The Lottie Journals

Questions worth answering

2009-08-18T13:46:00.000+09:30

via the very sharp Stephen Irven:

* What is the primary reason for having it?

* Who will be using it, and in what way? (Is it a broadcast medium, or collaborative, or something else entirely? What sort of people will be interested in it?

* What kind of information will it be focused on?

* Is there another website doing something similar? How is this going to be different?

* Has anyone done something similar, but ended up with a result that you don't like? What has led to this?

* Are the aims and objectives likely to change over a 12, 24, 36 month timescale? Is there any way to envisage or predict what might be needed down the line?

* How many people are likely to be involved with using or contributing to this (in a 12, 24, 36 month timescale)

* Is the whole site for public use, or are there likely to be private or restricted areas?

* What are your planned timescales for making and using it? Are there several phases?

The initial proposal.

2009-08-12T21:57:00.001+09:30

The catalyst: An investigation into participatory creative engagement through the design of a web-based system.

This research aims to investigate, through implementation, modification and reflection, how a dynamic online environment is best designed to facilitate creativity in its users. In doing so, this exploration will traverse connectivity, community, creativity techniques, and the ideal conditions for experiencing ongoing conceptual innovation.

The objective is to build a stimulating construct through which visual artists and designers can regain their creative impetus by responding at will to elemental briefs; tangential creative provocations. The research will work actively through the assumption that the tactile act of generating artwork, unrelated though it may be to the primary objective of the blocked creative concerned, will facilitate further creative generation.

The response of participants will inform the design of the site throughout the investigation, forming a digital sculpture concerning the relationship between inspiration and application – the generation of actual art and design.

2009-08-12T15:38:00.002+09:30

Sticky... think about the following (dubiously sourced) from an e-zine authored by Kal Bishop.

Motivation. Motivation is arguably more important than nature / nurture or traits. Someone with natural ability or placed in the right environment may not take advantage of it unless motivated. There is intrinsic motivation, synergistic and non-synergistic extrinsic motivation. How can it be induced and measured? There are many elements: material reward, progress to the ideal self, self-determination, self-evaluation, feedback, enjoyment, competency expansion, recognition and feasibility.

Blocks to creativity and organisational culture. What are the blocks to creativity and how can they be overcome? We can all be more creative, so what is stopping us? There are many blocks such as evaluation apprehension (in its many forms) and lack of adequate finance and resources. Separating creative from critical thinking, incremental productivity, tools that draw out tacit knowledge and using frameworks to trigger flow are some of the effective unblocking techniques. What is psychological safety and freedom? What properties of an organisational culture cultivate productivity?

Alllright Cleveland!! Are you ready to rock!!?!

2009-08-12T15:22:00.003+09:30

This research goes out to those creative "identifying" folks out there. Pointless to try and find a common trait to creativity. As such, the results will be an at will engagement. If you want to get your creative on, I don't care what your day job is, we'll get it going.

Huh.

2009-08-08T20:37:00.002+09:30

Stunned to learn that that the word 'provocation' is already in use in association with creativity techniques. I'll continue to use it regardless; it's the best expression of what these little prompts are.

The proposal

2009-08-06T21:12:00.009+09:30

So I'm writing a new research proposal. Not that I'm proposing, exactly, I'm more like doing, but taking the time to propose anyway. It's like living with someone for thirty years, and getting married at town hall just to make it official. Or something. Anyway, it's hard, which is why it needs to be done because every time I struggle with the phrasing or angle, it means that something is unresolved,a nd I need to think it through. Everything needs to be articulated carefully, or I'm going to find myself in real trouble at some point later on.
Take for example the working title. The problem I'm having at this early stage is that the title is too long, but it's hard to know where to trim where the snip won't weaken meaning.
Come with me... I'll show you...

The catalyst: An investigation into participatory creative engagement and active outcomes through the design of a web-based system.

Isn't that a doozie? See, it says everything it needs to, and is only a Tweet in length, but jeez. It's a "catalyst", sure. Got it. The full colon is an equal sign, and on the right, balances rather ambitiously, precariously, the reality of what the catalyst is. Simply stated, it's action research project using the experience of people engaging through my design to solve a certain problem, a problem of finding a way to rouse latent creativity. I have to say "active outsomes", because I'm very deliberately not dealing with notions of creative ideation. What I am interested in is creativity put into action - variously; things made.

Here's a helpful definition of a catalyst, with the irrelevant portion dimmed. Emphasis all mine, baby.

catalyst
–noun
1.
Chemistry. a substance that causes or accelerates a chemical reaction without itself being affected.
2.
something that causes activity between two or more persons or forces without itself being affected.
3.
a person or thing that precipitates an event or change: His imprisonment by the government served as the catalyst that helped transform social unrest into revolution.
4.
a person whose talk, enthusiasm, or energy causes others to be more friendly, enthusiastic, or energetic.

Another problem I'm encountering is the sheer scope of even this simple seeming project. My God. The more I think, and read and write, the more ground I see needs to be covered. It's as though every conceptual element supporting my project splits before my eyes, like cels multiplying, and each in turn halving, and splitting, and halving - two thoughts becoming four, four becoming sixteen, sixteen becoming thirty-two... it's really giving me a case of the shrinking realities, like contemplating the night sky and just thinking, "Huh. I guess I don't matter in this vastness." OK, that's an analogy too far.

Some people have done some really interesting study into creativity. Like this, for example. Lot's of great reading. I haven't seen a project like mine so far. So far, and so good.

A few tentacles...

2009-08-03T19:30:00.004+09:30

PROVOCATION: Hold a sheet of A4 white paper landscape, and using scissors, cut a landscape across the top of the page, and using negative space, cut detail into the paper. Lose yourself.
WEB: Infinte, looping, scrolling journey across the landscape. Left to right travel, each project abutted against each other to form a continuous journey.

PROVOCATION: Draw and name people you see pass you by while sitting in a café (or library, or park). Draw them as you imagine their nature or personlity to be, using line, shape, or texture to convey the essense of the person.
WEB: Virtual café (or library, or park), in manner of Saul Steinberg. Piece all submissions together to juxtapose interesting characters.

PROVOCATION: Visually express an irrational fear
WEB: Periodic table of the elements of fear.

PROVOCATION: Write an angry letter to the editor
WEB: Typographic exploration of outrage with dynamic text.

2009-08-01T21:17:00.001+09:30

Learning XHTML. Look at me go...

I will probablty try the tech learning during dull points, when little thinking is required, or when time is short, and the site plan and theory to larger chuncks of time.

Flow

2009-07-29T21:39:00.000+09:30

TED Talks: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on flow

Obvious stumbling block.

2009-07-29T21:03:00.005+09:30

How to jolt folks out of creative inertia while luring them onto the internet to play, one of history's most devastating and debilitating wasters of time?

The physical media demanded by the provocation may hold the key to stepping away from the computer. Or maybe it's not about media? My instinct is that the opportunity to experience Flow through an arbitrary brief will be enough to set the artistic recovery in motion.

Something to revisit along the way.

The technical aspirations of a noob.

2009-07-29T20:36:00.008+09:30

Here are a few examples of the sorts of things I would like to achieve from a technical perspective on my site. Some of the confounding factors.

Some of the content will be like Learning to Love You More, where I will invite submission of work, which could be images, text or.... gulp... video/animation/sound. Although the projects will be more fine arts than these ones. In fact the projects won't be like this at all, so bad example? LTLYM should give a sense of how the provocations might work as cultural probe. The site is about inspiring creativity, so it's important to me that the look be inspiring too, and that each task/project be visually reflected in the design. In my (vast and overachieving) imagination, this means that every project will have a different section of the site, and will function differently.

I imagine my site as a mythical octopus; the head being the homepage starting point, and the provocations as tentacles numbering many more than eight, each with a different design and operating style. The media must inspire above and beyond the simple brain tickle of the provocation.

I can start with one or two tentacles at first, and add more on as time goes by, hopefully building a digital "scuplture" of sorts. What this means in practical terms is, if I have participants submit, say for example, a stamp design based around a simple, personal brief (the provocation), then I might (just by way of example) want it to upload into a collage type pattern on the site where it builds with the work of others to create a visual cloud, or an incredible montage, like on Exactitudes. I might even want to load these submissions to the site onto the collage according to a colour, or design matrix that I have created, like you can see on the Shop by Colour section of Etsy To complicate matters, and just by way of example, I would like a collage like this to be explorable in some way, say, if you roll over with the mouse, you can look at a stamp in the montage more closely, or read comments by the person who submitted it.

A tentacle my be, depending on the tone and intent of the provocation, be a flowering of words or images, along thematic lines, like the work of Stephanie Posavec's Writing Without Words. Another tentacle may traverse a map, or navigate a pathway through concepts, like the site for the film Donnie Darko. Or there may be an arcade-like tentacle, which generate amusements, like Chip Wass's World of Wassco. And this would be one 'tentacle', of the site, with several others, all with different appearances relating to the task it concerns. I also have to think of a home page starting point from which these all spring, which is easy to navigate, easy to return to, and holds the whole thing together.

In terms of time frame, I would like to get the home page, and maybe one or two of the simpler of these 'tentacles' up and running before the end of the year, but I would like in the coming year to create ever more beautiful 'tentacles' to add on, building up the site as I learn more. This all depends on what I can learn and when.

Painting myself into a technical corner with theory paint...

2009-07-29T20:04:00.006+09:30

I need to know how to build a website. Why chose a medium I have no expertise in? Because it's most appropriate to the study, so I just need to work hard overcoming a missing skill set to realise it. I can't jam the theory into ill-fitting media.

Besides, learning something new is always a good thing.

So I asked the asinine question on Metafliter, and got a a fantastic avalanche of carefully considered answers. The consensus seems to be that I'm attempting something difficult, but not impossible. Something which will be laborious and slow to accomplish, but which will leave me well equipped with web development skills for the future. I got a lot of detailed, step-by-step advice about how to approach the task, like the following, one of the best answers:

Well, it sounds like you are trying to jump in the deep end! Which isn't a bad thing actually, you can learn a lot in a short time. What you are proposing does sound fairly advanced in terms of fuctionailty, so if you have a strict time limit you may have to prune some of that fuctionality back. When you have a bit of basic knowledge you will be in a better place to assess this. I would second most of the advice above, in particular DarlingBri's comment. With the extra info you have just provided, it sounds like you will eventually want some web programming skills. PHP is the best best for a beginner - you can achieve a lot with it quickly. The good news is that as DarlingBri suggests, a lot of the more generic complex fuctionality such as forums etc can be achieved with a content management solution (CMS) such as Joomla. Web hosts like Dreamhost have one-click installers for a lot of the more popular CMS's and the Dreamhost's wiki is pretty good if you get stuck.I'd tackle the learning in this order:1) The basics. XHTML and CSS. Run through the tutorials at W3Schools and you're set. If you are using firefox, get the web developer toolbar and firebug to help you debug and understand what css is creating what effect. Dreamweaver's code view is quite nice for search and replace functionality and code hinting, but it's a lot of money and you can get by fine with a notepad replacement like SciTe.2) Get a basic understanding of how PHP (and server side coding in general) works. I highly recommend a book to help you with this process and for future reference. I like the Visual Quickstart series personally. This should also give you an overview of using web databases like MySQL, which in the long run you probably won't need to know too much about if you are using a CMS, but I think a fundamental understanding of how databases work in the context of a website is very important. At this point you can either be testing your pages directly on your web hosting (unwieldy - annoying amount of FTPing), or if you want to test locally on your machine you will need a local web server. Xampp makes this easy.3) Get set up with a CMS like Joomla (some alternatives here if you want to compare functionality of CMS's - drupal and joomla are the 'big two' are should have better documentation / community support). Start hacking templates using your CSS skills.4) If you want to add visual florishes, jQuery if great, but I'd recommed learning a little about JavaScript and the DOM first.Good luck! When you have all this under your belt you will be an accomplished web developer and will have a skill set to tackle most anything you can think of. Feel free to memail me if you need more info on anything. Oh, and with regards to design, make sure you are doing sketchs and organisational flow charts etc in the 'real world' before you start implementing your site. Try and think about usability from the persective of the end user.

So you can see what's involved.

I'm actually going to take this advice, and learn CSS and XHTML, adding to my knowlege according to the various Mefi replies after I have confidence in those areas. As for the demands of my PhD program, however, it's probably not realistic to get a site up and running this semester, and as a very big part of the work is planning the site, on paper, I will get down to that concurrently. That's going to take a lot of work. A lot of thinking.

My greatest fear, at this stage, is this: The site is heavily dependant on the participation of others, and without that participation, it's just a portal of no consequence. I can strong-arm all my creative, brilliant friends into contributing for the sake of my survival early on, but I will have to reach beyond that to really get it going in the way I want it to. Must I promote it? What happens if no one comes to play?

The practical beginning.

2009-07-23T05:01:00.003+09:30

Well, as it turns out, all I have to do to get started, truly started, is build a website. I'll go into the panic about why I'm doing that at all another time, and just stick to what I need to try and do in practical terms for now. The problem with the website project is that I've never built a website before and have no idea how to go about it. I think to myself constantly that is OK, I can learn, but I have to go ahead and do that now. I actually have to get the making under way.

I've really never had a problem learning things like this, so in spite of the expected steep learning curve, I know I can manage it, it's just figuring out how to begin, like standing at a rockface, studying the surface for a fingerhold and toehold to heft my body into position number one, not knowing how I'll get all the way to the top, but hoping that I'll be able to shout down to someone trusty on the ground for guidance. Jerad? He's great with simple programming. Perhaps Matt the I.T. Guy can assist along the way too.

What complicates matters is I need to build a site that will allow a lot of future flexibilitiy and creativity. I've not seen what I hope to achieve on the web before, so I only have partial models to follow.

I like sites like Metafilter which inspire earnest participation, and seem fairly light on trolling, spam and light posting about what was one television last night or what people had for dinner. This tone is set in part by the way participants join; you must pay (a nominal) $5 fee to sign up, then wait a long-seeming week in order to ask a question (and post too? I can't remember, but there is a period of forced observation before you can participate). Moderators seem to sit on the forum pretty diligently, deleting anything which derails the flow of feedback, and every member can flag posts that they think are offensive or irrelevant.

The result is that when someone asks a (sensible) question, they get dozens, sometimes hundreds of (sensible) answers. I've actually never seen a healthy flow like this on any other site. Though the setup seems somewhat draconian, it results in a fairly smoothly run community, where as long as you put some thought into your enquiry, no matter how esoteric or obscure, you don't feel that you're going to be shouted down, bullied, ignored or flamed.

I have no intention, nor realistic ability, to charge participants a fee to join, but there may have to be other hurdles implemented in order to get honest participation. Perhaps for later, and something to think about anyway - how this is achieved in practical terms. I think having a true audience of people who have come to the site with the same objectives as me will probably help, so investigating how a tone of that kind is set is also helpful.

OBJECTIVES (today):
Find web hosting.
Ask the simple question in a helpful place: "How do I get a website off the ground - one which needs to be simple at first, but will allow for creative complexity later when my own skill-set drags it's way up to my ideas and ambitions for the site?"

Like a coin in can of coke.

2009-03-10T12:46:00.002+10:30

That Squash! thought reminds me of Brenda Laurel's TED talk, and the confluence of "humanism" and "clear-eyed research" she talks about. How to make both these goals have equal weight without allowing them to erode one another?

Squash!

2009-03-10T12:37:00.002+10:30

I had a sudden thought last night: I've got to be really careful that when I'm working through this idea, that it doesn't become too distant in tone from the point of origin, which is the correspondance I enjoy with Heather. I wonder whether it's worth trying to define what is good about our discussions about creativity and creative blocks, so that I can always be mindful that my work results in the same feel - the genuine heart, or core of the idea. It really needs to be there. Would this be like catching exotic butterflies, only to pin the to a board, label them, and use them as a dead illustration of the species? Ugh.

Warmth, collaboration, mutual assistance, humour, personality... how do all these things cvreated by design, in a community setting?

How do you build complex systems and imbue them with warmth?

DPB - Daily Provocation Blast

2009-03-03T16:23:00.002+10:30

If I have the chance I will think of a few provocations on the fly. Not all of the will be good, but just to keep them coming:

• Create a concertina secret mini book about a secret. A mini book you can keep hidden.
• Invent a folded paper object. Can you show someone else how to make it?
• Stab some scissors through a sheet of white paper or newspaper. Now cut a landscape with trees and animals into the centre of the page, in negative space.

Mapping the Terrain – Contextual Concerns

2009-03-02T14:35:00.005+10:30

There's more than the below - I just need to blow it open in a brain-stormy way, and continue to try to think of even more contextual angles, just so that I can be sure I'm seeing this topic with some clarity and ensure I'm not missing anything. This would be the beginnings of a world view, to be followed by a national view (proposal) and street view (question). I'm working backwards in a way, because I know the question, but need to figure out what has been achieved by others - what is being done now?

Interactivity and Connectivity
Comments and file sharing – what makes for the most fluid and inviting collaboration? What inspires users to upload and share? Explore exclusionary limitations and the web community; ie. Metafilter.
Compare with the didactic auteur – genred blogs

The Blocked Artist
Investigating creativity productivity and inspiration – what, if any, is the benefit of just putting pen to paper? What, if any, is the benefit of a tangental or unrelated task to creative inspiration? Explore both the generation of work, and the collection and sharing of environmental stimuli.

