Message delivered

Sam Winston and Susanna Edwards & Research materials¹

Sam Winston encourages people to use their own hands when exploring or developing a design (“learning by touching”). He likes to play with perspectives and the undiscovered, similar to Kenya Hara, who believes that the unknown moves people. Michael Beirut says that people want to “connect the dots and experience the moment of discovery”.

When exploring an environment Sam Winston takes into consideration:

-processes (something interesting/useful in a particular case)

-material

-language (found in the environment but also own response to it)

-design (it’s multisensory)

He says it’s about looking at a cultural community and combining the materials with something contrasting (e.g. K-POP and street signs). The image and text of a design should not convey the same message (“say one thing, but it looks like something else”). For Ivan Chermayeff and Alan Fletcher, graphics are ideally witty as they attract more attention and are more memorable (“it’s about finding something to play against”).

Definition of wit: The ability to relate seemingly disparate things so as to illuminate or amuse.²

Part of the design process is to constantly rethink, revise and test certain ideas and build up a personal toolbox and materials (e.g. the Institute of Making).

For me, finding the uniqueness of the city I currently live in has been an important aspect of my own journey for brief 3. For Sam Winston, this is significant when the place you live in is not very rich in resources. He also mentions that you should “accept what you have in front of you, [because] those are the tools you work with”.

Research task: Explore your relationship with your local area

• Create a mood board (using images and text) that conveys your perception of your local environment.
  • The picture down in the middle shows a statue that is part of the sculpture path

Brief 3 continuation

After the street festival, I had the feeling that community is very important to most people. And I wanted to explore that further. While I believe that community plays an important role in many smaller towns, perhaps it’s not unique to this area. So I approached a local magazine and asked them for advice on a particular area or object. One suggestion was the sculpture trail created in 1998 by German-Romanian artist Ingo Glass. The 11 or 12 statues are scattered along a diagonal path in the city. The woman from the magazine also told me that they are not very well looked after by the city council and are rotting away. My curiosity was awakened. I went to various sculptures and asked several passers-by if they knew them and what they thought about them.

The first person, who has lived here for 30 years, told me he felt the statues were a bit random and he didn’t understand the connection between them. Other people I asked said that the statues go unnoticed (which I think could be partly because they’ve been used to them for a long time). One woman even said that she didn’t like them at first, but now she can’t imagine them not being there, and that they make the city special. An international couple who recently moved here told me that they just thought about what “that” statue might be, but they didn’t know for sure and thought it might be something that kids like, but they didn’t feel like it was “special”. Another elderly couple said it was “better than nothing” and they supported the cultural effort. The husband said they had recently redone the paint. The wife, on the other hand, said she would prefer them to be rusty, as is sometimes done on purpose with sculptures.

The people who have lived here longer seem to know about the sculptures, but the general impression is that people can’t quite grasp them or haven’t done much research on the meaning behind them. There is an information board close to some of the statues in the municipal office, and even the people who knew about them didn’t know the board existed. I also took some photos with my grandfather’s old camera to document my research process.

Reflection and further thoughts

The questions I asked myself after exploring the sculptures were: “What is the meaning and purpose of art?”, “Should art be experienced?”, “When is art perceived?”, “How can art be more connected to the community?”

So I came up with the idea of giving the sculptures a new face by projecting artworks by local artists, photos of the community, things people like about the city, etc. onto them, bringing them to life in a different way.

Since then, two aspects of this city have been circling in my head. One is about how art is a part of the community, or how it can become a bigger part, and the other is about community in general, especially in the neighborhood. Since moving here a few months ago, I’ve gotten the impression that the neighbors are pretty much among themselves (as a counterpart to the street party that celebrated community around the municipal office). I’m also fascinated by the differences and similarities that the people around me have. On the left I have neighbors who moved to this neighborhood about 8 years ago and are originally from Kosovo, on the opposite side I have migrant workers from Ukraine who live here temporarily, and on the right a woman who is about 70 years old and has lived here since she was 4 years old. How do these different people see the community? Do they see themselves as part of the community?

Art in the community

I got the impression that people in the town are not very interested in the art in the community. This may be partly due to the fact that Munich is nearby and offers various museums and other art experiences. (The elderly couple I interviewed at the sculptures, who were interested in art and culture, mentioned this as well.) However, for a city, there are quite a few clubs for different interests, even a photography club and a painting club called “Der Farbkreis”. I had seen their small exhibition at the street festival. They sometimes also display their work in the town hall. In my opinion, people seem to be more interested in music, as a look in a local magazine and on the town’s website showed.

I decided to get in touch with the painting association “Der Farbkreis”. I contacted three of the painters by e-mail and asked them to send me some information about their painting. Two of them replied and also sent a picture of their painting. I thought it would be nice to ask them questions about the community and art in the community. However, this proved to be quite difficult as I couldn’t find any information or a website online, although a magazine article said that most of the members were quite old and new members were being sought. So I wrote to one of the three painters I had previously contacted to get more information about where they meet, but the person was very suspicious and said they could not give out such information until they knew more about why I had contacted them. Another person answered that they meet again in September, so way to far in the future to be useful for this research.

An unrelated search for another club related to photos revealed that it has a website and doesn’t really seem to lack members. (It says that the number of members is limited to 30 people and that new members must first complete a two-month trial period).

The community in the neighborhood

As already mentioned, this neighborhood is home to many different people, some of whom moved here a long time ago, spent their childhood here or have only recently moved here.

• People who have lived here all their lives
  • One family with mother/father and adult daughter who live together
  • One single pensioner
  • One pensioner couple of whom I only interviewed the woman
  • One couple of whom I interviewed both
  • One young mother of two children
  • One of the 4 families does not live in the same area

• 3 units that are foreigners/moved here recently/in the last years
  • 2 young families who have lived here between 5 and 8 years
  • And a son of one of the migrant workers who is only here for a few weeks

Tutorial with Paul

I told Paul about the Thorak building, which I couldn’t explore any further at the moment, the climbing forest (which I had already visited twice but hadn’t explored any further), the sculpture trail and the topic of community. He was very taken with my idea of interviewing several people from the neighborhood. He told me that I could create a typographic explanation based on the interviews. He also liked the idea of projecting something onto the sculptures. He even said that I could project the results of the conversations in the neighborhood onto buildings.

1. A smile in the mind: witty thinking in graphic design (Beryl McAlhone; David Stuart; Greg Quinton; Nick Asbury) ↩︎
2. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/wit ↩︎