Text to image workshop
The first workshop of the semester was led by Chris and was based around visualising information. We were given a selection of articles from science magazines that were text based and tasked with creating a visual from the information using basic paper techniques. My article was about 'rodeo ants' that ride on the backs of larger ants, laying eggs and tricking other colonies into looking after their young. I thought this was a fun idea to visualise but I spent most of the time drawing and cutting out ants from a sheet of paper. I think I should have gone for a more abstract style because in the end my graphic didn't really say a lot. I'm a big proponent of analogue working processes and I enjoyed using paper to craft the images. I think it's an interesting way of developing work, especially when thinking about risograph because it helps limit the shapes, colours and textures available in a similar way to two colour riso printing.

What does politics mean to me?
Politics is an incredibly vague term so I thought it might be helpful to try examine what it means to me. It's easy to talk about the literal interpretation of politics - governments, prime ministers and political parties but I think politics covers much more than political institutions. I keep thinking about a quote from Lucien Roberts' 'curated by...' talk last semester that discussed the idea that 'everything is political'. The idea that politics influences every aspect of life is a really relevant one in today's world where it's nearly impossible to live your life without taking a political stance - through the businesses you support, the food you eat, the clothes you wear and the people you talk to.

Personally I like the political topic because I'm quite interested in politics in general. I'm fascinated by current US politics but I feel that I might be able to produce a more meaningful outcome if my project looks at issues closer to home. It's important to me to avoid cliches so I hope I will be able to pick a project that has a fresh perspective on things and will allow me to bring something new to the table.

Dr Knut Roder: Politics
Head of politics at Hallam, Knut Roder gave us an introductory talk about politics to get us started for the project. I was expecting it to be a really basic and boring discussion about the principles of politics and the political system but it was really much more of a free flowing discussion about contemporary politics and topical political issues including Brexit, identity politics, social politics and globalism. He talked about political trends and how things have changed over time as well as how things will likely change in the future. I was really interested in the discussions about political divisions; the gap between the left and the right as well as between the young and the old. He mentioned that the older you get, the less likely you are to care about the things like the environment and that your age massively influences how you will vote, more so than many other factors. The amount of young people who have come of age as well as well as the older people who have since died since 2016 would mean that if we repeated the controversial brexit referendum today with all other factors remaining the same, the outcome would look very different. Last semester, I looked into polarisation in politics and Dr Roder discussed the increasing gap between the political left and right, with the rise of populism through figures like Donald Trump & Boris Johnson. Although he briefly talked through some of the basics of politics like ideologies, governments and political theory, most of Dr Roder's talk was him taking a shallow

Winter Infographics Review
After Dr Roder's talk, we discussed the different infographics that we produced over the winter break. My infographic was called 'does my dog hate me' and aimed to quantify an abstract idea in a numerical and visual way. Over a week, I tracked incidences where my dog was overly friendly to me as well as incidences where she was less friendly and ranked them by severity. I also tracked the times when other family members were in the house as a way to determine whether or not my dog acts differently around me vs other people. I'm not a huge fan of my infographic and I really think I could have done it more effectively. Looking at the finished thing, the topic just isn't that interesting to me and I think the way I tracked it is neither engaging nor meaningful. I wanted the infographic to look minimal and sophisticated but I think it looks too simple and it's not very easy to understand it's meaning. If I were to repeat the task, I think the visuals should either be more abstract and interesting or more figurative and meaningful. When all of the class' infographics are displayed on the wall, mine blends in and I should aim to produce eye catching designs. Despite my issues, hopefully this task has allowed me to stretch my infographic muscles so that I can produce something really effective for the risograph brief.

Possible Research Ideas
Looking at this semester, there's not a huge amount of time afforded for each project so I think it's really important for me to decide on a research topic quickly. During my past projects, my least effective outcomes came when I did poor research or when I took too long deciding on topics so I must work quickly here.

So far, the ideas that have interested me the most are based around political divisions. I've tried to tackle similar projects in the past looking at bridging the political divide but I still think there is interesting things to examine outside of the classic left wing vs right wing ideologies. The age gap that Dr Knut discussed is one but I could also investigate geographic division (things like the north vs the south), cultural division (religion & traditional ideology) and social divisions (rich vs poor, class divide).

I don't love the way the brief tells us to pick topics but I'm pretty sure I want my project to be based around present day politics, probably in the UK.

We did a concept mapping workshop in the studio to help us develop our projects and come up with project ideas. Concept maps give me major flashbacks to first year because I never really figured them out and we did them to death but I'm starting to figure them out. The key difference between a concept map and a mind map is that the concept map illustrates a concept and the connections between each aspect of it. We made a concept map about politics in the session but I found it really difficult to map our ideas with much coherency. Concept maps still feel pretty arbitrary to me but I might try produce one for my project and see if it helps.

