannabe support towards feminism as a means to be relevant.  

This conversation forced me to look in a different perspective that I didn't consider before. I thought this is useful because I will start considering the impact my product outcome will have on different minded people, thus allowing me to further refine my product to be better understood and recognised by more people. However, this led me to think whether I want my product to be understood by everyone. If I go into a subject with a certain angle, there will definitely be an opposite angle that dissatisfies or offends someone. In fact, its not really about which angle but as long as you touch on a controversial topic, you are bound to offend someone. 

http://spinemagazine.co/articles/some-things-covered-why-metoo-isnt-funny

Secondary research: coming of age films, such as the princess dairies, mean girls, clueless...etc These movies held a lot of memories because, during my adolescent years, I remember watching them and relating to them a lot. These films usually explore the typical high school/ secondary school experience, and although the ending is usually not so realistic, i feel that the general gist of the adolescent is portrayed accurately. This made me collect several themes that these movies have in common, which are 'a sense of belonging', insecurities and fears, self-confidence are things that all tweens struggle through. 

I had interviewed several of my friends about their adolescence experience to collect primary research which will, in turn, determine my focus on the topic of adolescence. I had specfically asked these 

Looking at their interviews,

In the tutorial with Hannah, we presented our made work and everyone contributed some form of feedback on each other's work. 

For my work, Hannah said to me that my project 2 outcome print has to be contextualised instead of just being a print. I was asked the purpose of this project, which was to raise awareness / inform adolescents the nutrition value of these food units, indirectly promoting them a healthy choice of foods. I agree with her as well, I want my work to have its position in the world and not just be a thing that I produced during foundation. I want my work to have meaning behind it even though people will most likely just appreciate its visual value and not take the time to further understand its intention or meaning behind it. Isn't that a failure / unsucessful point in GCD?

Many suggested different further development ideas such as creating a storybook with the illustrations as characters, making a stop motion animation as the story etc and that was helpful in terms of generating ideas that sparked further ideas. I will be further developing these ideas into visualisations in my sketchbook. 

4. Comic

I was thinking of creating a comic, because at that age, I was very interested in reading graphic novels or comics, such as Astrix or Tintin. I did a short comic version in my book but was unable to develop it further due to the time constraints. I might progress this further after the foundation. It is a short story based in the future, where these superfoods are finally valued for their nutrition value in specific disease fighting qualities, such as mango has cancer-fighting qualities. I created a hypothetical store that sold these natural super good ingredients repackaged to have an appearance of medicine but is actually 100 % natural. It features a bunch of parents going to these stores early in the morning to line up just to get these 'medicine' because the doctors recommended it for their respecitive off springs who needs different treatments. 

I thought it was a cool idea envisioning the super foods as medicine because although medicine now are chemically combined and made, when technology wasn't that advance, the people used different foods as their medicine to treat themselves. I was hoping to have this idea as an underlying theme. 

 Approaching topic theme and primary research and thinking

-For this project, young adulthood, my age and experiences right now is the closest and resembles the theme 'young adulthood' the most. Therefore, I took inspiration from personal experiences but also referenced the interviews bits with a comparison of young adulthood in it. 

-the focus on gratitude and finding a design solution of improving emotional and mental health was something that I personally wanted to find out due to having experiencing emotional and mental struggles about achieving.  I felt that a lot of young adults in this transitionary phase often put a lot of pressure on themselves to do certain things in order to have a solid foundation before going into the real world and getting real jobs, so thats why I was hoping to find information to help improve with the situation. 

Although I was slightly behind on schedule, my progress today was quite well in terms of brainstorming and setting a general direction to my project 3.

Design/ Concept thinking

This project, Mature adulthood was based on the experience of being a full-fledged adult. Due to my inexperience and haven't gotten to that level of maturity yet, I don't think I will be able to complete any primary research other than interviewing my family and friends who are around 30 ish. 

However, this made me think why not try to document and depict my preconception of mature adulthood in the perspective of a young adult. I thought that it might be interesting as it may be significantly different from the reality of mature adulthood and it would be entertaining to see this publication or outcome when I've grown older. (because of my imagination and naivety)

IDEA 1: PRECONCEPTION OF ADULTHOOD

My initial idea proposal was to create an outcome that focuses on my preconceptions of mature adulthood, and their likely load of responsibilities but also immense power. From my primary research visualisations from commune, I asked my participants to visually draw out their perception of what adulthood is to them. A few are realistic I presume and some are quite weird and strange.  I think it will be interesting to the target audience of adults to see it and laugh because being adults they understand that these imaginations are absurd and untrue. 

After brainstorming ideas, I decided to go with the last one, 'time capsule' because I wanted to end the unit 7 on a personal note. I thought that since the last three projects weren't really derived from my person, it would be nice if one project was dedicated to myself, so that's why I chose it. I think, therefore, my audience is my future self in the future. upon reflection, I thought it might be too revealing or awkward for another person to be reading about you when you're not a famous person or anyone important to the viewers. 

Thinking in terms of methods, 95% reason being that because we have to hand in a publication and I haven't made one yet so I should use this project to create a publication outcome. 5% reason because other than the publication format, I can think of limited suitable formats for outcome such as diary form.. I'm not really sure and will spend some time on it to figure it out

If I had more time, I will definitely develop in further, first of all, I would create more pages, and have a smoother link/ transition from presenting illustrations with random facts about 20 year old me to linking ahead to the 30 year old me to end the publication. I felt that the ending was too abrupt because I didn't have more time to think about the ending and even if i did, I'm not sure if i would have been able to illustrate it on time.

To further develop this, I can perhaps build an installation with the theme of a time capsule in mind. or creating a film that has a nostalgic feeling that documents snippets of the daily life of my 20-year-old self, similarly to a vlog but specific that its giving real-life moving image about the city I'm living in right now, the people I know and etc.