The Web and Creative Collaboration
Learning to Love You More, Post Secret, Found!, Flickr, Tumblr, Twitter, Etsy. There’s sure to be more

Dynamic Interfaces
Looking at Exactitudes, Visual Complexity, Etsy, Flickr, Facebook groups, blogs. Flash sites… exploring the most interesting web sites and their approach.

Curiosity and Creativity
The Artist’s Way, craft blogs, IKEA hack ... there's gotta be more. Just need to think harder about this.

Aspects of Engagement in other Media and Fine Arts
The inspiration of the Sydney Biennale works, perhaps imagining ways that collaborative web work can become public work, either anonymously in Guerilla Art form, or as a kind of event. Stephanie Posavec's Writing Without Words

Oh hey... and do all this while not losing the intent or charm in the fog of broader context. I want to try an remember the source of this concept always, otherwise this is going to evolve into a mechanical beast, crushing me with it's giant pincer claws, it's red eyes flashing...

Know anyone who forgot how to be the artist they used to be?

2009-02-26T22:26:00.001+10:30

Can a designed experience or environment be a catalyst for imagination, visual awareness and creative processes in people who are seeking to re-connect with their creativity, curiosity and sensual awareness?

Is it possible to provoke responses of creativity and curiosity through design?

I will…
Build a website which awakens curiosity and creativity by proposing stimulating creative provocations for participants to select, take up and interpret in any chosen media, returning to the site to share the results, compare, and receive real-time feedback. The small tasks – unrelated or tangental to any particular project or artistic discipline, may include suggestions which harness a number of ruses to minimise fear and inaction in the participant, be they irreverent, disarmingly simple, without context, speculative, subversive, trivial, humorous, sentimental, or observational. This will take the form of “provoke” and “react” in a community settling where participants can contribute, comment, and counter the provocations I pose with their own visual responses and provocations, in a dynamic and visually stimulating way.

I will test the engagement with the provocations, and modify the design of the environment accordingly to create an environment designed to reconnect the participants with their own personal creative passions and as a catalyst for concept iteration and exploration. My investigation will incorporate action research techniques; I will intervene to amend the design of the environment informed by group dynamics and the resultant creative reactions.

At times idea taking precedence over execution may be strongly inferred in the provocation, to circumvent the perfectionist inclinations in participants who may stall or procrastinate by allowing technique to block the free flow of ideas. At other times, the participant will be asked to retrieve visual, textual or thematic cues from the wider environment, and interpret them for insertion into the site; widening the scope for inspiration through arbitrarily prescribed viewpoint, framework through task, and motivation through public display and reaction to the resultant work. Other participants may be motivated or inspired by the reactions of others.

My chief motivation will be to instigate creative play, outside of the pressures to achieve external artistic goals, presupposing that uninhibited play in a discretely guided environment can generate a quantity of work in various media with self-censorship suppressed by the brief, unpretentious nature of the provocations. Inherent to each provocation will be one or more specific, but concealed, creative possibilities designed to motivate, inspire and energise the participant through further personal exploration.

I will explore in my writing the journey made between ideation of the provocations, and the supposed outcomes, and how this in turn shapes the provocations. In most cases, I will be travelling forward into the creative position, to anticipate possible reactions and engagements with the task, returning to re-shape the provocation and pose it publically. I want to reflect on the shaping of the provocations via this personal journey back and forth between Question (thought) and Result (action).

I will seek to create an engaging, unique space in the design of the site, responding to the visual presentation of each provocation and responses as appropriate, so that explanation and framework is present only to explain the workings of the site, and the designed space hosting the collected work results in a dynamic, collaborative web based artwork. As with each provocation, the general visual tone of the site, will be designed to describe a creative, energetic, free space.

Seemingly unrelated tasks will provoke quick reaction, free of pressure, and create the environment for ideas to flow. Without expectations about the form the resulting reaction to the provocation will take, participants may feel liberated to indulge exploration and creative play, inspiring their personal work in the process.

I anticipate that participants will approach and subside from the project as it fills their needs.

My contextual concerns are the various artist motivation platforms, in print and on the web– each effective and limited in the way the participant can engage with the process.

Breakthrough

2009-02-24T14:53:00.002+10:30

The session I had with Kate was beyond successful - she really helped me cut through a few of the ideas which I have been circling like a buzzard, and get to some of the core concerns. The feeling was kind of thrilling as these sort of truths came tumbling forth and I rolled form point, to point, to point, forming connections as I travelled.

What has been happening of late is that I have been noodling with the PhD work, riddled by anxiety that I have no core question, or have lost it somewhere in the undergrowth. At the same time, as mentioned, I have become aware that I need to find a way to break back into my old creative habits and processes. Thinking through this, and forming a small organisation to help play games to get my pen moving has been a big part of what I've been doing lately, but I didn't see that they are one and the same thing. I'm trying to find a method I can use to liberate creativity, to excite curiosity, which is what my project has always been about.

So while I've been thinking about these provocations, it didn't occur to me that the provocations, are the work. It makes more sense for me to deal with people dealing with the sense that their creativity has dried up, than pre-teen girls, because what I have been doing, organically, is working through ways to get creativity flowing. Tangental ways, unrelated to the core problem.

So now I have an idea what I'm doing... More soon.

Further provocations

2009-02-18T15:56:00.002+10:30

• Add weight and age to a model in a magazine using photoshop
• Write the school report of a beloved author
• Draw and name people you see pass you by while sitting in a cafe (or library, or park)
• Express an irrational fear
• Make a pen drawing about a song
• Draw a favourite childhood meal or snack
• Turn a politician in the newspaper into a woman
• Make one image (draw/photograph) to sum up a film
• Draw a teacher you had in primary school
• Secretly draw or write a description of three people you are looking at on public transport or in a cafe
• Design a seal or stamp for your own republic
• Make a collage out of the car sale ads by blowing up or shrinking the copy on a photocopier, cut, arrange, paste.
• Write a haiku about haikus, a limerick about limericks, a synopsis of a synopsis
• Write a restaurant review for last night's dinner

The Catalyst

2009-02-17T15:06:00.005+10:30

My meeting was super, super encouraging. I feel that I have something valid to add to the world, but will need to reconcile my own reflections with the academic writing required for my research to have the appropriate weight. Discuss further with Kate.

HJ and I have launched a new venture to help us both get the creative engines roaring.
Herewith, a few ideas for creative provocations. Dopey or neat, it doesn't matter, as long as it gets things rolling:
• Make a drawing without taking your pen off the page
• Design a tattoo for a biker
• Accidental beauty: photos
• To work and back: A journey
• Draw a map without context of your common paths in the neighbourhood, each path a different colour. Annotate?
• Take 15 pictures holding your camera at arm's length, and without looking through the viewfinder. Crop them to create great compositions or a series.
• Explore red (or yellow, or blue, or grey, etc)
• Create an image of a criminal from the headlines of today's newspaper.
• Pursue a theme: Blushing. Barry Manilow. Hand held. Herbaceous. Dot. Round. (any media - you could think up starting points all day.)
• Create a silhouette landscape by cutting into plain white paper
• Describe yourself, using items from a newspaper or magazine (text, image)
• Describe your favourite smell (any medium)
• Draw a character from a beloved book
• Write an angry letter to the editor
• Take a picture which expresses boredom (anger, anticipation, fear, adoration... etcetera)
• Modify a glamour shot from a magazine using any means at hand.
• Draw someone you haven't met but know through Facebook
• The best robot
• Trace an object sitting on your desk onto paper, and make a portrait out of it
• Write about a regret
• Write a letter to the celebrity you had a teenage crush on (make drawings too)

And some places to steal provocations from:
Learning to Love You More
Post Secret
Found
The Artist's Way (the book has tons of ideas, though I could do without the spiritual shite)

So here's the plan, Stan.

2009-02-11T21:56:00.004+10:30

Thursday evening, that's tomorrow night I will be brainstorming the hell out of this residual question refining problem, which so confounded me late last year, and has left me wandering around the academic wilderness, looking for a clue. I will be using the no-nonsense brain power of a secret academic who will ask the right questions, and accept no padded answers. Once I have that nutted out, then I can reveal my secret method of advancing my happy regression into creative Kell of the past.

Tangental: I heard a funny story about a company who, for reasons of political correctness, decided to shelve the phrase "brain storm" out of respect for people who have had strokes and other neurological maladies. They now have an "Ideas Shower", which is kinda limp, isn't it?

The holiday is over, baby.

2009-02-05T20:52:00.003+10:30

I'm back, and I'm pretty sure that I've lost myself, or at least my creative routines, instincts, navigational skills. And I don't mean lost-it-over-the-Christmas-break, I mean lost it somewhere over the past fews years since I finished my last film,"Danny" and swore off drawing for a few weeks. Then I moved house. Then I had a baby. Then, then, then...

I feel such deep shame over this neglect, I can't tell you. I dug out my sketch book and some markers and will try to remedy the situation the only way I can think to, and that's by just going forth and drawing, without any goal or expectation, just to begin with - t make the process feel natural again, or at least stimulate some ideas. I may try to use some kind of online literary brainstorming application to give me some key words to start with, and hopefully that will break the meniscus on this problem, which feels very similar to the awful gnawing sensation I feel when I know I ought to write a thank you note for a kind deed, and become too busy and preoccupied to take care of it. Until I put that card in the mailbox, I do not feel right with myself. That makes it feel simple, but it's not simple. The fact is, you don't hone any craft without doing, doing, doing. Reminding myself of that is a fantastic guilt trip, and highly motivating. I really have no business not doing what I do best.

Question ouija

2008-12-10T15:17:00.001+10:30

Feeling good and fighting fit. Ready to tackle the thinking ahead of me, but I will need time, space and quiet, none of which are available to me today. Tomorrow night is going to be it.

Unravelling?

2008-12-09T13:01:00.013+10:30

Met with Kate yesterday and she invited another academic to participate in the meeting with a view to this person acting as my co-supervisor. Meeting went... not so well. In fact it was demoralising and unpleasant, actually, which I attribute to three things. Two of which I am responsible for, and need to seriously work very, very hard on, the third was, I believe mostly out of my hands.

The first point, is that I need to get to the core of what my question is, or find a unique, problem to work on. A specific one. An appropriate one. Needless to say, this is a big problem, but not an insurmountable one. I will have to think this through carefully, but I have a few ideas, and I'm sure this can be resolved. This was an excellent point, and I will make being at least half way original and intelligent about this my priority in the coming week. I need to distill my general idea into something tangible, and it must be interesting to me. But the criticism is a valid one, and I'm very glad I heard it.

The second problem stems from my inability, in this particular situation, on this particular day, to articulate my ideas, or at least defend them in an intelligent way. In know I can do this, and I feel ashamed really that I was caught off guard, and wasn't more lucid. Basically, the second academic took the opportunity to make a number of statements about the work I am doing and the assumptions I am making. I came to the meeting with several pages of notes, really to ask questions of Kate, but that would have been as useless under the circumstances as asking how to get the train to Chatswood - "Oh, no... you're in Moscow, we don't have a rail system here. Anyway, you don't need to get the train, you're at the livestock market. Shouldn't you be bidding for chickens?" So I didn't ask any of those questions, and I sat there like a stunned mullet while someone said they assumed that I had assumed certain things that I knew that I hadn't.

Now I responded in this way for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I genuinely wanted to listen and learn if I could. I came to the meeting for guidance. secondly, because it seemed important to me not to seem defensive about my work and I didn't want to seem over-sensitive to criticism, and I thought I should pick my battles when dealing with someone who is so well respected and has so much to offer me. But when I went home, and all through the night I continued to think of the things I should have said, because well, I don't think she was right on a number of points. And I don't mean data points, I mean about me, and my position. A good example of this is the presumption that I have made sweeping generalisations about girls, when all I have written about, to date is from my own outlook, my own experience. I haven't yet begun to get to the heart of what interests others, or even really who those others, specifically, are. also I need to deal carefully with any misapprehension that my work is consumable - my ideas have been camped around the appeal of consumable goods. Passive flow of entertainment, the nature of consumerism, the economy, the internet, the value of creativity, Flow Theory vs. wellbeing sought in group settings... all these came up and were mishandled by me, and had me incorrectly placed by the academic. Worst of all, I felt my positioning as a design/art practitioner slipping away. I couldn't see how I could do any kind of visual experimentation or exploration under these circumstances. I felt disabled.

The third point is that I should take care not to get into these situations with anyone who hasn't fully understood where I'm coming from, or what my focus is. I think this may be my problem too, because I should be able to explain both these things in a simple, all-emcompassing way, but to be critiqued in this way because a person has misunderstood my intentions and approach to the point where I wonder what I'm doing taking up space in a chair and air in a university office... well, it was just awful. I have been in this situation in the past, and I should have learned from it. I have the right, I believe, to brief a person on my work before they make generalisations about its focus, particularly if they have not heard from me, nor read my work.

I don't thinkI'm prepared to state at this stage just exactly what species of expert I intend to become, or what I hope to be the autority on. I have started the work, not finished it, and while I intend to travel from A to B in a sensible, planned way, I simply can't say I know what I don't yet know.

I gave the meeting some thought, and have decided that the second academic isn't a good match for me, not because I was faced with some hard truths, and some serious defecits in my ability to perform academically (both of which happened), but in part because the whole experience made me feel temporarily worthless, because it confused the hell out of me, and because I don't know if my values or approach will ever seem relevant or interesting in the view of this person. And that's 100% OK. I don't need to surround myself with yes-men, but I do need to feel like I'm being challenged where my true weaknesses lie. I think there may have been a divide between hard theory and visual exploration too, but my mind becomes a bit muddy in the recollection of this point.

Anyway, the experience was pretty horrible. Depleted, my love for the work and motivation really hit a bit of a low during those two or three hours, and it felt as though my project slipped out of my grasp, and became something it is not - started to take a shape I didn't care for anymore, kind of like falling out of love. I left with unanswered questions and a sense of having no real way to proceed in any direction. It certainly didn't help that I had slept in past 6am that morning for the first time in two years, and only had black coffee in my stomach - again, not such a good call. Like the Boy Scouts say, "Be Prepared!".

Anyway, onward and upward: I'm just going to deal with it for what it is - a challenge to get things right from now on. I'm not going to cry, or quit, or complain about the meeting - it was what it was - a clear elucidation of where I am falling down, and what I need to remain vigilant about. This is all part of it, and this is how we travel from place to place through an uncharted wilderness.

Danger

2008-12-07T23:14:00.002+10:30

So much planning - just gearing up for my meetng with Kate tomorrow. All these small things, small invented deadlines, provide such structure along the way. I have made a long list of things I need to do and ideas I need to address, and now I will just have to place them all in a heirarchy and start doing them. It's exciting, really - I'm enjoying the work so much, and have so much enthusiasm for it. The only thing I don't have a lot of is time.

One thing I really have to avoid is using planning as procrastination - a way to avoid the creative exploration I need to do next. As mentioned, I'm a little afraid of it. It would be easy for anyone to just say "Jump in" but I need to transition, and the important discipline will be putting an end date on play, and setting a firm commencement date for exploration.

I'm going to propose that I change modes on the 24th of January - the date we're going to check out Bon Iver at the Sydeny festival.

Growing sideways in every direction, like mould in a petri dish.

2008-12-06T20:23:00.007+10:30

A petri dish has sides which contain the growth, and so should my work be contained by my objectives and planning.

Tonight I will be planning my next steps, now that I have my first chapter in circulation. My short term goals are to meet with Kate on Monday - I've taken the day off work so that we can have a substantial meeting, rather than rushing things as we may have to do every other time. When I have her feedback on the chapter, I will apply the changes, then shelve the chapter for a later date. Over the maturation period, I may alter my approach, discover something new, or gain some perspective which I can apply to the chapter with the clarity which time can afford, so I think the plan to set the writing aside is a good one.

In the coming few weeks (months?) I will carefully plan the rest of my thesis; that is to say, I will at least set out the objectives and framework, or expand upon what I have already set forth on myfirst chapter. I think this will take the form of Chapter 2 (sub-list), Chapter 3 (sub-list), Chapter 4 (sub-list), etc. I'll be doing this for two reasons. Firstly, I plan on moving into a creative phase, which I will discuss in a minute, and so it's important to get all this structure down now so that I know how to proceed when I come up for air some months from now. Secondly, not only is it just good practise to plan in this way, but it will just supply me with a roadmap of sorts, telling me step-by-step how I should proceed. I can see the planning becoming a bit murky towards the middle where I plan a conversation bewtween the theory and the practise, but that's OK.

My second objective for the next few months is to move into the creative zone of this project. I'll do this in two phases, the first being a self-indulgent period where I will allow myself to muddle through various arbitrary techniques and processes to free up my mind and hand, and remind me what I'm capable of. I think I should do this throughout the coming Christmas period, say over a month, and set a deadline which I may call the SDA Date*, somewhere around mid January. After this point I will go full tilt into phase two - creativity with a purposeful intent. I will just need to go hard creating and testing my work against my objectives (Hmmm... Ethics Clearance time?)