In short, social mobility is the movement of individuals between layers of society. In a fair society, somebody born poor should have equal potential to get rich as somebody born into a rich family. But that is frequently just not the case. The class divide in Britain may have gotten smaller over the past decades but the gap between rich and poor is stronger than ever.

Social mobility is a key aspect of inequality and is an important marker of how fair a society is. The problems of inequality are in the vicious cycles it creates for the people at the bottom who, through a lack of opportunities never have chance to improve their situation. The dream of capitalism describes a society where hard work and perseverance will lead to success but this facade is crumbling: If we want to create a fairer society, it's vital that we study and improve social mobility.

Educational Inequality
One of the key factors that seems to influence an individual's potential to succeed is education. Consistently, children who achieve higher levels of education as well as attending higher quality schools are more likely to get better jobs and earn more in the future. This is important when we compare access to education between different social strata - people born into poor families are far less likely to attend high quality schools and (as a result) are also much less likely to do well in their GCSEs & A levels and are less likely to move on to higher education. According to the Education Endowment Foundation's 'Closing the attainment gap' (2018) report, 'a majority of 19 year-olds who have been eligible for free school meals leave education without a good standard of recognised qualifications in English and maths'. Furthermore, when compared to their more advantaged classmates, disadvantaged students are twice as likely to leave formal education without GCSEs in maths and English. Much of the attainment gap stems from the simple fact that schools in economically disadvantaged areas tend to be significantly worse than in wealthier areas. A 2018 Labour analysis revealed that the poorest students are nine times more likely to attend a school that ofsted rates as 'inadequate' .It is undeniable that a student's economic background will influence their academic achievement and as such, it is completely unfair to suggest that all students are offered an equal chance at success.

On the other end of the educational spectrum, the most privileged members of our society are offered unfair opportunities in life through their access to high quality private schooling. These exclusive institutions gather children from the wealthiest families in an environment designed to nurture networks of elitism and to perpetuate privilege. On top of smaller class sizes, access to high quality facilities and well payed, world class tutors, private schools teach children how to speak, how to dress and how to act in a way that will ensure they reap the benefits of their class. Despite only 7% of all students attending private schools, privately educated individuals make up 39% of the country's leading figures (Sutton Trust, 2019). 29% of all MPs were privately educated along with 57% of the house of lords, 33% of all newspaper columnists and over half of the Sunday Times' 'Rich List'. Private schools produce generations of advantaged individuals that are massively over represented in the most influential positions within government, business and the media.

Income inequality & Wealth Distribution
I also think it would be interesting to do a project on general economic inequality. You often see statistics about the distribution of wealth and I think it might make for an effective, impactful project.

'We are the 99 percent' is an slogan that arose from the 'Occupy Wall Street' protests of 2011. It's based on the idea that 1% of the population are super-rich, elitist individuals who benefit from low taxes and over-representation in politics while the other 99% are hard working, tax paying individuals who are suffering because of the inequality. I think talking about inequality through the lens of wealth distribution might be an interesting idea because it allows me to take a stronger stance against the issues. When we talk about rich vs poor, it's very easy to get bogged down in the politics of it all. At the end of the day, it's difficult to make a convincing case that people who have earned their money don't deserve it. However, when we talk about wealth distribution, we are talking about a tiny tiny proportion of people who possess unfathomably huge amounts of money. Unless you spend like Bill Gates on charity endeavours, it's almost impossible to actually spend all of your money if you are a multi billionaire. As I write this, Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world is hovering at around $150 billion as Amazon rockets towards a trillion dollar valuation. These levels of wealth are inherently unethical and unlike your day to day millionaire, they're much harder to justify. A project criticising this aspect of wealth distribution might make for an interesting concept.

I've used the flag to represent 100% of the wealth and then expanded the central red cross to make up 61% of the total area. I also made an alternate version using the blue triangles instead. I really like this concept because the flag is such a recognisable image that it becomes really impactful when it is corrupted. Because people are so familiar with the usual shape, the altered proportions feel uncomfortable and magnify the effect of the graphic. I think the red version is more effective because although the blue triangles are sharp and violent, the expanded red creates a bloated, claustrophobic feeling that works really well with my message of a bloated and greedy upper class.

My main issues with this context is the subtext that comes with using the flag. If I'm using the St George cross to represent the upper classes, am I implying that the English possess all of the wealth? The same thing applies if I use the blue triangles from the St Andrew's Cross. The graph is based on the proportions of the final image but I think there may be an implication that it's based in some way on the proportions of the original flag. If I'm representing 60% of the wealth being controlled by 20% of the population, do I need to find a shape from the original that makes up 20% of the flag to demonstrate the disproportionality?

