Project: Publication

This was an interesting project as it's the first time since the "Manifesto" project last year that we've worked as a group; as well as being a crossover project with the BA Graphic Design students, allowing for new alliances and a fresh perspective on our work.

I'm normally not a huge fan of group work- last time people were very reluctant to do work to a deadline and it all ended up being very last minute, and I regretted allowing someone else to managing collating the zine we were doing into Indesign as they set the resolution at 72dpi and therefore we produced a very low-quality zine, which sucked. However, this project, although a little stressful due to the quick turnover, actually went really well and the other group members were very talented. We all worked to our own strengths and I'm very pleased with the outcome.

The publication was a follow on to our personal elective essays. I chose the education elective, and chose to look at educomics: "How can art and design be used to teach other subjects? Or Comic Classroom Content: using comics and graphic novels in the secondary school classroom". The essay was suprisingly challenging, not least for trying to create a succinct argument (I used to be well-versed in writing essays as we wrote minimum 2 a week in A2, but now I only have to do 2 a year I feel like either my abilities or my confidence in writing has slipped), but also because I wanted to go out of my way to dispel bias and see both sides of the argument.

Our group proposal was as follows:

Einstein once said “Imagination is more important than knowledge”. While this may have to be taken with a pinch of salt when studying education, we still want to take the essence of this and create an object for play where the aim is not to acquire knowledge in a traditionally structured, classroom-orientated sense, but more about the process: inspiring imaginative outcomes and fostering fluency and familiarity with the subject of numeracy and maths. We will be designing an object for informal learning in non-classroom environments, for example in a playground or at home, reiterating the importance of play in education, with the education aspect found through the design of the object. The idea of this would be that the child can conduct self-led play without supervision or rules to maximise the exploratory and imaginative nature of the experience. This design will be aimed at younger children, between 3 and 7 years, who so often are forced into a classroom environment where it can be hard to get them to gain knowledge and complete work in a traditional sense better suited for older children.

While I feel my research on using comics in the secondary school classroom is quite removed from younger children in play, the basis of children finding enjoyment in learning by looking outside traditional classroom teaching remains the same through both projects. Equally, I think experiencing art is a good way to teach almost anything, and creating things is a good way to solidifying information on your own terms.

We then each researched a playground object to look at how it was successful and what we could take from its design in creating our own object.

Although not technically a playground object, I was most intrigued by one teacher’s wet weather symmetry activity, using flattened balls of clay and asking students to find plants and petals with which to create their own mandala pattern. This is a colourful and inventive way of teaching symmetry, and practical too: the wet leaves stick to the clay but are easy to remove also, clay can be reused and is a natural product, and so doesn’t harm the environment if bits are dropped by children. The exercise has endless possibilities and can be tailored in complexity for different abilities.

That said, this activity has to be lead and therefore doesn’t optimise the creative exploration and self-initiation of the child, which is why I also considered Cuisenaire rods: colourful wood-blocks proportioned to be able to teach fractions and, potentially, create patterns. I liked that so much of the teaching of maths lay in the design of these objects rather than in directed learning, and I wondered if they could be redesigned somehow, taking in consideration the mandala task, to allow for different, potentially more attractive pattern-making.

Other group members looked at dominoes and their derivatives, Montessori theory and what health and safety means to play.

Our original group idea was a set of wooden blocks that could be used to build, count and make patterns, as well as being proportioned by fractions and printed with numbers (much like dominoes) that could fit into a larger frame, but there was no way of designing these where they were simple enough to have not been designed before, or complicated enough that the design didn’t become impossible or too abstract. We therefore abandoned this idea after much deliberating, but took an idea we did have to add magnets to the blocks to form a game where the object was to stick things to each other.

We therefore formulated “counting vests”, black felt (or for mass manufacture, loop Velcro would be much more resilient a material) with separate sets of felt numbers backed with hook Velcro. Originally the felt numbers were just the shape of the number so the child could feel and appreciate the form of the number, but beside being too flimsy, we decided there could be multiple ways of experiencing the number, hence incorporating a balled shape and sticking felt numbers to these shapes. The design is versatile, with no rules, and can barely cause harm due to its soft design. It also encourages physical activity and collaborative play, as it is almost impossible to use otherwise.

For our outcome, we created a prototype of the game, a booklet publication aimed at educators and parents outlining our research, possible uses and the importance of allowing children to self-direct thir play with the object, and a wordless large-format comic for display purposes, aimed at children and adults alike. 

I did the writing for the publication, summarising everyone's research, and I created the comic. 

I think the comic is one of the more successful things I've done during Unit 6: it fits its purpose very well and is visually engaging. 

The only problems I had were more during the writing up of everyone's research: some of the student were not at all very inclined to writing in coherent English, nor did they properly summarise their own research, and there was a quick turnover so I could sent the writing to the girls doing the graphic design and printing of the publication, meaning I ended up doing some people's research for them. However, towards the end, they had a lot more to do than me, so I didn't mind so much. 

I also somewhat struggled creating the comic as it was a very different style to what I'm used to so until I worked out exactly what I wanted, I really lacked confidence doing it and felt like a failure. However, I pulled it off, so I'm quite proud of myself for that.