Frankly, I'm scared witless by the upcoming creative work, for three reasons; I'm in a literary frame of mind which may be tough to transit out of, I expect the work to be kerrr-azy and without structure (woah - am I ready for that?), and finally (unk!) because I have lost confidence in my creative abilities. A leeeetle bit. I'm not sure why - too long since I finished my film "Danny", and felt it kind of sucked? Because lately, it's not what I do every day, even though I'm a designer. I think I'm going to work on illustration, and a little bit of colour theory, which should match my abilities well, but I'm perched on the side of the creativity pool, all blue-lipped in my swimmers, terrified of the jump into what I presume are the cold waters in front of me. I have been performing a little mantra which goes a little like this: When I focus and work hard on creative tasks which I'm passionate about, they are always successful. This is absolutely true, but saying it to myself doesn't make me believe it. It's like a friend saying "Jump! The water's nice and warm" but not really believing them. In a way the extension of this idea, also a truism, is that I have no business not working on it, when it's what I do best, and love best.

Also, I have taken to heart this quotation:
"It's no good running a pig farm for thirty years while saying 'I was meant to be a ballet dancer'. By that time, pigs are your style."
Quentin Crisp.

This thought resonates with me. I know exactly what he's talking about, and it calls to mind a conversation I once had with my dear friend Antonia, about the visual artists she knows through her work as a curator. She described to me how they are all people who have worked long and hard to hone their artistic skills - no presumptuous middle-aged up-start has a look in when they finally turn to their love of art, because they would be competing, or compared to those who have been sharpening their visual accumen for a very long time. No pressure or anything.

Needless to say, I very much need to get over myself, and get making. I'm on it.

* Acronym key: Stop Dicking Around Date.

Semi-amusing side note: Out of curiosity, I took a lengthy online test which determines a suitable career path, based on your personality traits. My results? Graphic Designer or Scientific Researcher. I'm dead serious.

Creative springboards...

2008-12-05T14:52:00.002+10:30

Great creativity suggestions, in answer to my Metafilter question (paraphrased). The things I'm going to start with are bold:

• Setting up extremely strict guidelines, like small exercises that take an hour to achieve at most, is very useful
• Set up a ritual
• mind map
• word, sentence or paragraph generator
• immerse myself in sensual experience
• Get friends to commission extremely short creative works from you, like 60-90 seconds each. Make them place ridiculous restrictions on your work, like you can only photograph marshmallows and flowers. Or you have to alternate three seconds of B&W film with five seconds of color, and use that rhythm to pace your narrative
• I took a yoga and meditation class for several years and they always burned a certain type of incense. I find it much easier to meditate if I burn that incense now, it's kind of a short cut to that state of mind for me. I would say try to bring as many of your senses into your transition ritual as you can. Find a tea or juice that you save just for this, something distinctive, blood orange maybe, or a fancy, sparkling mineral water in a nice bottle. Find a scent, incense or something you dab on your wrists, even just a little bottle of essential oil that you open and sniff. Again, something you use only for this. Play a song you love or the sound of water or get some sort of chime that you ring or you could chant. If you know how to meditate or know relaxation techniques get into that sort of state and then make a visualization for yourself. Go through a door from one room into a drastically different room. You could start in a library and move into a studio filled with all sorts of colors and textures, paints and clay and toys and whatever else feeds you. Or get on a plane or boat and travel into your creative place. Feel the boat rock on the water, hear the sea gulls, listen to the engine of the plane, definitely go first class. I like to have some physical signifier, I usually use a bracelet to remind me of what I'm trying to accomplish but you could wear a ring or a necklace or even tie a red string around your ankle. Have fun with it.
• What I always did after a period of distance was start with a 100 drawings/sketches in a day ritual. It will take about 8 hours and it is exhausting. You don't need to draw anything in particular, nor do the drawings have to be heavily invested with time or talent. In theory I bet you could finish this in about an hour, but who are you trying to impress? The goal here is to acknowledge 1) what you are currently thinking about, sensitive to, directing towards, interested in 2) what can be done with that.
• Maintain a work journal daily. Don't be melodramatic here - but clarify your thoughts: "Yesterday I formed the nose. Today I will paint it, and try to make achieve the proper sand texture. Its reminding me of a can of sardines." Like in simplifying the equation? - cut out all the extra noise that is distracting you. Place in simple - unemotional terms what you did, what happened, and what is the current state and direction of the project(s). Acknowledge changes in intention, goals, expectations with the monotone of a journalist. If you are committing a period of time to this, things can get emotional, and haphazard - 'art' permits alot of freedom of action and thought, but that is a thin line from wasted energy and confusion. At least stating out loud what is going on for real (not in "I think" land) clarifies your intention to yourself, and permits you a way of being detached from the struggle. This permits you to think freely about directions or actions you would like to take.
• Best brainstorming method is really very short, time-constrained projects with a direct and specific goal: In one hour, I will invent a prank to scare mom. Or, In twenty minutes I will draw 5 friends wearing hats. Remove all the value judgments (like, scare the hell out of , or funny ), and focus on the verifiable. In process, you can be clever, but don't make it difficult. Make it short, contained and something you specifically reference in your mind. Generally these short projects sets your gears going on how to further manipulate it. Scale out from here.

Ho hum...

2008-12-04T16:17:00.002+10:30

I got a lot of great suggestions on Metafilter about brain storming creative techniques, which I will post here when I have a moment.

Last night I just outlined what I have to do next, having sent Kate the First Chpater. Wow - the more I think about things, the more I need to do. It's like cells multiplying in a petrie dish under a microscope. I also took to my first chapter with a red pen and began "refining" - I was amazed that I had so many changes to make. Keep at it.

I asked the hive mind...

2008-11-28T14:48:00.003+10:30

A question I posed on Metafilter

Brain shift: How do I transition out of a heavily academic/theoretical mode, and into a creative one?

My PhD work involves writing about my research, and creating visual media. The writing, needless to say, is very dense and theoretical. The creative work is just that - creative, free, fun, beautiful, without constraint. I enjoy both of these pursuits enormously, and for different reasons - the theory for the problem solving, mental knot untying and wordsmithery, and the creative because it's what I love to do. I don't need help with either of them, but what I do need are ideas for transitioning from one mindset to the next. I become pretty much entrenched in one mode or the other, and find switching pretty hard. To be honest, I find conducting a conversation or making dinner hard sometimes after I've been focussing on this stuff, but no one can really help me with that.
I'm looking for ways, small creative ways, to start moving out of the theory and into the making. Out of head and into hands. Ways to brainstorm visually. Visualisation, meditation techniques, anything goes. What do you suggest? Silly, fun, irrelevant, relevant to get me out of my head, and focussed on art-making.
Three conditions, if I may:
1. Ideally I would prefer the ideas not be "Go take a nice walk outside" - what I'm looking for are time effective tools or ideas which can get me focussed on making creative work in an industrious way.
2. I should mention that I don't need to make this transition daily, more like every few months. So if you can imagine what I would like to do is focus on the writing for three months, spend a week or two in fun transitional exercises, then move onto creative work for three months. Rinse and repeat.
3. I have already read The Artist's Way, and don't much care for its spiritual angle. What I would love are ideas, practical things I can do which won't add another book to my already long reading list. I have been writing for months now, and have become the human equivalent of a test pattern. This Ms. Dullsville automaton thing isn't working with the creativity at all. I really appreciate your help...

Thesis framework

2008-11-27T13:59:00.003+10:30

An elemenrty thesis framework I propose in my first chapter. It doesn't make mention of the exogesis relationship between creative work and reflection/theory as I begin to create later on, but that can be added as it takes shape.

In the chapters that follow, I will investigate the mystique of the commercial toys and books, like the ones I loved, and isolate the design principals and methods which contribute to their desirability. For me, the want, want, want of these things, was an empty and anticlimactic journey, and getting to the heart of what makes a toy or book so alluring is one thing, but what I want to do is capture the irresistible pull, the appeal of those toys which often seems disconnected from reason, and apply it to something creatively “nutritious”: Something that generates the same environment of creative permissiveness that the box of art supplies I received in 1984 did – a “product” which would encourage and teach exploratory creativity, self-guided fun, and a self-perpetuating culture, freeing parents from the need to purchase additional add-ons, and children from the hollow and distracting completeist mentality which fuels an empty consumption cycle well into adulthood. I will also examine the context in which I conduct this investigation, dissecting firstly the design of some key examples of contemporary girl media and entertainment, and secondly with the influences which shape my own creativity as I progress through the “making”. Finally, I will define my position further from within the eight key contextual relevancies central to my theory, which are aspects of Design, Engagement, an Omni Media Environment, Sanctuary and Girlhood.

Doubt.

2008-11-26T15:50:00.003+10:30

I sent Kate my first draft of my first chapter last night, and ever since I hit SEND I've had all these panicked misgivings about various approaches I took, or decisions I made, this in spite of months of thinking, crafting, planning, re-tooling... Urgh. I can't imagine at all how it could be possible to really feel that you've ever finished something. I could substitute word for word, or approach for approach until the end of time, and the resulting chapter would swell and shrink, ebb and subside, in and out, like a breathing creature.

Oh, and? I quoted Jerry Seinfeld. Someone give me a doctorate.

Just a timeclock punch today.

2008-11-19T22:19:00.003+10:30

I suspect working such long hours on both my writing and work is making me come a little unhinged. I can't write much here now, because personal work time is so limited today because of my baby commute business that I think it wiser to spend the time and energy actually writing.

Backup.

2008-11-18T13:57:00.003+10:30

I nearly lost everything I was working on last night - intricately woven argumentative connective tissue, new relationships between concepts established... oh it was a nightmare. When Word folded up in half, burst into flames, and the ashes blew away, I rolled my chair slowwwwly backwards from the keyboard, and told Jerad that I would have to leave while he looked at it. Which meant that I would have to go sit gently somewhere else in the apartment, and feel moderately ill. I was saving as I worked, but the file was gone (gone!), and it took Jerad* some time to recover the last saved version. I have no idea why this happened, but it did inspire me to immediately source a removable hard-drive, stat.

I've heard of this happening to other people, and I always thought to myself "Oh, if you just saved your work continually, this wort of thing wouldn't happen". Pssht. I have officially been humbled.

* Hero.

Oh, but the summer rolls!

2008-11-17T15:04:00.002+10:30

Just turned down dinner on Thursday, in order to get this writing done. Feel so virtuous.*

* Obvioulsy, I'm not such a hero because I turned down one thing, but I usually have every second allocated to this work, and this one thing? Would have been nice but hey...

Onward, onward, ever onward.

2008-11-16T21:19:00.003+10:30

Hung out with my previous supervisor Michael today. Such a nice visit - I always get a kick out of seeing him, and Louise his wife. Had a little bit of trouble explaining my desire to complete my first chapter before moving onto more creative work, because I think they misunderstood me and thought that I meant I had compartmentalised the writing and design. Louise said something about finishing my vegies before being allowed dessert. It's really not like that. I actually enjoy writing almost as much as illustrating, creating layouts and other fine art ype work. I just don't want to drag both out needlessly because I haven't got enough time to devote to one or the other. I need to get this first chapter out of the way to feel that I've accomplished something tangible. Anyway, it's nearly, nearly done....

Tally ho!

urumph

2008-11-14T12:06:00.001+10:30

Finished that intro... now onto 1.3 where I hog-tie the whole thing. Contemplated sending the finished majority to Kate to make good on my promise to send it this week, but better methinks to send through one whole piece so the argument flows in a sensible way.

Huh. I did not know readability could be quantified.

2008-11-12T08:40:00.002+10:30

But is can be. By the Gunning Fog Index.

Wiki:

In linguistics, the Gunning fog index is a test designed to measure the readability of a sample of English writing. The resulting number is an indication of the number of years of formal education that a person requires in order to easily understand the text on the first reading. That is, if a passage has a fog index of 12, it has the reading level of a U.S. high school senior. The test was developed by Robert Gunning, an American businessman, in 1952.[1]
The fog index is generally used by people who want their writing to be read easily by a large segment of the population. Texts that are designed for a wide audience generally require a fog index of less than 12. For texts that require a close to universal understanding generally requires an index less than 8.

So there you go. Technical and academic writing must assume a certain readership though, I presume. By this I don't mean to infer that writing of this kind necessarily assumes a certain level of literacy or intelligence, but that jargon and terminology may be an inevitability for clarity's sake, and would surely affect the level of readability by this scale.

And just for kicks, the unwitting winner of 'Philosophy and Literature' Bad Writing Contest, from Judith Butler, UC Berkley.

"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes [End of page 354] structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power."

Fog Index rating of 74.*

*So says I.

Slowwww progressss.

2008-11-11T14:38:00.004+10:30

So I re-jigged my intro and just have to move onto 1.3, then I should be ready to submit for initial feedback. Working with the introduction turned out to be the very difficult manipulation of a long-ish paragraph. Difficult because it was like solving a very complex puzzle. How to make more than one idea make sense at the same time, as well as create a sensible segue into the bigger ideas to come. I'd forgotten how tricky this could sometimes be, and I'm not even writing in a particularly academic tone.

Oh wells....

Write or DIE!

2008-11-10T20:01:00.003+10:30

I'm not at suffering any kind of writer's block at the moment, but for those times when I do, here's a great little application which means what it says. Basically, you type for a set period of time, or pay the consequences.

http://lab.drwicked.com/box.html

It's a cool little tool which I think you could use to get into your writing each session by setting an arbitrary perdiod of time, say five minutes, and writing everything which comes to mind in that period, either around your topic, or as a cleansing brain dump. Then just copy to your clipboard, refine, prune, and re-style as you wish.

I think you could also use it as an idea generation tool by using the alocated time to just brain-storm ideas around a topic, doing so in a completely uninhibited way, then refining offline at a later point.

Either way, it's just like someone who forces your sneakers and kicks you out the door to the gym when you'd rather not go.

Nice third act breakthrough...

2008-11-10T10:45:00.006+10:30

Realised last night, after reading first chapter aloud to Jerad, that it really should be sewn together nicely with the idea that my project will seek to position itself at the meeting point of desire for the commercial toys (which is wrapped up in design principles) and my own memories of a chilhood well spent (which delivers the intent and motivation for the piece).

So the plan is:

Intro - Opening thoughts - explanitory comments around the reasons for personal reflection
Action: re-tool

1.1 - Desire and the unsatisfying disconnect between the wanting of a commercial toy/book, and the having of it.
Action: Done

1.2 - What we really did as children and the gift which changed forever the nature of material desires for me.
Action: Done

1.3 - What the nexus between these two ideas means for my project in practice and my goals. Making the creatively inspiring piece have the same lust appeal as the less well intended toys. The key goals, questions and problems to be solved by the generative phase of my work.
Also (perhaps here? Or elsewhere?) an overview of the plan for the chapters to come.
Action: Write

Conclusions - an exiting round up of the concepts and lead-in to next chapter.
Action: Write

I had actually thoguht my work was complete and self-sealing at this point, but this insight now means that I have to re-write orcrystalise section 1.3 to reflect the new clarity I have on the chapter.

Oh... I forgot to mention that I think one of the good lessons here was that explaining my chapter out loud to someone else really helped me to articulate the decisions I'm making as I make them. As it turned out, I asked a lot of "What do you think about..." questions, only to answer them all myself. This really helped crystalise certain ideas for me.

But what does it meeeeeaaaaaaaaan?

2008-11-08T21:30:00.005+10:30

Suffering from the crazies. Or some kind of strange research related ailment. Every time I think of going to work on my writing, I get the theme song from 'Laverne and Shirley' in my head, complete with the beginning - One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Sclemeel, schlemazel, hasenfeffer incorporated... I don't have to tell you that this is a big, big problem.

Breaking up is hard to do.

2008-11-07T14:33:00.002+10:30

God, splitting the first chapter into sensible sub-sections is a tougher task than I thought. Seems I got carried away in places. Became expansive.

Enchanted Cabinets.

2008-11-06T22:34:00.003+10:30

"Inexplicable magic tempered only by the brevity of the thrill; for once extracted from the package and examined, the toy always seemed to be substantially less wonderful than it had seemed when sealed. It was as though the box was an enchanted cabinet from a fairy tale – to break the seal was to have much of the magic evaporate. The having of it kills all of the enchantment of the unsatisfied wanting of it. So then I wanted the next toy, because the next time will be different." *

Strawberry Shortcake (for example) is the cabinet where the magic evaporates, and the Lottie Journals are a cabinet where opening the doors reveals an ever expanding world of possibility and creativity because it opens the mind.

A compare and contrast, succeed/fail, good/bad dichotomy is not an important things to establish, but the opposing cabinets is a real difference in outcomes based on the content within.

*Only quoting myself here, from my first chapter.

Tricked out ponies and re-claiming plastic for art.

2008-11-06T21:39:00.005+10:30

Wow... this is cool. Apparently there's a subculture of artists, or craftspeople, who customise exsisting My Little Ponies. I don't need one of these - about the only things I really have to keep around me are books otherwise I prefer a pretty bare space - but I'm so impressed with these.

The reason I dig these is that I hated My Little Ponies when I was a kid. I had no idea what you were supposed to do with such a rigid, plastic little thing. Surely not simply brush their mane and imagine galloping scenarios? I know millions of girls loved them, but had no interest in them at all. But customising... now that's something I can get behind! Apparently these folks buy old ponies, design and repaint them, re-thread their mane and otherwise trick them out beyond recognition. They use them as a base for their own creative expression, and subvert the general commercial prinicpals of the collectable pony by rendering them completely useless to collectors by covering them in paint. A lot of these artists sell their work too.