Furthermore, I'm not convinced by the statistics I found because I can't find a clear definition of household wealth within the study. I want to be really sure about the statistics I'm using because the message should be clear. Am I saying that each percentile should proportionally be in control of wealth (1% Controls 1%)? Because that suggests that there should be no difference between the rich and the poor. I think it's more important to look at the richest 1% and what influence they have. The main issue behind economic inequality is the massive amounts that billionaires and the super rich control. I will need to do more research about this but I have a feeling that this number, although important, might not work as well for the flag idea. If 1% of the population control 10% of the wealth, that is an important statistic but it might not look very impressive if the flag is expanded to 10%.

Unsurprisingly, the report finds that in many areas of society, the leading roles are overwhelmingly taken by people who were privately educated. This suggests that these people come from wealthy backgrounds and are well connected with other wealthy individuals; in other words, the elite. The report has a bunch of interesting statistics in it that I think I will use for the basis of my infographic. I want to communicate the advantages that are offered to the elite individuals who come from privileged backgrounds.

Risograph Poster Development
Although I'd like to spend more time researching and refining my research topic, but I need to get cracking with the design if I want to have anything ready by Monday when we will be printing. I think it might be interesting to approach the poster from two angles; One looking at the challenges faced by less fortunate members of society and the other looking at the upper classes and the unfair opportunities that they are afforded. Initially, I played around with putting one part upside down so that the poster needed to be rotated but I decided that it was a bit unnecessary and would make for an annoying wall poster so I instead used opposing colours to represent each side. I think this will work really well for a riso print. In my initial design, I made some long, diagonal rectangles that bisect the page and spread across it as a visual representation of 'barriers'. I selected some statistics from my research that demonstrate the difficulties/advantages of being born on either side of the line and the rectangles are partly filled to create bar charts representing these ideas. At this point, I quite like the reduced, overprinted style that I've been working with but I don't love the poster itself. The statistics feel a bit random and don't make very effective points. I think it might be overall more effective if I can refine the topic or if I include some paragraphs explaining my poster.

Further Riso Development
After developing the poster a bit further, I settled on a few visual motifs for my risograph. The 'privileged' side of the poster features a series of straight lines diverging from a single point before reaching a series of boxes. The directness of this imagery represents the simplicity and inevitability that ensures rich children can succeed. Between the lines, the wedges are partly filled in with diagonal lines. These are used to represent the data I gathered about privilege. Lines diverge in all directions from a point that is surrounded by concentric circles. These represent the barriers in place preventing the underprivileged from succeeding. These wedges have likewise been turned into bar charts representing data. I really like the idea of visually representing the struggles/advantages but I think I could do this in a more successful way. The lines coming from the poor side are mostly going straight up which I think confuses the message. I think the two sides should be less similar.

I put most of the information on the page into text boxes that are overlaid. I wanted the page to feel busy but I'm not sure this makes much sense for the overall communication. The text boxes in blue are in neat little boxes and have a white background to make them easily legible as opposed to the red text boxes which aren't enclosed and are overlaid directly onto the graphics. This is a subtle way to again represent the struggles of class. I really like this idea but it's not obvious why I made that decision in the final image and it could have been done more effectively.

I added some photos to illustrate my points. The data about rich children is represented by Eton college and the Houses of Parliament whereas the poor children are represented by a generic comprehensive school. I think the architecture of these places is a really interesting symbol of class and works well to illustrate my points. The photographs are halftone filtered which works well for risograph but I made the mistake of scaling them down after filtering them which means the dots can't be seen on some images. I also feel that the images look way to dense in the final image and draw the eye far too strongly. I think either the whole poster should be designed to be the same density or I should think more strongly about the visual heirarchy. For example, the titles should be in solid colour.

Risograph self evaluation
I definitely need to go back and work on my riso print again. The annoying thing about the process with this project is that it's hard to make prototypes and see what it will look like in the final version. My largest issue with my infographic is that the actual information isn't very strong. I think I should go back and develop my research further so that I have a really solid foundation to work from. The infographic needs a clear goal and message which it currently lacks. It might be neccesary to reduce the scope of the infographic in order to make a simpler point more clearly.

Secondly, I need to further refine the visuals. I don't hate them but they definitely don't work massively well within my poster. The abstract ideas I've used are good but they need to be clearer and more logical. I need to adjust the visual density to give the infographic a sense of rhythm and balance and I need to organise the text in order to clearly define my message. This probably means representing my data differently or choosing different data sets to represent. I think Garamond works well as a 'posh' and 'sophisticated' font but I think there could be a better typeface for the working class elements that works well and harmonises more with Garamond.

Hopefully I will have time in the next few weeks to refine and reprint my infographic.

I had the idea of representing my two data sets on two axes, giving the object different meanings depending on how you looked at it. From the side, the heights of the two buildings will represent the proportion of the cabinet that were privately educated. It will serve as a bar chart with the smaller 32% looking like a short but wide comprehensive and the 68% serving as a taller but much thinner tower that might be found on a historical private school like Eton.
From above, the object will act as a sort of square pie chart (I think similar to a waffle chart) where the area of the shapes will reflect the data. The smaller private school tower will represent 7% of the total shape in contrast to rest of the shape which will obviously represent the 93% of everybody else. I think realising the data in a physical form like this will really help highlight the contrast between representation and reality.

gap separating the tower from the main body to make it clearer that it was a separate body. I extruded the tower to be 1.8 times the height of the school so that the side view bar chart would make sense. To add detail, I put some little windows on the sides of the tower and gave it a slanted roof, also with windows. I wasn't sure how well the detail would come out in the final print so I didn't go overboard but I wanted to make sure that it was at least visually interesting. In the same vein, I added lots of very basic, very boring windows around the edges of the main school. On the roof, I added some ventilation ducts and skylights. I'm not entirely sure why I thought this was neccesary but I actually really like the way it looks. Certain details like this have a huge effect on the final outcome. Once the main component had been designed, I had to make the

cut out a cavity from the main model. Because the hole in the base is smaller than the sphere itself, I shouldn't have to worry about it falling out. This is the kind of thing that would have been really helpful to prototype to get working correctly but with this project we probably will only get one shot shot so I'm forced to design it and hope it works. I kept the joint clearance fairly small because I didn't want it to flop around much on it's own and if the mechanism doesn't work, I want the model to still function. Below is a technical drawing that explains the pivot mechanism in a simpler way.

feedback review session but I'm really not sure how much I like it (The model was leaking a lot from the acid was). The horizontal lines in the background are meant to invoke the school theme without being too explicit. I considered ink splotches or doodles in the margins but figured it would be too much. I quite like the way the type interlocks and the large black serif works well but the layout doesn't really do anything for me. I might have to rethink the orthographic projection idea or at least make it more obvious. From the feedback, people liked the way the model worked but others didn't think the layout made the data clear enough. People in the session enjoyed the colour scheme - I designed it to invoke the conservative party as well as being two colour risograph ready. I think I will definitely have to rethink my printed key (and certainly print it in the correct scale next time).

the entire country (if the population is 66 million, each one represents 660,000 people). I decided to colour code the symbols in the margins to better communicate my point. People in red went to comprehensive schools and in blue, were privately educated. I also debated about the symbols used to represent the wider population in the bottom half. In the end I decided that mortar boards would be a more interesting replacement for faceless blobs and they would help reinforce the educational imagery of the poster.

would really like to come back and add a bit more polish to the presentation of the coins. I might try to make some presentation pages explaining the concepts behind the coins to make the project more accessible and I would like to try getting some even higher quality renders. I've also been playing around in blender making some simulations with my coins. The software has a really steep learning curve but I managed to simulate a coin flip and I think it might be an interesting way to utilise the designs practically.

Looking back at the infographic, I like it better than I did at the time but it's flaws are still very obvious to me. I really wanted to redo this piece and made a few attempts (in my sketchbook there are some initial collage pages with images of schools) but never got chance to make a real attempt. I find this kind of work surprisingly stressful because without extra layers of complexity, it's simply about basic graphic design skills and it can make you doubt your skills. Hopefully I can learn from this project and apply these lessons to future projects.

more impactful. The graphs above and below the model serve to explicitly state the information as well as helping to communicate the perspective idea with the model. The copy at the top and bottom of the page serves it's purpose well enough but I definitively don't love it.

Overall, I'm really happy with the work I produced for Brief 2 and I think it's probably the brief I completed most effectively. I'm really glad I got to play around with fusion for this because it has since become a useful tool for other projects. Playing around with Adobe dimension was also a really nice way to finish off the presentation of the model and I'm really happy with how it turned out.

Furthermore, the whole 'slot machine' stuff works well enough but it's a fairly contrived way for me to incorporate the coins into the interaction. I think I might have had a better shot at an interesting interaction if I had known what I would produce from the begging. I also would have loved to produce something that actually looks nice which my interaction certainly does not.

Overall, I think I achieved a mixed degree of success with brief 3. One one hand the pocket provocation was one of my more successful pieces this semester but on the other, my interaction is fairly flawed. However, throughout this semester, and throughout my degree, I've been trying my absolute hardest to develop as many new skills as possible and with the 3D and coding skills used for this brief, I was certainly successful in that regard.