This is about the only thing I can imagine doign with a My Little Pony which would make them fun.

What if?

2008-11-06T21:32:00.002+10:30

(mental note)

What if... the Lottie Journals is a package, an indefinable toy/book/thing, wrapped like a package? Trading cards... now those are cool. What if it doesn't resemble anything which currently exists?

*scheme*

Clocking in, like Laverne and Shirley at a Milwaukee Brewery. But without the beer.

2008-11-06T13:45:00.005+10:30

I'm pretty close to that arbitrary level of completion on my first chapter which I mentioned earlier, so pretty soon I can start giving some thought to some creative expressions of this writing. I really can't wait to just start using creative media again,a nd I can't believe that, at Kate's prompting, I will be doing so this early. I was also thrilled to have my idea of my contextual analysis expanded to include the books I find so inspiring, in addition to the more scholarly ones.

Dang, this is boring reading.

It's just that I can't stop.

Can't stop? Can't stop. You see, I have made a commitment to myself to blog my progress (oh god, should I utter it?... go on then.. shove!) daily. I will do the best I can to do just that, whether it means spilling nothing on the page, or writing for hours. Right now, I am not able to work on the writing. I'm indisposed you see. Working. A day job. So all I can do is think about what I want to do later when my time is my won and I can apply all these thoughts and ideas to the work itself. But why daily? Because I believe great achievements, big works, grand things, are built on arbitrary daily disciplines - chipping away, as it were. The discipline of punching this blogging Murphy Card every day is a good thing.

When the words themselves become the form

2008-11-05T13:51:00.003+10:30

Well, not only is the above scaled down from it's screen-filling original size, but I've also cut it considerably showing only the top, say, one-tenth of the document. It's a fabulous typographic treatment of the US election issues and dramas, presented in chronological order called this.fucking.election.

What a great way to present information. I'm going to think about visual presentations for my first chapter tomorrow night, when I have several hours to myself to work on it. I have some ideas which can bring it to life, in it's own idiosyncratic way.

More sand...

2008-11-04T12:39:00.003+10:30

It seems in the writing I'm doing at the moment that small decisions about the direction have big implications for the flow and order of my arguments. I think this may be quite common in writing of this kind, but I do wonder from time to time whether a past version, long saved over, was perhaps better than the one I am currently crafting. I think and think and think and then my brain goes TWANG! and I wonder what I was trying to resolve anyway.

I would very much like the piece to fit into a four part format, but the centre is heavy and oozing like a ripe brie*, and containing it is proving to be a challenge. Is it too florid, or if the development necessary to tell the full story? Splitting it will not work, of that I am sure. I'm working in some images too, just to show the toys I'm talking about.

Wow, I'm really goinjg a bit crazy. there's no solution but to get feedback and move on accordingly. I could see a piece, even this small, not ever being completed. Shaped and re-shaped into infinity, a Japanese gardener raking sand into beautiful designs for the sheer mediation and enjoyment of it. Time to make the final decisions and at least get some guidance.

*Must stop with the analogies. It's genuinely how I think, but god...

Wordscaping

2008-11-03T13:39:00.004+10:30

Writing sometimes feels like sculpting one of those impressive sandcastles which look like the Taj Mahal. You've got your micro view (the tiny grains of sand, the cornice you're applying a nice smooth finish to with the back of a trowel), your macro view (the finished awe-inducing result) and sometimes when you make alterations to the shape that you thought were quite simple, a whole side of the structure slides back into sandy anonymity on the beach while you watch, mouth agape and sand spade poised above the ruination. You look over at someone up the beach and wonder at the ease with which they seem to be building a scale Eiffle Tower sandcastle - how do they do that? Remember those little sandcastles built by firmly packing a bucket of sand? How easy were they!?

Le sigh.

It's all good. I've felt that that first chapter I put a lot of work into last year before going on leave, and re-applied the trowel to this semester was ready to show to Kate. But the whole ready-to-show-Kate thing added a whole new cast to the reading of it. Look at how that one turret seems to sag over there... why are the architraves lop-sided like that? Should that minaret be higher? More squat? Removed altogther?

I enjoy writing and I've enjoyed writing this chapter. I sometimes get a little bit caught up in the grain-of-sand level craft of the writing (correct tense being an issue once I get carried away, as is repetitive word use), but have found inspiration in the bigger concept framing and discipline in the book 'Authoring a PhD' by Patrick Dunleavy. I would recommend this book to anyone who would like an overview of how the sandcastle (thesis) should look once you stand back at some distance from it.

I guess once I reach my own arbitrary level of quality, which I will call R.T.S.K*, I will certainly be able to advance the chapter further with Kate's advice. I probably just need to wrap it up, truth be told.

*Ready to show to Kate.

What if?

2008-09-24T22:22:00.004+09:30

What if, the data that I collect and sort could not only be visualised, but held? Check out Level-of-Detail Visualization of Clustered Graph Layouts by Michael Balzer and Oliver Deussen This is, like most of the beautiful examples on Visual Complexity (obsession!), is a 2D representation of informational relationships which are best understood, because of their complexity, in 3D. So, the graph itself is either printed, or reproduced on a screen as it is here, and can perhaps even be turned over in the mind by rotating it in space, if it is rendered in 3D. Honestly, I don;t know enough about the form this takes, but it did bring to mind sculptural forms (obviously, I mean it looks like something which rotates slowly in the foyer of an international bank).

I'm wondering, can I represent some things graphically, then stretch a skin over them to give them have a tactile form? Could they be weighty? Light? Fragrant? Textured?

Perhaps the results of research could look like Balance? Mine sure won't, but what if the form can be explored? Heard? Shaken? Stretched?

Hot nugget o' thesis

2008-09-18T22:24:00.004+09:30

Not really. Fom the section I am currently wordsmithing into oblivion - A personal reflection, the origins of my project:

...increasingly concerned about the way things are for girls today - the persistent and irritating prodding for them to grow up and buy adult consumables, the premature emphasis on sexuality, the lack of space and time to be creative, to discover things about themselves, and to daydream. I find myself asking, as people so predictably and tediously do when they are no longer children, “Is this how things were when I was a kid?”. In the interest of full disclosure, I should establish one thing right from the very beginning; My childhood was no Amish utopia of making handicrafts with my kinfolk and reading by the light of a candle. I was a child in the eighties which ripened by the middle of the decade into the plastic-scented nadir of the marketing-concept-as-entertainment phenomena. There is no denying that there was more plastic junk to buy children in the eighties than at any other time in history. Barbie, at the height of her bodacious powers, was queen of all toy departments, and the space around her was densely and vibrantly populated with Strawberry Shortcake, Rainbow Brite, My Little Pony, Care Bears and Cabbage Patch Dolls.

Horrifically, many of these toys were engineered by greeting card companies, bolstered by wan back-stories which propelled them into movies, TV, video, and games from the lunch boxes and other merchandise they originated from. Each was like Frankenstein’s monster in a way. Hastily stitched together from the cheery and insincere sentiments of greeting cards, then inflated with a meerest puff of synthetic life, they were no less flat or lacking in charisma on screen than they were on the bed sheets or stuffed toys they sprang from. These “stories” - cursory back-fill as they so patently were -designed to pad their value and mileage in disingenuous deflection around the truth - they were simply marketing exercises designed to sell toys to kids - a complete reversal of traditional merchandising springing organically and opportunistically from the success of entertainment, such as books, film, and television programs. That was market research in action, with the products first, and the entertainment and education value to the child a secondary afterthought.

Etcetera.

concept mapping

2008-09-16T20:06:00.005+09:30

God, there are some beautiful ways to present complex information. Check out Stephanie Posavec's Writing without Words. I don't know about you, but I find that breath-taking to look at. This work, entitled Literary Organism is a visual depiction of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. I've linked these images from the remarkable site, Visual Complexity which is crammed full of amazing examples of stories told, and data presented, in interesting ways.

What you can see, here, is a breakdown of literary elements, which have been organised as organic patterns. It is easy to see at a glance where weight and emphasis has been applied in the writing, and viewing the graphs adds another dimension to the interpretation of Kerouac's work, without re-stating the obvious. By that I mean, it's not writing about writing, or a film about film making, it's a cross-disciplinary approach which is becomes a way of seeing in itself. It's the opposite of a review, which often has the suggestion of catching a beautiful butterfly, and pinning it to a board, it's wings forced assunder for analysis - a cruel and dismantling approach which robs the thing of its beauty in order to describe that same beauty.

a spark

2008-09-15T14:47:00.008+09:30

At the moment, I feel as though my mind is working faster than I can record. I've been experiencing a wonderful rush of ideas, coinciding with a few perfectly timed cultural intrusions, the best of them being the Sydney Biennale, as mentioned in an earlier post. The Anastas and Gabri work, which I photographed and have posted below, blew my mind, basically. The work sits in a perspex display case, and appears to be several pages out of a process journal, and apparently reflects a visual conversation between the two artists, a collaborative work, constructed of collage, hand-generated text, and illustrations.
But it was really just a spark, igniting all the petrol pooled about in my brain - the fuel was there, the impetis, well, I can't understate how exciting this small incursion into my brain this work afforded. I know now too, that I need to make these kind of invasions more common by seeing more fine art in general.
The thing is, it had never occured to me to create a non-linear, graphic application of my thesis, and so what happened was I saw the Anatas/Gabri work, and fairly quickly forgot it -as much as a work with certain attributes was concerned - and I began to think about techniques, ways of making and building meaning in addition to presenting the ideas in my thesis. What it provoked, inspired in me, was the idea that I could express myself at the same time as delivering a clear message, and that additional layers, or depths of meaning can be communicated through the form the work takes.
My work could be made of things I enjoy creating. I began to think, why can't it be embroidered (literally), or torn , or graphed mathmatically, or illustrated, or packaged in a box, or folded like origami, or employ collage and fine art techniques? Does it project film? Is it mechanised? Does it have sound? Peep-holes? Velvet internal organs? Pages of a book which pop up? Is it textured, fragranced, does it hum or glow or bounce or read out loud? Oh, mental note to self: Check out Peter Greenaway's layered approach to film, and integration of text.
The more I thought about it, the more appropriate it seemed to have the ultimate form reflect the process I am going through to create the work - is it in a trunk? Is it a custom-made cabinet, with increasingly difficult to access areas, like privacy and an inner life, waiting to be invaded, and the contents read? Does the content need to be untangled? What does the form say about the content? It must be beautiful, and it must speak for itself, even though I know I won't be allowed to let it stand alone to do so. Interacting with it, as a fresh observer, must be an explanation of the work in itself.
Most thrilling of all, to me, is that now I feel that I could have a generative phase to my work which I can do well, and which is interesting and enjoyable to complete. To me this is a great relief, and seems to have lifted some sort of burden which I have felt, but cannot identify the source of. I think it may have been the presumption that the work would need to take a specific form, and one I may have had to labour over. I could see how that would have taken me years, and years and years. This is no short-cut, but there truly is no substitute for a Flow experience when it comes to looking forward to the making, and the purest enjoyment of a things. I know that the elements I have in mind will be wonderfully satisfying to create. I am merely setting myself up to do something challeneging I know I can do well, instead of dredging up something which a reader must dredge themselves through, reciprocally, to get to the meaning.
I'm now also leaning towards making the "vessel" central to the storyline which makes up the book for the greater concept. In a similar way to the real treasures of a Kit Williams book, the visual part of my thesis could form the real object at the heart of the story I have in mind for the book for girls. I've always loved the Kit Williams books, and the mystery at the heart of them - what a playful idea. I don't intend at this stage for my concept to involve a mystery to be solved, but for a real artifact to exist, which inspires the story and can be seen by anyone who cares enough to dig a little further. A magical vessel, which inspires Lottie's creativity. I want to involve, and inspire my readers on that level. I want to build an enigmatic quality into the work, an authencity.
So now... time to think about the form, the content, the way this "thing" should be created. It's a massive task, but I feel so exhilarated by the posibilities.
Another inspiring angle which I will have to elaborate on further another time, are the graphic repesentations of complex information I have encountered lately. Some artists and designers have been lifting the presentation of data to incredibly beuatiful heights - I could absolutely use some of those techniques.
Here is some more inspiring stuff from the Biennale. I feel a little bit ashamed, actually, that they remind me of techniques and aproaches that I am experienced and skilled in, and have neglected for years.

Images: Pushwagner... look at these fine pen illustrations. How could I forget something I enjoy doing so much? I feel like an idiot.

The bus... get on it, or throw yourself under it?

2008-09-11T22:04:00.002+09:30

Hilariously uttered by Kate Sweetapple, my new supervisor. Have a really good feeling about how she views the work, and her understanding of the problems, the intentions and the possibilities.

Cataclysmic catalysts.

2008-09-06T22:39:00.014+09:30

Anastas and Gabri

Embryo

2008-09-05T14:48:00.003+09:30

I'm working on a the perfect embodiment of my project's aims, which serves as both result and catalyst, inspired by a work at the Sydney Biennale 08.

I feel energised, almost breathless with excitement for the idea, and the need to call a half dozen people to discuss, which I have resisted. I will have to elaborate more shortly... so many hours spent at work, and so much inspiration rushing forth, well, it's like being tied up and having a feast laid before you, hands incapacitated, salivating.

Biennale... and oh, the possibilities.

2008-08-31T21:53:00.004+09:30

I think everyone hated the Biennale - at least in the sunshine on the front steps of AGNSW (Agnes!) people all around me hacked up furballs of distaste, and almost anger, at what they'd just seen. Not me, not this time. I left with my heart literally fluttering in my chest, dying to think about, process and utilise what I'd seen in my own work. It kind of blew my mind, if you want to know the truth. I'll expand tomorrow.

There are ways to make this project not just all that it should be, but more.. beautiful, engaging, enigmatic.

Also: I wanted to wait around for the rest of the day by the phone for Yoko Ono to call from NYC. I would love to talk to Yoko. I was fully prepared to run through the gallery, pushing art patrons asunder if the phone rang.

Some wonderful things, in synch with the mission

2008-08-28T20:17:00.003+09:30

Some of the good stuff, and the things which are inspiring me right now.

• Remembering the wonderful exuberance of the Life. Be in it. campaign in the 80s. Obese couch potato Norm, the everyman Aussie. I think the program was meant to encourage exercise, but I definitely recall a sort of embrace-life-in-general ethos, which promoted hobbies, outdoorsy wanderings and family time together. I had a large Life. Be in it. calendar on my bedroom wall in about 1985, which had little cartoon characters doing all sorts of cool things on it: flying kites, making pottery, throwing a frisbee, walking a dog. I really loved that campaign. A little half-hearted Googling around suggests that the organisation still exists, but where are they, and why so quiet? Maybe it's un-funded. Un-funded probably means dodo status.

• The Artists Way, by Julia Cameron. A book which guides the reader through a course of self-discovery, and helps adults re-connect with latent creative talents and passions by giving "permission" to indulge them, and teaches the skills to rediscover them.

• Girl's Own, Boy's Own Annuals: My parents owned these as children; a combination of fiction, non-fiction, craft projects, science articles, woodworking, gardening, nature observation and puzzles. They entertained my brother and I forty years after they had entertained our parents. I collected a few cheesey latter day examples from the Seventes - a David Cassidy themed among them, and they had the same wonderful charm. Some of the later ones include clothing customisation projects and cooking. Where did this wonderful genre go? I'm going to revive it. I believe at this stage that the rejuvenated annual will form the core expression of my project's aims.

• The Roland Harvey calendars. These were the most desired item in my school's book club catalogue because they had the coolest cartoony illustrations and had a giant sheet of stickers for customising the pages, or marking dates. That a thing so simple was one of my most anticipated gifts every single year- wow.

• Lenore Skenazy's campaign for Free Range Kids - giving kids the freedom to live a childhood which isn't shaped by fear and paranoia. Well, in this social climate, when Skenazy can draw outrage by allowing he eight year old son to get the subway home, well, it needs to be said - we are suffocating our children.

• Flow, by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. Recommended with incredible timing and precision by Michael Hill, this book has made me into one of those book bores who goes around insisting that other people "MUST read this now". It's very tiresome, the way I've been behaving, but this book is seriously blowing my mind. It thrills me, but doesn't particularly surprise me to learn of all the additional benefits to striving for optimal experience through focussed attention. Facilitating Flow experiences is the highest aim of my project for a number of reasons that I'm working through now.

From Wiki:

Components of flow
Csíkszentmihályi identifies the following as accompanying an experience of flow:
Clear goals (expectations and rules are discernible and goals are attainable and align appropriately with one's skill set and abilities).
Concentrating and focusing, a high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention (a person engaged in the activity will have the opportunity to focus and to delve deeply into it).
A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness, the merging of action and awareness.
Distorted sense of time, one's subjective experience of time is altered.
Direct and immediate feedback (successes and failures in the course of the activity are apparent, so that behavior can be adjusted as needed).
Balance between ability level and challenge (the activity is neither too easy nor too difficult).
A sense of personal control over the situation or activity.
The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so there is an effortlessness of action.
People become absorbed in their activity, and focus of awareness is narrowed down to the activity itself, action awareness merging[2].
Not all are needed for flow to be experienced.

Deploy the designerly techniques!

2008-08-19T21:04:00.002+09:30

Perhaps the things which get me through the creative aspects of my life; the dailies of designing things at work with a shred of a brief, making films with the mental starting point of a fresh pad of watercolour paper, writing fueled by the merest fragrance of an idea floating past me in the air - perhaps these things, light as they inarguably seem, are actually the floatation devices which will keep me bouyant throughout this project.

Pffffft! Pull the rip-cord and bob safely in the cold sea of research until someone sends out a search party.

Awful metaphorical abuse aside, and as an elaboration on my last entry, I'm thinking about how I go from A to C though B in my work practises. I have followed many creative paths, in a variety of modes- dopey fan, fine artist, and commercial artist, but as a starting point I'll think through my practices as an industry professional.

I work as a Graphic Designer where I turn around many print jobs a day. Small ones like designing postcards, larger jobs such as designing brochures, and creatively challenging ones which involve creating broader visual concepts from scratch, and spinning them across a variety of print media or collateral.

I do these things daily on a creative smell-of-an-oily-rag; that is, I have little time to sit around and wait for inspiration to hit. I have to get moving and design on my feet. I think now that a lot of time some kind of inspiration, or it could even be conditioning, takes over, and I don't even go through what could be called legitimate processes anymore. If I do, I'm certainly not aware of them, they are deeply embeded and reflexive. I'm so emersed in the work, and so much on rails that I routinely draw text boxes to spec, or shapes to exact size without measuring, pausing only long enough to be unduly impressed by myself, and move on.

Additionally, I'm not designing in some rarified creative environment where I can pause to flip through a coffee table book about architecture or painting and decide to draw apon the colour scheme of an Op Art masterpiece for inspiration. I work in a harried environment, with multiple requests and many demands on my attention. I have to answer the phone, burn CDs, help people with technical dramas, locate files, swear, find crucial papers, drink cup of tea after cup of tea, un-jam the printer, look at proofs. Actually a really good way to attract ridicule would be to voice the need to wander outside to get some air and find inspiration.

What I'm telling you is that in my professional life, inspiration doesn't come, I can't wait for it to come, and I have to deliver anyway. I wonder now too, whether inspiration of the drifting-downward-like-a-feather variety is even legitimate. For me, it isn't - I force my advantage instead. What I do do is think about the client, think abot the tone of voice. I go with my instincts and lunge at some colours. I hate purple and avoid it, arbitrary distaste being entirely my perogative. I think about an idea, a greater flavour or concept. Something which interests me, or has struck me as beautiful of late. I think about where the work needs to go and the design applications it needs to cover.

Then certain unavoidable biases and quirks start to emerge, which mark the work as mine alone, and I couldn't escape if I gave running away, zig-zag fashion, my all. Because the decisions you would ultimately make to avoid doing things the way you would ordinarily do them are still the choices you have made and will make. You are unavoidable. What I mean by this, in practical terms is this; I favour clean and bright design. I like crisp, legible communication, accompanied by sharp, bright graphics. I like lots of punchy colour, and I like to play with typography to bring a bit of subversion to my work. These aesthetics inform every decision I make along the way, and seem to be inescapable, and as a result my work always looks like... well, mine. It's like a filter of personality that you can't get away from long term, and it is best to indulge, because in truth it is generally the best of your work.

So what I do is get all the information into the document or design, to size up what I have to play with in the constraints of the brief. This involves mathematics, which is a very funny joke played on me by the very same universe which smite me with a complete antipathy and lack of skill for maths in the first place.

More elaboration shortly...

Practice informing research

2008-08-13T21:44:00.002+09:30

I'm starting to think about the various aspects of my professional life/lives and the correlation between it/them and hard research part of my work - the method, or fact gathering. The generative aspect will flow organically from the way I work, and the way I have made art and film in the past, with the exception that there will be a lot more rigor and framework supporting the work in substitution for the instinctive, intuitive way I usually go about things.

As for the former point, I will elaborate a lot more later, but I am thinking about the methods and processes I use in finding inspiration, then channeling it into clear and engaging communication, and working out ways to make those methods into research methods.

Don't get me started.

2008-08-11T20:29:00.006+09:30

Transitioning out of the negative thinking which fuels this project (What's wrong here?) into more constructive modes (How can I fix it?) is something I'm feeling more aware of as I continue to post. Just sheer distaste for so much of what I've seen around brings out the why-I-oughtas in me, and I can sense the tone - that of a humourless scold. I tsk-tsk my way around crappy department stores, eye rolling my way from racks of bras for seven year olds, to the toy section where I can melodramtically huff and sigh my disgruntlement at the hoochie Bratz dolls. When I'm targeting a group of people who are all about fun, creativity and exploration, I'm going to need to lift the tone considerably, or at least portion the different tones, file and shelve them accordingly.

It may go something like this:
academia (theory) =cranky
creativity (practise) =positivity
Is this a law of nature or something, because if I'm just headed that way because the path is well worn, then I would prefer to think about ways to stray off the trail and find newways of getting there.

But I have to indulge the heavy-sigh-arms-flailing-in-the-air thing just this once to relate the Harper's Bazaar story I read the other day about two society women who have joined forces to create what is perhaps my project's nemisis - a "you go girl!" custom clothing emporium, where all the creativity and craft is taken out of making custom clothes, and the only thing the girl children bring to the experience is their parent's money and the ability to choose clothing patches. The worst part of it is the creator's "belief " that they are giving girls the best experience of their childhoods - making memories.* The inflation of the ideology - well, it's just shopping, and it's still just shovelling "stuff" into an ever deepening pit of desire.

If you want to read the entire nauseating story for yourself, go here. Proceed with caution: It made me want to be a Trapist monk, and I'm a woman with a drawer full of Chanel cosmetics and a wardrobe full of shoes, so that's really saying something. Or you can scope it out on their web site. I guess I get bent out of shape by these things because they are fundamentally building a similar thing to my project, but their hearts aren't in the right places and they underestimate their audience, who will no doubt buy the clothes anyway. Perhaps I underestimate when I presume it'll be a hit, but I know how powerful the lure of cool stuff is to young people. All people for that matter. Incidently, $57.50 is a huge freaking amount of money for a hoodie in the United States. I bet they sell a trillion of them.

I'll admit envy that these women seem to be able to hurl money at a project of this kind. Unless you are truly challenged, money will invariably make money, so I predict their store will be a fungus-like success story of multiplication and doom.

*I'm not really certain these are beliefs the creators hold anyway - I sense it's more of a money making exercise and they want to fluff the whole endeavor up with some life affirming platitudes. Making money is fine by me, it's just the faux feminism and pretensions of fostering creativity which get me down. It all makes me hanker for the purity of the fully transparent, no holding back sales pitches of my childhood. Buy meeeeeeee. No one pretended Strawberry Shortcake made girls more independent and self reliant. Every brand has a philosophy these days, including mine.

According to me...

2008-08-09T22:30:00.005+09:30

Core truism #1:

Contemporary commercial girl culture is not kind or beneficial to girls, and not reflective of true girl culture, because it is not created by girls, nor with the best interest of girls at heart. It is created by market forces* to sell stuff to girls, and to inspire a lifetime of loyal brand consumption.

Core truism #2:

The above is achieved, generally, by suggesting to girls a variety of "inadequacies" which can be remedied through consumables.

Core truism #3:

Many of these consumables are variously in the spirit of bicycles-for-fish. That is, they are not needed by girls whatsoever.

Seemingly smart-arsey, but by no means disinegenuous question:

Why does design for tween girls look the way it does? Why all the pink and purple and wild prints? Why all the exclamation points? Why is prose never longer than a paragraph? Why so the use of collage? Why all the chaos, and for what reason the scrap-booky, piece-y layouts?

Action points:
• Gather good examples, collate the repeated elements.
• Work out exactly what the motifs and conventions are.

Method question to self:

How to pull apart the visual codes and explain them? Using what framework? Using what examples? What process/es? What does a designer do when creating these products/packaging/layouts/websites? What do they think about and how to they proceed? What are the conventions? What about illustrators, writers and animators who are creating for the demographic? Who are they?

Action points:
• Make a list of some of the more popular things being consumed by tween girls in all media.
• Role play creating a layout, design, or illustration for various media - what are the prcoesses? What goes through my mind? How are decisions informed? What is the driving motivation in creative decisions? Is the look intended to appeal to girls based on everything else which is out there, or because it genuinely appeals to girls in some general way? Are there other visual languages which could be just as effective, if not moreso?

My goodness, I think I may have just set myself the task which can help me transition from the theoretical which has me straying out of bounds, to the aesthetic and designerly, precisely where I need to be.

Asking simple (or perhaps even moronic) questions of self = good.

* Ill-defined at this juncture, but presumably marketing professionals, market research folks, advertisers, manufacturers of toys, music, clothing, cosmetics, movies.

Brain dump: Age appropriate preoccupations for girls

2008-08-07T20:47:00.005+09:30

Can I remember what I enjoyed? Today, just for kicks, I'm going to list everything I can think of on the spot that I would have enjoyed doing as a kid.

Crafts, pets, books, penpals, holiday fun like visiting the Acquarium, zoo, museum, art gallery or Royal Easter Show, wandering around in wild places like the bush or suburban vacant blocks, daydreaming, sleepovers with friends, drawing, dancing, baking cakes, playing with lego, playing dress ups, putting on puppet shows, learning magic tricks, writing stories, star gazing, sewing clothes, making friendship bands, braiding a friend's hair, playing a team sport, spending time with grandparents, writing letters to admired people, collecting things, painting, hiding from people, making a film with the family video camera, going to the library, working a part time job, telling ghost stories, conducting amateur investigations, making jewellery, creating a family magazine or newspaper, making a pinata, making a dolls house or the furniture to go into one, learning about how to repair small things on the family car, riding a bike with a friend, climbing a tree, visiting horses, playing spotlight, planting bulbs, making collagage of favourite images, learnign an instrument, playing a board game, writing a really complicated Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story, fabric painting, making a tea pot, correographing a "music video" to a favourite song with friends, creating shadow puppet shows, hypnotising people, making audio recordings of family interviews, trying to levitate a friend, taking a friend with their eyes closed on an imaged journey1, building a hut/fort/cubby house, designing a dream home, watching clouds and the shapes in them, playing handball, playing catch, rollerskating/rollerblading, taking photos, painting egg shells, inventing a board game, playing with dolls, making a diorama2, inventing a perfume, making Christmas decorations, freezing ice blocks, making plaster casts, swimming in a pool, inventing outdoor games with elaborate rules, draw a comic book, play marbles, play elastics, race sbilings or friends, make pieces of origami, grow herbs and vegetables, create an ant farm, put on a majic show, play in a sprinkler, make a tent out of sheets in a bedroom, create a maze, play "Battleship" on paper, create a fish tank, make a flip book, make something using carpentry, learn about a time in history, watch a movie, make salt dough, throw a tea party, press flowers, draw using computer software, paint faces, conduct an archeological dig, make a spell with plants and leaves from the garden, draw the fairies who live in the garden, correograph a ballet, learn how to knit, play word games, learn the names of the constellations, learn about the Greek gods, create a treasure hunt for friends, using a long chain of clues, train a dog to do a trick, attempt to break a record for something like consecutive minutes hula-hooping, learn how to play with a yoyo, learn a cool card trick, play card games, make fashion drawings, make a paper doll, write letters to friends, make an elaborate machine or booby trap, write a recipe book, blow really big bubbles out on the lawn using detergent and a coat hanger, make a terrarium, learn computer programming with "Alice", start to learn a language, make a bag, weave some fabric, make a fortune telling folded paper cone, create a gymnastic routine, decoupage a box like a shoe box, make a pop-up book, draw the local arcitecture, make a bust of one of your parents, create a treasure map, put on a play.

1 My brother and I did this often as kids. We would take turns having our eyes closed, while the other would describe some kind of Indiana Jones-style jungle adventure, guiding the other all around the back yard, spalashing the face with water to simulate a waterfall, dragging under trees to indicate thick jungle undergrowth... My Dad had a canoe which we would play in on the grass in the backyard, telling each other stories about speeding down rapids.

2 I was obsessed with making scenes in shoes boxes for a while. I would generally try to rig up the insides so that small things could be animated externally, while someone looked through a hole in the front. I spent a very long time, one summer, constructing a kind of Dracula's castle scene, complete with stained-glass windows and a vampire that would rise out of a coffin in the middle, drawn up by a thread pulled from outside the box.

Ouroboros

2008-08-03T22:26:00.003+09:30

I think one thing I was really unprepared for when I commenced this work was the relationship between the core project, and the research process. At present, I spend more time reading about research techniques than I do writing, or otherwise exploring my field. Always, this feels wretched, like procrastination.

Dan McLaughlin, my Animation Professor at UCLA, a man who endowed me with the only bon mots I ever retained because of their precision, once told our class to "never confuse activity with achievement". This, of courser, is genius, and I knew immediately what he was talking about. It really is possible to tie oneself up into the most complex of knots, while feeling as though you are working incredibly hard, all the while taking no more steps towards your goal than if you reclined on a sofa in a dressing gown and ate bon bons. It's a perverse form of procrastination, but it is procrastination just the same. It's sort of like a kinky, sophisocated, super-charged Type-A kind of procrastination. One which is born of never wanting to look the concern of your topic (or project) squarely in the eye, and engage it.

That was a particularly useless digression because this isn't my problem. I'm not even really sure I have a problem, though in this isolation I wouldn't know. The fact is, I need the information about the research methods. Much of it is new to me. Each new thought, each new consideration, and each new problem requires me to dig up some information on how to handle the information, and how to proceed. I get a feeling, like a snake eating it's own tail, that I'm in an infinite cycle of learning about the learning before any of the learning can be accomplished.

I suspect I feel this so acutely because my time in general is so limited that I want to feel as though I take meaty, notable bites out of the various things I know I need to do, but once I get into the reading about how to do this, or what is required to prove that... well, I just don't have time to apply it yet.

I hope the balance will shift, and I will have more time to spend on the work, instead of the "hows" involved in getting the work done. Over time, I may need less of the instructional content, but right now it feels like walking on a treadmill - lots of work, but going nowhere.

Girlfriend

2008-07-31T21:15:00.003+09:30

On a break in the afternoon today at work, I made a cup of tea and picked up Girlfriend magazine, orphaned in the kitchenette. I flicked through, turning my body away from the page-flipping arm slightly in anticipation of someone walking into the tea-room and seeing me engrossed in a magazine which literally makes me feel dumber as I read it. I imagine my brain as a kind of sausage-like tube, and even the most casual of flipping through Girlfriend crams a whole lot of inane in one end, forcing things of value, like multiplication tables and my ability to design a layout out the other.

The Girlfriend demographic is slightly older than the one I'm concerned with-certainly girls up to their armpits in adoloescence-but the problem is the same. Really, truly tell me that what that magazine represents aren't the only options for girls: Celebrities, shopping, clothing, boys, and more shopping.

I wasn't somehow above these things as a teenage girl. I read DOLLY and Girlfriend wih a detailed intensity I felt was due to the life manuals I fully thought they were. I wanted badly to have the effortless, playful good looks that the models in these magazines had/have. I used to imagine I was the only girl who didn't have the means to buy things like jeans every week.

But I flicked through Girlfriend today, as a grown woman, and I just sort of felt sorry for myself at 12 years of age. How nice it would be to whisper into the ear of that kid - that what I was reading was by no means a reflection of any kind of reality, and because of that, the fact that I didn't match up didn't matter. I would tell me that thousands of girls just like me were reading the same things and feeling the same way I did. There's more to life than being attractive and having stuff. Being a cheeky brat, or a scarily flirtatious nymphette doesn't in any way approximate feminism. Marketers of products are intentionally making you feel that the next purchase is the one that is going to set things right in your world. The attentions of boys, or men for that matter, do not validate you. There are thrilling, bigger things in your life ahead of you - travel, art, passionate loves of scholarly things like history, love, incredible meals, amazing acquaintances to be made, there is family, career, community, friendship-there is much, much, much more to life...

Consumption is a curious phenomena because the acquisition of a thing leaves a hole of sorts in that the 'having' of the thing make one aware of the other things they don't have, and the things necessary to bring the newly acquired item into focus are still wanting. But still there is always the hope that the next thing will bring satifaction, always travelling as it does with emptiness, and lack of satisfaction. It's like a nonsensical hole that the more earth you shovel into it, the more earth is wanting, and the more aware you are of needing more earth to complete the impossible fill. In the meantime, while you are competing with yourself on this never-ending treadmill, and no one is watching, your mind is completely taken up with the senseless minutia of products, and the practicalities of gaining them, and there is no room, time or energy left for daydreaming, or the other big loves you are yet to discover.

I recalled how in Catholic primary school we did a class on NEED and WANT - a sort of ethics and values primer, on what a person must have in their lives (not much, when you think about it) and what we desire. That lesson stuck with me, because I started to tally, mentally, the items depicted which I would call items a person NEEDS, and came up with few. There were many "must haves" though, all of them only life embellishments. I'm not going to pretend that pack acceptance isn't mportant to teenage girls, but the exercise was interesting anyway.

Girls want this imformation though. Most are on admirable paths of self-betterment which make them feel that they are gaining some ground if they learn how to control their weight, learn what music to download, or make wise accessory purchases. But how do they know that there's more to life, if more isn't offered them? The distraction is massive. And snapping out of my trance, I fought distraction myself, and closing Girlfriend went back to work.

Tomorrow, if it's still lurking on the counter, unclaimed, I may take it away with me so that can post about the visual language and conventions used. I'll stick the rolled mag up my jumper to make my get-away though...

The two tasks at hand

2008-07-29T09:15:00.003+09:30

Coming back to my senses and trying to work out how to proceed with this work I now know that I need to tackle two things at once to get up to speed; My Contextual Analysis and the first chapter.

In terms of the Contextual Analysis, I think that I need to plot the ideas manually. By that I mean that I need to tape cards with brief summaries of the ideas to some poster board, move them around, organise, create groupings or tenets, then parse the order I have created into a clear document, with an easy to follow path through the ideas for the reader. The thing that is presently tripping me up is that the dissparate ideologies come from varied disciplines.

What I need to say is this is way some see this or that issue, through this and that filters, and that is different from this because of that- and all while telling the story clearly.

I'm losing track of the ideas and how they are related, or challenge one another, by trying to mark them in my mind only. Need paper and scissors.

In the meantime, the first chapter is on rails thanks to the framework I created (below) before I went on leave.

Re-commencing the work...

2008-07-26T22:15:00.003+09:30

When I commenced this work some time ago, I was acting on hunches and observations regarding the changing nature of childhood. Since that time, a lot of comprehensive academic study and governmental focus have centred around the issue, resulting in several thorough texts, more than two public televised debates that I managed to stumble over without paying any particular attention, a probing inital investigation by the Australia Institute, and even an Australian government Senate Committee inquiry into the sexualisation of children. All this is merciful from my perspective because substantiating my general observations had my focus lurching sideways into sociology, communications, journalism, gender and cultural studies, and a variety of other specialisatiuons which are not my own. It is dangerous to drive a vehicle you are not licenced to.

Something I never could have predicted has happened: the central focus of my work has become a hot topic. This gives me the uneasy feeling that there may be little left to mine, or worse, that the issue may become over-exposed before I have an opportunity to propose a solution. Or a part of the solution. Or a part of the cultural change giving a boost to the solution. Or solutions. Digression - but I don't really know whether this exposure is good for my work, or is going to hinder it.

The true challenge for me has been, and continues to be, to remain committed to the practise and theory of design in the context of all this thought and debate. This is the path I have to navigate, and it is un-mapped.

My critical review rudely flashes its under-garments.

2007-05-31T19:13:00.000+09:30

In a manner... here is the scaffolding of my first chapter. The framework, expressed here loosely the way that I'm working with it, continues to build the main structure of the review - really a Literary Review built around my theoretical position.

Critical Review
Tween Marketing Subverted: Designing an Engaging Omnimedia Sanctuary for Girls

Overview/introduction; A simple expression of main concerns around girls. I will utilise design to combat:

• Excess consumption and the gatherer/collector/completist mentality
• Exploitative, covert and early sexualisation of girl children
• Uni-directional flow of media content, stymying creativity
• Diminishment of hand skills (craft)
• The commerce endowed obsession with physical appearance/celebrity worship/shopping etc which have the power to distract girls from broader understanding of the world around them.
• The aesthetic monotony of toys and books available to girls. Regarding the sea of hot pink - are there other design manifestations that girls would enjoy?
• The lack of engagement with literature, history, sciences, the arts severly limiting the vision and life options of girls.

And to enable and encourage:

• Reflective thought, self reliance, creativity
• Fun and enjoyment
• Tactile, creative expression (using the hands to mark paper, spread paint, shape clay, weave textiles, and much more)
• A sense of connectedness with other girls, encouraging friendship
• An appreciation of genuine individuality - girls are different whereever they are found, but the model of the white, middle-class, hetrosexual girl dominates in contemporary tween girl media/literature in a way which is mean to imply universality.

Framework for Review

The following sub-points draw on textual references which in some cases support my position, and in some cases refute it. I haven't linked in those references here because they form the body of the review and are the flesh and muscle around the bones...

Aspects of Tween Culture: inextricably linked with marketing, because the tween demographic is an “invention” of marketers.

• The “nature” of a tween (not yet adult but longing for adult lives)
• History
• Emergence – the invention of the demographic
• Media, harms and benefits – magazines, TV, film, consumables, advertising,
• Financial mobility of young people
• Tween heroes - who are they? Why?
• The nature of the culture: Adult generated, child consumed
• Privatised and supervised free time is now the norm in heavily scheduled lives few children are able to spend time dreaming, playing and creatively exploring. The restriction of autonomy caused by parental fear

Aspects of Marketing:

• Feminism is uncool. In the context where men and women are presumed equal, astute marketers manipulate well the assumption that feminism (particularly second-wave) is overly serious, which they utilise to sell things to girls which quickly undo all the good work of the past.
• Peculiarities of selling to tweens
• Peculiarities of Selling to girls - What has changed?
• American Girl Place, Bratz, and girl marketing successes
• Why I can’t, as a designer, operate successfully outside of the standard marketing paradigm (The perogative to join ‘em to beat ‘em)
• Transmedia intertextuality – fast food/film/toy tie-ins

Aspects of Subversion: Using the tools of marketing to undo its aims. Working against repressive societal conventions and expectations of girls.

• What is truly subversive now? Refusal to consume, innocence, supporting other women (girls),
• Forms of play (history) . Simple occupations, lack of technology.
• The new nature of innocence
• Creativity
• The home-made, and making one’s own fun without purchasing things
• Independence
• Engaging with others, face-to-face, is subcersive in the bcontext of Second Life, online messaging and other forms of internet-based remote sommunication.
• Books are subversive – in the context of the internet, gaming etc.
• Selling a product which doesn’t encourage any further buying and entertains for a long time is subversive
• Kids creating their own media and entertainment without the mediation of adults.

Aspects of Design: The "hows" of the project - the physical methodology

• How is design for children different?
• How is design for girls different? Is it possible to design things differently, and for them to still appeal to girls?
• How girls identify with the design of the objects they own: Keeping pink objects around you signals or emphasises traditional femininity, which must seem crucially important to girls considering all the efforts of marketers to make the impact of this influence pervasive (mentioned previously)
• Design for tweens - are you designing for adult visual literacy, or children’s visual literacy?
• What is tween design currently like? Can a designer make any safe aesthetic assumptions?
• The HOW TO - researching the visual, aesthetic and tactile portions of this project. Research methodologies.
• Engaging the senses - the journals as sensual experience. Consideration of texture, smell, sight...
• Ways of researching visual appeal and design, specifically, my approach to the physical research phase with girl research subjects – what are my questions, and how best to reach the truest, most useful answers to my questions? What are the "right" questions?

Aspects of engagement:

• Technological aspects of the book - potential for technical interactivity - E-paper etc.
• Design of the book - The journals as kit
• The Diary format, and a year of story/projects
• History – Investigate Girl’s Own Annuals
• Scale and scope of the creative projects within the book/web
• Interaction with other girls – community, learning to respect other girls (and by extension as girls mature, learning to respect others and respect self)

Aspects of an Omnimedia environment:

• Existing media, harms and benefits – magazines, TV, film, consumables, advertising,
• What are children watching?
• The interaction between the web/book/newsletters in the project (command of technical things combined with enjoyment/mastery of tactile and engaging things.)
• The difference in young people today – the short attention span and instant gratification afforded by technologies like the internet
• Adult control over the media environment of children – media is rarely created by children, for children
• Discussion re the “death” or re-invigoration of literacy, as it applies to young people
• Text and media convergence – interactivity and intertextuality

Aspects of Sanctuary:

• The girl's bedroom environment - the bedroom as sanctuary
• Safe zones – the family and friends
• Safe haven from predatory behaviour of adults – sexual exploitation, exploitation as consumers
• Daydreams and fantasy. The inner life – building the confidence to trust and rely upon oneself
• The retreat one can draw upon at any time of their life, because it’s an internal resource
• Escape from “relational aggression” ie. "Mean girls". Revisit and address the idea of sacrificing relationships for relationships among peers.

Aspects of girlhood:

• Girlhood in the context of the theoretical dismantling of Feminism – if it is assumed that women are equal to men then there is no need for over politicised challenge to the patriarchal system
• The normalising of heterosexuality and white middle-classdom and the alientating influence this exerts (eg, magazine quizzes)
• The power of girl culture to distract girls from more important things – the obsession with appearance and related consumption as a diversionary tactic (I haven’t encountered discussion of this distraction as a harm anywhere yet, but it’s a big one as far as I'm concerned. While kids will eke out a creative, learning experience out of pratically anything, some leisure occupations are undeniably less valuable than others in my view.)
• Computer literacy and access to technology, such as the internet
• Relating to other girls – mean girls, sacrificing relationship for the sake of relationship
• Geography, class, demographical concerns of my physical research recruits
• Intersection of girlhood and adulthood – notions of girl as exploiter and exploited
• The conflicted role of adult men in tween media
• Grappling with girl “fixing” vs culture “fixing”
• How saving the “selves of adolescent” girl saves the woman
• Polarity between “celebration (resilience) and alarm (risk)
• That there is nothing “essential” about girlhood
• Female individualisation as outcome of feminism and reward for its abandonment

Sociologists are from Venus, Designers are from Mars.

2007-05-23T19:34:00.000+09:30

A chapter (Phase 2: Critical Review) in the text I mentioned in my last post, "Visualising Research"* has suddenly put the purpose of my literature review into sharp relief - I can see the purpose of the review with such clarity now. I think I was dithering in my writing, struggling to isolate my perspective, though all of the content is sound, and have now used the shaping criteria of quality to re-form what I have composed - the vitues being 'breadth and depth, rigour and consistency, clarity and brevity, and effective analysis and synthesis'.

What has complicated my approach so far has been the desire to locate my position, or contextual position within the disciplines external to design, but dealing with my focus area. The context is often only orthogonally related, intersecting with my claims from the perspective of feminist theory, marketing, sociology, childhood education and other disciplines where I am far from an authority, and where tinkering too fervently or intimately would be inadvisable. It's as though I'm trying to indicate my location in a land-locked jungle to sea-faring people utilising an oceanic map and a ship's navigational tools. I know where I stand, but how to articulate it usefully to people who don't spend any time on land? They may even get the leg wobbles trying to find my location. It's really the message of being a practitioner-researcher in a bottle. And a creative arts one at that.

Put simply, my position is often discussed, is topical, and is undoubtedly useful socially, but is only being debated outside design theory and practise. All this amounts to enormous progess, and despite all the designerly navel gazing, this first chapter is fast becoming a solid, concrete, first-look, draft reality.

* I cannot understate the value of this text to practise-based research PhD candidates. It's solid gold. Without wanting to get overly evangelical about it, the book provides leverage tools which would be useful to any practitioner-researcher.

Hokey, yet helpful.

2007-05-18T08:13:00.000+09:30

The book with the most impact for me thus far has not been about my research focus at all, but a kind of research guide called "Visualising Research: A Guide to the Research Process in Art and Design" by Carole Gray and Julian Malins. It reads as though it were written for me, in the exact stage I'm in, in the exact program I'm in, and for anyone undertaking practise-based or practise-lead PhD research in design, I believe it would work the same way. The emphasis is not only on creating original thought, but in ensuring that what you decide to research is of wider use. Sounds simple, and like something I should have a grip on by now, but it's great to have these things which Michael utters re-articulated later, when I'm thinking and writing at home. I'm going to have to buy the book and have it at home. It's like a disciplining cane and an encouraging voice, right there on the shelf.

One of the early questions posed by the authors is: If they use the metaphor "journey of discovery", what metaphors are relavant to my research? Explain in short story form.

As I see it now, my work is to hack a path through dense forest to erect an elaborate, sheltering hut on stilts at the end of the path. The path will need to be wide enough for others to follow, and for them to see the destination beyond the confusing undergrowth. The hut will afford a view of the space around it, and be ammenable to additions later on, according to the needs of others and changing circumstances. The hut will be a place where the people that I invite down the path will want to stay, and looking out from its windows they will be able to see the world differently. Beneath the hut the jungle can continue to grow and tangle, but the hut will provide safe and enjoyable shelter.

Textual Summaries

2007-03-25T14:22:00.000+09:30

I've been distilling the main concepts of the texts I've been reading to succinct portions for adding to my writing later. In some cases (Ellen Seiter, for example) I have created a few different pieces, because I know I will need to use different fascets of the theory in different contexts in my own work.

Here are a few:

Ries, Al & Laura
The Origin of Brands

The Ries’ approach to branding and marketing consumables, is particularly focussed on creating new categories for brands. A compelling argument is made for new products to be given two names, firstly for the category which, in order to thrive or even thrive, must be utterly singular and unique (cola) and the second name the brand (Coke). The Ries’ place a strong emphasis on divergence, as opposed to convergence concepts. Accordingly, a product can occupy the top of the range, or the bottom, but the "mushy middle" is no man's land, and doesn't sell. The first product in a category usually stakes an unshakable lead in the category, even if the next product that comes along is of superior quality – a phenomenon the Ries’ term "survival of the firstest". The only option for a product which is second in the category, they argue, is for it seem to be, and become, the opposite of the market leader in every conceivable way.

The ultimate goal of a brands, say the Reis’, is to establish loyalty beyond reason in the consumer.

Walkerdine, Valerie
Daddy’s Girl. Young Girls and Popular Culture

Even though publishing this text prior to the explosion of the Tween marketing phenomena, Walkerdine is writing of the "little girl who doesn't think or act like one; she's a child with the mind of an adult.'

Primarily concerned with class, Walkerdine mines the aspirations and fantasy life of working glass girl children, and their relationship with popular media to expose the vulnerability of working class girls to the paradigm of the orphan girl who is rescued to a life of luxury, love and comfort, primarily as a conduit for oedipal themes – especially, the relationship or otherwise between girls and their fathers. Often, Walkerdine counters, this results in characterising the mother as an inteloper or competition. Walkerdine touches on the inevitable direct or coded sexualisation of little girls this engenders.

Seiter, Ellen
Sold Separately. Parents and Children in Consumer Culture.

Seiter considers the horror of children's media as educated middle class snobbery primarily over the kitchiness, or girliness of the conten, which ultimately excludes the poor, who she believes have little choice in entertaining their children. Informing children that the things they like to watch are tasteless and of little worth belittles them, and underestimates their analytical powers. Seiter believes that children are media-literate, and know when they are being persuaded to consume, via advertising or marketing ploys. Indeed, Seiter argues that kids engage and challenge what they see, as they see it.

Seiter believes that being able to discuss the latest cartoon or TV show is the currency of childhood, and depriving them of it disadvantages them in child culture. Additionally, children’s programing is often designed to appeal to the rebellious side of kids, and therefore is not really designed to appeal to adults at all - the fact that adults find it revolting should make it all the more appealing to kids who adore all things cheeky and subversive.

Seiter's discussion of marketing of toys through time gives voice to the way in which girls and minorities have been relegated to stereotypical roles, and the white boy has traditionally been the only child to be challenged through play - to build, discover and learn. Girls, and minorities have traditionally been kept busy playing at keeping house and nurturing others, or languishing in the periphery, observing the white boy child at play.

Seiter makes a good point that adults abhore the consumer tendancies and desires in their children, despite having their own. She believes this is injust to children, who also desire consumables just as adults do, debunking at the same time the notion of ‘purity of consumption’, the purchasing of necessities only: Something adults rarely, if ever, do.

Seiter draws attention to concept of chase and flight in consumption of lower social classes seeking to emulate the upper classes, who move on to something else before the goal can be achieved.

In advertising, Seiter notes, boy's play takes place in an imagined place which does not resemble the home, kitchen or other domestic saces, whereas girls are invariably depicted playing in their bedrooms.

Roberts, Kevin
Lovemarks, The Future Beyond Branding

Roberts contends that the most successful brands establish an emotional connection with consumers by engaging with them in a sensual way, terming the most skilled of these brands “Lovemarks”. A similar concept that the Ries’ develop, but term “loyalty beyond reason”.

Little Grown Ups, or, Good Luck Girlfriend!

2007-02-25T16:34:00.000+10:30

Over the last month of two, I have gathered every magazine title I encounter in a newsagent or supermarket which seems to be pitched at the tween girl audience. Buying and reading them has been a pretty scary experience, for a number of reasons, which I'll go into in a moment. Personally, I don't believe it's up to young girls to reject these publications - not at all. They're designed to appeal to girls, and would be irresistable to almost any girl shopping with her parents, sitting in the rack by the register, packaged in a celophane bag with shiny cosmetic gifts like stickers, costume jewellery and nail polish. The idea I have is to give the girl something a lot more intellectually and personally stimulating to consume, while packaging it in the desirable design for a tween girl.

Just loosely for now...

Design

I believe it would be valuable to do a complete and thorough content analysis of the titles I've selected here, particularly from an aesthetic and written communication perspective, for my own purposes particularly, but also to weave into my written research. What lesssons can I learn from these publications about desirability, while modifying the content to make my project more age appropriate? I think if I can keep my feminist ire suppressed long enough, I may be able to learn something, because they're doing something right; Total Girl's circulation is 306,000 girls aged 8-11. Little Angel rather armlingly identifies their demographic as girls aged 5 - 8. Needless to say, the content is the same as in the other magazines.

Each magazine came packaged in a celophane envelope with a free gift inside - including in the small sample I purchased, a nail polish, nail decals, stickers, button badges, a nail file and a plastic ring. From a design perspective, colour dominates, as does clutter. Each issue is a full-frontal visual assult of girlish vivacity and not a single area is left unadorned. Every spare inch of available space on every page is filled with heart, star and daisy motifs. Brightly coloured sans serif typefaces predominate, along with several decorative faces, and hand-generated fonts, all compteing for attention. This general fluffy chaos fails to support the traditional left-to-right reading of a page, and so the copy and pictures can only be explored in a loose, anarchic way which infers a casual tone. Copy is distributed across boxes and bubbles, and no particular style ever pervades or informs the entirety of a page.

The content

What I believe they do in publications such as Total Girl, is lure girls with the sorts of things that interest them, then introduce consumables that they don't need. It's a sort of bait and switch - something that I know I wasn't subjected to as a child. I see clearly now that girls aged between 8 and 12 are some hotly contested commercial turf. In terms of the sneaky bait and switch, the magazines run features on crafts, but also talk to adult celebrities about their hair and make-up. They run features on pets, but then advertise bras. Girls in the tween demographic generally do not need bras, but that doesn't stop these publications making them think that its normal and that they do need them. Evidence of this is that the bras advertised don't actually have a cup in them, they're more of a bandeau.

Much is made of the "in between" nature of the demographic (see below in the magazine's own comments), of the girls being somewhere between child and teenager, but I am beginning to supect that tween girls aren't a demographic at all - in our society, there are children, and there are teenagers, and teenaged, or adult content is not appropriate for children.

It's no secret that marketers see the tween demographic as a new commercial segment, that they can parcel out as separate and new, and then sell things to that they haven't had the opportunity to before. Advertising and marketing people talk about this quite frankly. By this I mean, taking a demographic chunk out of later childhood, renaming it "tween", and shilling teenaged or adult stuff to them, because it's new to them, and they aspire to adulthood.

But a good question to ask, is have kids really changed the way people who want to sell them stuff tell us they are? Saying that kids aspire to adulthood isn't excuse enough though - I think we have a duty of care to make the things sold to children age-appropriate. Selling things to kids in this way is just exploitative because they can't know that it isn't normal for a child without breats to wear a bra is the media they consume tells them so. Child development experts can help me understand age-appropriate for the purposes of my writing, but I'm going to make a guess right now that they will not say that part of an eight year old gilr's development involves the purchasing of bras, make-up and developing"crushes" on adult men.

I suspect this post is going to present some cynical reading, but I've taken as much of an objective look at them, and I found it hard to isolate valuable, age appropriate content. When I say "valuable" I mean assisting in personal development in areas such as literacy, self esteem, personal expression and creativity, and learning new things about the wider world.

Here are the publications. I've taken a few pictures, just to give a sense of what I'm talking about. I will make proper scans shortly... looking at the images as I post them, I realise I may have compressed them a little too far, so apologies for the poor quality.

Clockwise from top left: Barbie Girl, Disney Girl, Total Girl, Little Angel.

Here are a few of my observations as I flipped through the mags.

Fashion craft project inspired by Paris Hilton. As far as I know, Paris is mainly famous for the leak of a sex tape and partying. I'm really not sure what the relevance to your average nine year old girl is. She is presented as a style icon, but considering she rarely wears a lot of clothing, I'm still struggling to draw the relevance.

Lots of craft projects, mainly concerning the application of make-up or modifying clothing. I would have to say they're not the most challenging of projects but for a little girl - fun, certainly. When not a single project ever pertains to personal expression, creating something unique, learning something new about life and the world, an opportunity is lost and another brick is cemented into the wall of how-you-look-is-all-that-matters.

I'm really, really trying to not be too judgemental about all this, but I do think it's sad. If we agree as a society that self worth is about more than how we look, how do girls ever receive that message? You could tell a girl over and over that she is more valuable than the external alone, but these magazines present messages which are stronger, more mind-numbingly repetitive, and more consistent than any you could preach at home. You'd really have to go completely Amish to avoid it. I truly feel sorry for girls who grow up today looking at this stuff - at least for me it only really began in earnest when I was about 16 years of age and began reading Dolly magazine.

More craft projects - glueing bows into a pair of thongs. Again, not the most challenging of projects. Where do girls ever get the desire to be painters, teachers, designers, scientists, or anything else for that matter with this kind of patronising crap passing for intellectual or creative stimulation?

An interesting jutaposition which elucidates the precarious developmental transition the tween girl is travelling. On the left, a feature entitled "What's in Your Shopping Bag" - a vox pop-style feature, with tween girls who have been shopping displaying their fashion and toy purchases, and on the right an ad for Care Bears, a child's toy.

An article entitled "Totally Embarrassing!". Tween girls are encouraged to write in stories of ways thet they've been embarrassed. A nice way to share the experiences of growing up, I suppose. Do they have features like this in the equivalent boys magazines?

I didn't have too many crushes on boys when I was 7 years old and I certainly didn't fancy adult male celebrities. Why are girls encouraged so heavily to think it normal to desire adult males while they're still children? Could it be that the adult males produce records, films and television programs for consumption? I think so.

This was genuinely not a part of the culture when I was a child, and I think it alarming now. In her report "Corporate Paedophilia", Emma Rush at the Australia Institute agrees with me. In discussing the harms of early sexualisation of girls, the mixed messages of girls aspiring to womanhood before they're ready is discussed at length as a catalyst to early sexual activity. In our society we also tell adult men that children, both girls and boys, are sexually unavailable - why then do we also encourage girls to dress and act older than their years?

Stuck in the middle: Children's contest prizes, among them a tween girl doll, PG rated DVD packs, doll's pram and a pack of merchandise from Fifi Flowerpot, a toddler's TV program.

Fashion and make-up spread for the pre-pubescent girl highlighting non-existent or budding secondary sexual characteristics. The girl is encouraged thorough the use of clothing and make-up to draw attention to zones generally coded for adult sexual attraction, such as the breasts or hips, even though the child doesn't have them yet, while the use of make-up simulates arrousal, just as it does in adult women.

Features of this kind normalise the concept for both parents and children that children seeking attention using their phyical attractiveness is a normal thing. In the past, these kinds of gender entrenched behaviours were play-acted using pretend make-up, or costume jewellery, but now it seems girls are encouraged to role-play adulthood in a very real way, long before they're able to cope with the realities of adult sexuality.

Again, appearance is king in the magazine, and nothing much else matters.

Core Values:

I believe that the core values of these magazines are the ubiquity of hetrosexuality, the joy in the consumption of goods, the value of a prescribed form of attractiveness, and the adulation of fame and celebrity over more usual careers, of which there is no mention. On a somewhat more positive front, they also enshrine family relationships, friendship, and pets - feminised domestic concerns, but suitable at least to pre-adolescent girls whose loyalty is generally transitioning between family and friends. In this insular context, missing is any kind of diversity, educational value, challenge, internal life, wider world context, or encouragement for the imagination or personal expression.

In a way, it's futile and redundant to critique these magazines from the perspective of any benefit given to the child, because they don't exist for the child's benefit. The main concern of the magazine is to sell to the child.

What the magazine subscription sites, or the magazine's own web sites say about the magazines:

Little Angel

Little Angel is for girls aged 5 to 8, who love fun and aren't in a hurry to grow up - we aim to reach the unchartered territory between girls who watch The Wiggles and girls who wear makeup and like to dress up. Little Angel is about having fun, getting involved and staying a kid while you still can! Every issue come with FREE gifts too!

Disney GIRL

DisneyGiRL is about fun, fashion and friends. From celebrity gossip to DIY beauty tricks, DisneyGiRL is the magazine for young girls who want to know about the hottest trends and fashion.

Barbie Magazine

Barbie mag is packed with heaps of hot fashion, pretty beauty bits, unreal activities, all the latest entertainment news and incredible competitions! It's inspirational, cool and most importantly, lots & lots of fun. Barbie magazine really is a girl's best friend!

Total Girl

To discover the latest trends, entertainment news, cool activities and friendship advice more Australian tween girls buy Total Girl each month than any other tween girl's magazine Total Girl understands tween girls and creates a girls only zone - a kind of secret club - that boys and parents don't understand.

And finally, some market research from Total Girl's own web page:

Reaching Tween Girls - In one month Total Girl reaches more girls 8-11 (35%) than Disney Girl and Barbie combined (24%) - In 4 months Total Girl reaches 56%or 306,000 girls 8-11 - 53% of Total Girl readers do not read either Barbie or Disney Girl

Shopping - Total Girl readers receive an average of $9.03 per week in pocket money - With their pocket money Total Girl readers buy magazines (50%), CDs (46%), clothing (45%), toys (42%)and books (24%) - Total Girl readers know what they want and choose which magazines (66%), toys (63%), CDs (59%)games (51%) that they buy or their parents buy for them. - Our readers also help their parents with purchasing decisions for clothing (41%), shoes (38%), video/DVD hire (44%), fruit (34%), school lunch snacks (28%) and breakfast cereal (29%)

Food - Total Girl readers decide themselves or help their parents choose specific products or brands of chips (63%), lunch drinks (59%), dinner foods (27%), ice cream (50%), cereal (78%), lunch snacks (59%) and fruit (46%) - Our readers’ favourite foods are hot chips (90%), pizza (87%), chicken nuggets (82%) and fish & chips(81%)

Toys & Games - Total Girl readers favourite toys and games are make-up and jewellery (68%), craft stuff (66%), stickers (59%), stationery (54%) and board games (51%)*

Beauty Products - The beauty products Total Girl readers have used in the last four weeks are lip gloss (93%), nail polish (66%), bubble bath (59%), glitter (56%), body spray (54%) and moisturiser (47%)* - Total Girl readers have used the following hair products in the last four weeks, fun hair bands (81%), clips(73%), hair spray (55%), gel (31%) and mousse (20%)*
www.totalgirl.com.au
Everything in the magazine and more including polls - 70% of Total Girl readers used the internet in the last 4 weeks and 73% of those have internet access at home - 44% of readers use the net to look at websites for fun - 125,000 tweens have visited the Total Girl website in the last 4 weeks - Total Girl is the top website for girls 8-11, with twice as many visitors than closest competitor, Barbie

Technology

2007-02-24T21:17:00.000+10:30

I caught up with an old friend, Nigel, last weekend. Nigel is a genius of sorts. I'm not saying that flippantly; he learned computer programming in the 1980s at age of seven, back when almost no one had computers at home. I went to high school with him, and had enormous affection for him, in part because of his blinding brilliance in math, sciences and computing, and in part because he, myself and a sweet girl named Adelheid were the shortest kids in high school for the our first four years there. For most of those cold Bowral days, Nigel wore a six foot long striped scarf like Doctor Who, and carried around Sci-Fi novels, which he read voraciously.

I caught up with him last weekend for Yum Cha, and to talk about our respective projects. I'll stick to the conversation relevant to my project. And that relevance is? Well, he's into gaming technology and programing these days, and we had an opportunity to talk about the generational phase, and what my hopes were for the 'omnimedia' part of the production. I explained to him that a physical book, even taking the form of an old-fashioned Boys Own or Girls Own Annual was part of the plan, but I was thinking about ways to update the medium, make it relevant, and excite the end user.

He agreed that too much of kid's entertainment these days is passive, and that even games give an illusory sense of choice and self-determination which while sharpening the reflexes and the thumb muscles (very important in life) really don't enhance a child's inner life, creativity or imagination. We had a great conversation, as it is always possible to when you are talking with someone who ammicably agrees with all of your principals, but comes at the problems from a completely different angle. It was a very left-brain, right-brain conversation, he the mathematician, me the humanist.

We talked at length about my desire to make the book an option, because of the lack of tactile things of this kind available - things which could really fire up the imagination. I have a vision of the book being something which is packaged almost as a kit, within a bag, containing elements of all sizes which can be folded out, poster-like plans, stencils, stickers, and other elements tying into the project. Physically interactive from the very first instance, because of the need to extract all the elements out of the bag, and to make sense of them. To engender exploration. Whatever can be produced in the most creative way imaginable, yet still be published to a high standard without being prohibitively expensive.

He said to me, "Are you going to use web accesibility in your book?".
Huh?
"There will be a website, supporting the book, or interacting with the book by providing further projects, templates, maps, plans... is that what you mean?"
"No, no', he continued, 'have you thought of making the book remotely connectable to the internet"
"The what now??"
"Haven't you heard about the new circuitry paper and cardboard innovations? They're amazing, but really only in the earliest stages, and probably expensive at this stage, but won't be by the time you go into production"

(boom!)

BRAIN SUMMARILY EXPLODES WITH DELIGHT.

"What?! Really?!... what part do you plug in - is it like I would provide a sort of USB port with each bok?"
"Nah.. it'd be remote, you know? It would communicate with your web page. The circuits are compressed into, say, the cardboard back of your book. It looks like an ordinary book."
"I can add a bit of magic, or for more of an educational stance, empowering girls with technology in a new way by not making the process mysterious, but fully disclosed in some way. So I could make each consumable unique, and be acknowleged as unique by my web portal?"
"Sure."
"...and I could thereby limit the progress through the book, by limiting the content through time, to make the Annual truly annual?"
"No problem."
"...could book owners interact with other book owners? Could it require problem solving to progress? Could it form a project, in itself?"
"Yep. The web can also inform changes to the book... you could have electronic paper within the book, capable of modifying it's own text. You could also introduce sensory elements, such as warmth, movement, scent..."

Oh my god. I think I actually felt the need to fetch a cool drink and lie down, I was so excited. God bless the techies of the world. Nedless to say, I can see endless possibilities for this medium crossover in my project, but I will elaborate on them once I have given them more thought. I will stay abreast of the progress on this technology. Michael, can you see the potential for animation to be integrated INTO THE BOOK? Just imagine, the inside back cover say, acts as a portal, and an animated character appears there at intervals dictated by the technological possibility, to further the story, or prompt certain actions on a project? It would be so unique and amazing.

Marshall McLuhan

2007-02-12T21:24:00.000+10:30

Something very thought provoking, which I hope will assist in some heavy media sorting once I really start giving the "omnimedia" key focus the shake-down. It's Marshall McLuhans' tetrad, and it is used in this way (paraphrase from Wiki)

• Enhancement (figure): What the medium amplifies or intensifies. For example, radio amplifies news and music via sound.
• Obsolescence (ground): What the medium drives out of prominence. Radio reduces the importance of print and the visual.
• Retrieval (figure): What the medium recovers which was previously lost. Radio returns the spoken word to the forefront.
• Reversal (ground): What the medium does when pushed to its limits. Acoustic radio flips into audio-visual tv.

Reading and housekeeping

2007-02-12T20:33:00.000+10:30

Just by means of an update: I'm investing a short amount of time creating succinct reference summaries of the texts I've already read. The topics I've been reading through are diverse, which in it's own way has been refreshing, because varying the focus has made the greater body of work more digestible. The more I read, the more I feel reassured that as far as I know to date, nothing goes near hitting the same theoretical targets and creative targets I'm aiming for. That's not to say that no one has written anything which relates to my work in any way, just that nothing fills the entire space in the desired way, and certainly nothing creative has been generated from research in this mode, on this topic.

This is very reassuring, for two reasons. Firstly, from a micro-perspective, it gives me a sense that my focus is unique, and secondly, from a macro-view, I can see that many writers, academics and researchers are concerned with the same harms I am in varying disciplines, which makes me feel that I'm not alone, howling at the moon from some isolated promontory. I do feel that I have hair growing on my palms from time to time, though, probably not for academic reasons. Regardless, several people are coming at this problem from a number of interesting ideological angles, none of them designerly, so I am going to continue to cram the prevailing and historical thought conditions into my head, and to keep an awareness of my relative position to the arguments foremost at all times.

I have been reading some marketing (seemingly thrilling, yet somehow empty, like those fake Christmas packages they place under Christmas tress in shopping centres), some gender theory, some cultural theory, some parenting manuals and some really freaking inspiring Feminist theory.

Michael and Vicky - I just wanted to mention that I will continue to reference authors I have mentioned in this blog as slipshod tags, just so that within this space, I can always go back to the relevant topic if I need to weave something together from two destinct threads. I don't want you to be alarmed and assume that I'm calling those loose references my encapsulated contextual arguments.

Celia has checked in, and was good enough to recommend Emile Zola, which I will add.

I will post my first brief summary here shortly. I'm also working on the documentation to apply for Ethics Clearance, and will need to talk to you soon, Michael, about that.

Stealth and Sensibility.

2007-01-20T22:16:00.000+10:30

Today I spent and hour and a half in Toys R Us, making discrete observations and taking surreptitious pictures of product on the shelves with my camera phone. Here's a little about my experience, and impressions. My intent at this time was to remain open to the experience and to try to extract an admittedly casual account of what is being sold to Tween girls, and perhaps what they are desiring. In particular, I wanted to get an impression of the design and aesthetic conventions of products sold to pre-teen girls.

_______________

I have never entered a Toys R Us store before, so I was amazed firstly at the scale and the no-nonsense approach to retailing in the store - much like an Office Works or smaller Bunnings Warehouse, with large crates of discounted merchandise positioned in the entrance to the store.

It is easy at first glance to grasp the obviously well-calculated logic behind the store layout. Baby supplies, nursery furniture and educational materials are easily visible from the entrance, with the "fun" items - the toys -well concealed towards the back of the store, in the same way that milk, bread and other essential items are always kept at the furthest reaches of a supermarket, drawing the customer past aisles of extraneous and tempting items as they hone in on the vital item. At Toys R Us, however, there is an exchange of the essential for fun - the company anticipates that the child is going to lead the parent through the entire store to reach the toys at the back, which may lead the parent to make impulse purchases of "essentials" along the way, as well as to give the child plenty of opportunity to see, and in turn desire, a lot of additional items. Conspicuously, the store layout is built around the premise that children have significant power in this context to influence the purchases of their parents.

From the entrance, I turned right and began looking for the girl's toys. I walked through sections of board games, a computer game division (a store within the store), and boys toys, which present strongly from the shelf in (almost without exception) black, red and metallic packaging. It's interesting how well "trained" we all are, by these environments, I thought to myself - I knew immediately, without much investigating, that I'm looking at the toys intended for boys. As a girl I was highly trained while out shopping with my parents to seek out the "wall of pink" that Ellen Seiter refers to in "Sold Separately". The "wall of pink" is, of course, Barbie and all her accessories. Girls know immediately that they are on the wrong turf when they stumble into the meta-mechanical, industrial-looking boy's section of a toy store.

I continued through the store, past stuffed toys, to a section of plastic computers and electronic learning toys for toddlers, oddly paired with craft toys and books intended for the pre-teen girl. Every single craft item on display is intended for purchase by (or for) girls. This is indicated by the nature of the craft, the design of the packaging, and the depiction of girls at play on the front of most of the packages.The craft toys included: Sidewalk chalk for creating artwork and playing hopscotch, fabric paint for making apparel, several versions of "scoubidoo" a plaiting craft for making of key chains and friendship bands for the wrists, and kits to make stained glass windows, a painted tea set, a woven purse, a woven belt, a jewellery box, stuffed toys, and curiously, a woodwork kit which snaps together to construct a hot-pink, convertible jeep toy with a blonde haired, blue-eyed, bikini-clad surfer girl driver.

A couple of craft items caught my interest, particularly a comparatively large "Style Centre" craft kit for making cosmetics, stationery, and jewellery, and the absolutely huge range of bead kits on offer. Over 1/3 of the total space designated for craft items seemed devoted to bead kits. The boxes for these items are predominantly soft pink, or hot pink in colour. Motifs like stars, hearts, and butterflies abound. Many utilise curly, hyper-feminised typefaces which in some cases resemble the handwriting of a teen aged girl, and depict pairs of girls on the front of the package.

In the Tween years, girls begin to test their independence, and define themselves by beginning to distance themselves from their parents, and forming close bonds with peers. It's not surprising to see that so many of these craft kits are designed for girls to either make with a friend, or to make "friendship bands", lip gloss, or charms, which may be gifted or exchanged with other girls.

From crafts I headed to the section where Bratz dolls were merchandised. Bratz are advertised heavily in Tween publications like Total Girl, so I was interested to see what they're about. My first impression was awe at how much space in the store was devoted to them - two full, long, faces of an aisle, floor to ceiling crammed with dolls and accessories. I was also surprised to note that the girly, fluffy pink look of the craft section was really nowhere in sight - Bratz dolls are packaged in mature-looking deep purples, silver, and black. It's very distinctive, and en masse, looks unlike anything else in the store. I'm amazed really that they managed to bust out of the pink handcuffs (OK, that's a good expression for the inability to free oneself from pink when designing for girls).

The Bratz Girls - the Girls with a Passion for Fashion, apparently.

Also, Bratz dolls, in spite of looking like sex workers or exotic dancers in heavy makeup, strangely cartoonish facial features and a wardrobe more commonly seen on booty girls in hip hop videos, I have to say... Bratz are really freaking cool. I would have wanted these toys so badly when I was a kid. Basically, Barbie looks like a librarian compared to Bratz dolls, and Bratz now have all the stuff that Barbie used to have, but cooler. And I mean all of it - the remote-control convertible Mustang-like muscle car, the beauty salon and spa with real makeup, the fashion design studio, the hair extensions, the rock stadium set pieces and even (on the Bratz Diamondz dolls) real diamonds.

It's an interesting feeling to be repelled and drawn to something like Bratz dolls. It's all too much. I spent a long time in the aisle being alternately alarmed and thrilled. The dolls are themed into sorry caricatures like Rodeo Bratz, Kid Sisters, Pretty and Punk (oh, how I wept inside at that one!), Funky Fashion, Sleepover, Feelin' Pretty, Genie Magic, and Sweetheart. Two these which did have me doing a double take were the Class Bratz (wearing the most alarmingly provocative tartan miniskirt and a full face of drag queen-like make-up. What school was that now?) and Spring Break Bratz (an American COLLEGE rite of passage which usually involves travel to exotic beach locales for the excess consumption of alcohol and sexual abandon. Not at all kids stuff - and that is the prevailing general perception of Spring Break, not an aside.)

I could also see that having a child who is into Bratz dolls could quickly become a farewell to any cent of spare income you might ever have had. Priced at $49.99 for the basic doll, some of the more alluring merchandise such as the cars, and make-up bust were priced at $79.99. It's a range which begs to be collected, and like every aspect of Tween marketing, it seems to say "Buy the house, buy the car, buy the diamonds, buy... it doesn't matter... just keep buying...quickly, quickly... don't stop!"

To say Bratz is obviously a juggernaut is putting it modestly.

I picked up a "talking" Bratz doll, and spent an amusing few minutes pushing the button in its stand to have the doll say, in the most ohmygod of Valley Girl Angelino accents, "Remember you're the one who counts - Do what you feel!", "Have you ever had a bad hair day?", ""Don't be afraid to ask for what you want!", "It can be hard, but studying and working can be totally worth it!", and "Hey Girl! My name is Yasmine, but you can call me 'Pretty Princess' - all my friends do".

Lordie.

That this is supposed to be empowering is amusing at best, and ties in nicely with a text I'm currently reading "Female Chauvinist Pigs" by Ariel Levy, and one I can't seem to get my hands on called "Princess Bitchface Syndrome" by Michael Carr-Gregg, concerning issues of entitlement in pre-teen Gen Y-ers.

After gorging myself on Bratz inanity, I wandered off to look for Barbie. Where is Barbie? I walked to the back of the store, peering down each aisle, then back again. Yo, Barbie! Where are you, homegirl? I had to find a sales person. "Can you please show me where the Barbie dolls are?". When she took me to grim and scantly stocked 1/3 of one side of an aisle, I was perplexed. No "wall of pink"? Curious.

Despite being priced at $19.99 which is the price I remember them being when I was a kid (how does that work?) Barbie it seems, is not the force she used to be, and I would never have known it had I not come looking for her. Inside the familiar hot pink boxes, the dolls look rigid and archaic, and there's even a Barbie "Fashion Fever" line, which is a fairly blatant attempt to wriggle in on some of the economic fabulosity of Bratz. It was actually kind of sad. The inner kid said to me "But Bratz have all those cool accessories in the box, and there's that lip gloss manufacturing laundromat! Barbie, is like, totally lame!". Barbie is yesterday's hero, and Bratz is so "street" and now.

Barbie, and her freinds. Far too nicey nice for today's gal.

A man with his young daughter, who I learned was five years of age, wandered into the aisle. Hoping to ply some parental feedback out of him, I said "Doesn't look like Barbie is the thing girls want anymore...", and he said, "Ugh, no. My daughter loves these..." and he took me to another aisle to show me the range of Disney Fairies figurines. "They're all different, and have different skills each... or so she tells me. All I know is I spend a lot of money on them!"

_______________

I need to reflect on this further, but I gained some insight, and I'm certainly happy to see that from a design perspective it may be possible that little girls only like pink because it's all that's been on offer to them, and they begin to identify positive attributes of femininity from it. I can see there's room for alternatives, and that mountains can be moved. I mean Barbie as an also-ran? I would never have believed it.

Barbie now seems too innocent somehow now, which would explain the shift to young girls wanting Barbie, and older, Tween girls wanting Bratz. I think it very likely that Tween girls will eventually resist pink in products designed for them, because they will come to associate it with a childhood, a stage they're trying so desperately to put behind them. Bratz, in their warped way, seem to tap into the kick-arse proto-Feminism that pre-teen girls think they're engaging in. I didn't see a Bratz version of the Ken doll, so one presumes that the Bratz girls got all the stuff - the cars, the wild wardrobes and the Diamondz through their own chutzpah and scrappy determination. Friendship and sisterhood seems to be favoured in the Bratz world over the demure dating of Ken in Barbie's world. I'm sure Barbie had friends, I just don't really remember any of them.

I don't know if what I saw was an improvement, a shift... or what. The main thing is that there is definitely scope to wiggle into the hearts of Tween girls, even when it seems like they've got their time and attention all taken up with another plastic paramour. Should my work opperate inside the known aesthetic realm of Tween girls, or should I base it entirely on my own research, and see just what the kids care co-opt? I haven't decided yet, but these are useful steps.

The train.

2007-01-19T19:49:00.000+10:30

A few months ago, I decided to take public transport to work, so now I get the train each morning. My hope was that I might be able to observe people a little more - driving is so insular.
Unfortunately, at this stage it seems that my travel route is not populated with many tween girls. I had hoped to be able to observe groups of tween girls having animated conversations about tween girl things in relaxed, naturalistic tween girl setting. Not to be, it seems. No tweeny commuters doing tweeny things.

I know I can learn a lot from Brenda Laurel:

"To be an honest researcher, you must resist the enormous

temptation to interpret as you go in terms of your own

experience and values"

(from "Utopian Entrepreneur")

A roadmap.

2007-01-18T19:42:00.000+10:30

A roadmap is inherantly contentious. Time honoured road-trip tradition dictates that a roadmap should cause more problems than it solves, inflame where harmony is required. Who doesn't argue in cars over directions on a map? Anyway, I'm going to solve this problem for myself by simultaneously driving, AND navigating. That way, if I get lost, I can shrug at myself and say "If you got us here, I'm certain we were meant to be here. Let's go get a beer."

Please tell me if you notice I'm holding the map upside down, or am about to plow into a scholarly embankment.

On a more serious note, the partial reason for this preamble is that Michael wisely suggested that I tone down this title to allow for detours or to prevent lapses into flamboyancy. You'll soon note that the working title has become a tool to defining the perametres of my research. Certainly they will require further crafting, and I welcome comment as I continue to meditate on them. I will propose a blander title for public consumption.

The most succinct elucidation of my aims in this research project are therefore:

In reaching this methodological and contextual definition, I have also been able to loosely draw apart my approach to the work, stated simply as practice emerging from, or responding to my analysis - an artifact.

The definition is constructed carefully of the most key of terms of reference shaping my methodology:

Some additionl thoughts:

The term "Tween" is a frightful marketing neologism, and I baulk at including it, but it's crucial to differentiate between social statistic, and a marketing construct. The tween phenomena is interesting in that it's a relatively new catagory for the shilling of consumables, but pre-teens, as a demographic, has always existed. What is curious, or perhaps not curious at all, is that business, having grappled with teenagers to the point of redundancy has seemingly stepped aside, exausted, and sized up other parts of the population, with a view to herding them into a quantifyable consumer cluster. Manditorially, the group woud possess either disposable cash, or the power to influence purchasing, and succes would mean sculpting them into consumers of goods they didn't know they wanted yet.

The pre-teen segment must have seemed particularly vulnerable to marketing suggestion prior to the piecing-out of the group for direct and finely crafted targeting. They not only have pocket money to spend, but the influence household spending through the rather dire capacity for "pester power".

More telling though, is the emotional vulnerability of the group attributable to naivité woven tightly with aspirations of independence; desparate to be adults, or at the very least, teenagers, they are physically, emotionally, psychologically still children. They will purchase early and often to express themselves and generate solidarity with peers, who become increasingly important through adolescence.

The obvious challenges: How much of the understanding of Tweens is imposed, and how much is truth? In a context where the notions of harm, innocence, belonging, societal shifts and exploitation continually arise, how much of the stage is universal, developmental? How much is contextual? What are the implications?

The Design, growing out of research with tween girls, and textual exercises and analysis, will address directly the conventions of the media currently available, and consumed by Tweens.

The obvious challenges: I really need to give some serious thought to the nature of design in this context. What do tween girls like? The relevant stores are certainly awash with pink cuteness - do girls of this age inherantly like this look? Do they buy it because it's the only thing on offer? A bit of both? How dangerous is it to shift sideways from this aesthetic? What are the best tools for extracting taste data from girls? I need to design some exercises and problems which will loosen the mystique for me. I suspect some personal reflection here could be handy.

Certainly in a research setting with girls, I will need to think of ways to come at the information I need laterally. Why do I feel that way? Why is this even necessary? Are girls communicated to when they purchase tween consumables, or aspire to communicate utilising the products? A bit of both? What are kids buying anyway? Is there scope to bust out of the framework, or do I have to operate within the existing paradigm? A bit of textual analysis, particularly with the print media on offer may help crack the code.

Key to my research is the notion of santuary to tween girls. An interesting exercise is to watch toy advertising during children's programming in television. While the play of boys invariably inhabits fantasy realms (a jungle, the outer limits of space, a speedway), the play of girls is depicted as a cosily domestic occupation, taking place mainly in the girl's bedroom. It's pretty quaint, when you give it consideration. Why is this?

In spite of this, I know that I want to create an inhabitable space - and I mean emotionally inhabitably, not physically. For reasons that I will elucidate as I go along, I believe a protective, nurturing "space" in fiction, can help a girl to undertand the strength of relying upon their own resources. It's quite a different concern from girls engaging in tidy, home-bound play; it's more of a mindset. When I frame "santuary" as a concept, I mean in part the santuary of self - self-development, self-reliance, the ability to care for and support oneself, to create one's own fun. The internal bedroom of creative play which can sustain a woman - I know because I spend a great deal of time in the bedroom of my own psyche, tinkering with ideas. But only because I was encouraged in it. It sustains me even now. I believe the inner life to be important to tween girls.

The girls of my definition are English-speaking Australian girls because I need to study girls living in Sydney, this year, 2007, to answer so many of the questions I've already raised. The product of the generational phase will be an annual project, renewable, revisable and visible every year. But that's only if everything goes well. I will not be considering them in my study. My eventual hope is that on some level I can speak to girls passing through this developmental phase in the English-speaking world, indefinitely. A large plan, certianly. Delusional? I really care about girlhood. Like a passage you walk down to arrive somewhere else entirely, it's ingenerately fleeting, and crucial to happiness and health in womanhood, as all formative experiences are.

Girl culture is particularly well established in Japan, for more subversive reasons pertaining to different cultural ideas around adulthood. While young girls in the English-speaking West crave maturity, associating it as they do with freedom, fun, personal expression, and an avenue to personal fulfillment, Japanese concepts of adulthood are more encumbered with duty, career path, and responsibility to others, such as husband or elderly family members. Staying childlike and cute in Japan is an act of rebellion and refusal. Interestingly, this throws up some fascinating design concepts - there are simply so many women aspiring to girlhood in Japan, that a "girl industry" is more thickly populated with products, images and messages than anywhere else on earth. Obviously, I'm preoccupied with this movement in Japan - it fleshes out some aspects of the investigation by providing and entirely inverse view. Contextual analyisis and comparision is vital, I think.

This process of defining my parametres has really begun to open up the research experience to me - I can see now the sort of questions I need to ask of my thesis, in order to know what questions I need to ask, about which questions I need to ask. A degree of immediate clarity which indicates the magnitude of the complexity ahead, but gives me the first footfall in a direction. Which direction? Not sure yet.

The situation

2007-01-08T21:34:00.000+10:30

I have narrowed my terms of reference for my project to deal with design pertaining to girls, purposefully dealing with the same group of people in the developed world as targeted in tween marketing campaigns, “tween” being defined for in my study, as preteens aged between eight and twelve inclusive. The tween group is also a relatively neologistic and clearly delineated focus group for the purposes of marketing of consumables, generally understood within this context to be children motivated strongly desire to be teenaged, yet still developmentally and socially being children.

I intend to subvert the aims of tween marketing, by packaging my thesis work in a form that presents like the other media, play, and entertainment options for girls in its appeal, yet defaults on the key objective of tween marketing for girls – to encourage a lifetime of consumption at any cost. Simply put, my project will harness the key lessons of tween marketing in order to provide girls, and their parents, with a beneficial entertainment media alternative.

The primary concern of these media, will be design and the fullest use of a graphic interface to engage and challenge the child, and to cross various media forms such as printed material - magazines or a book, and digital media – the internet. This generational approach will enable my project to be across many of the same areas that traditional tween marketing is positioned.
I have deliberately harnessed the word “sanctuary” in my definition to identify the duality of a place of worship (in this sense referencing the power of the advertising image and the marketing machine to inspire brand loyalty or a fan base in the tween demographic) and a safe place, a refuge from harm. I hope to achieve both in the generative phase of my research.

Tween Marketing Subverted: Designing a Media-Rich Omnimedia Sanctuary for Girls

2007-01-07T20:49:00.000+10:30

Is currently the most accurate map for my six year hike through a Practise-based Design Research project wilderness. Please read on, and feel free to drop supplies along the route...