The writing
I feel like the writing has been needlessly confusing this semester. We were supposed to be writing a paragraph as part of each of the other briefs but this was such a strange way to do it in my opinion. I think it was supposed to be an 'easy' way to our first piece of formal writing but it was unnecessary to draw it out over the semester. Furthermore, I think it has been really unclear what the point of the writing is actually supposed to be. By writing it over the whole semester, I got the impression that it was intended to be a summary of each piece of work we've produced but I recently found out that in terms of the projects, it's only really about the interaction we made for brief 3. This means the research I've been doing all semester doesn't make sense because my work for brief 3 was a development and a step forward of the previous work. My work for briefs 1 and 2 were largely based around private schools and education as a factor in social mobility but the interaction I made took a much wider view of social mobility and inequality. If I had been writing each paragraph with each project, none of it would have made sense by the final part.
Confusion aside, it's time to sit down and actually write the thing. I found it difficult to bridge the gap between what I researched when I set out at the beginning of this project with where it ended up and I feel like it makes for a rather dithering essay. One issue I've had throughout this semester is that I struggled to clearly define the scope of my project, in it's subject area as well as in its overall goal. I've retrospectively decided that my goal for this project has been to shine a light on issues surrounding inequality and social mobility and to try to get people to think critically about the issue. I think it's important that I avoid taking too clear cut a stance on the issue and I allow people to make up their own minds. Instead of saying 'private schools should be banned' I opted to discuss the advantages offered to private school children as they enter the working world and leave it more up to the reader to decide if that's unfair. I concede that I don't exactly take an impartial stance on the issue but I think it undermines my position if I present my arguments solely punching up at the elite and complaining that things are 'unfair'.
I was also a bit confused by the whole work vs practice thing. I get that the work is supposed to be a literal description of the work and the practice is an explanation/justification but I feel like I need somebody to explain why it's necessary for them to be separate. Also like I've mentioned, it's strange to me that we are only supposed to mention the third brief outcomes. My interaction was a development upon the work produced for brief 1 and 2 - not a culmination it all If the first briefs were intended to be stepping stones towards the interaction as an ultimate goal, I would have produced the work very differently. I found it hard to justify the influences for my outcomes. I came across a project called 'the people's pound' that was an advertising campaign run by poundland a few years ago that was painfully close to what I'd been developing for my coin interactions. I decided that I'd list it as an influence because although I discovered it after developing the ideas, it informed me to steer away from what they had produced. My interaction was quite a pragmatic outcome in the end with a lot less thought put into the visual style than I would have liked. As research I talked about games like 'papers please' because it is the kind of digital interaction that informed the project through its mechanics and concepts more than its visual style.
I think my overall confusion with the whole writing thing Is apparent in the fact that the introduction, body, conclusion and abstract all say more or less different things about what the project aimed to do. I figured that with the abstract, it would be better to speak vaguely about the project and do so in an interesting way to benefit the video abstract. The conclusion attempts to summarise what is an extremely disparate project but I don't hate what I wrote. Overall I'm happy with what I managed to salvage in terms of my essay but I think that under more favourable circumstances, I could have produced something miles better. In the future I think it will be really important for me to consider my research more for projects like this. Having less direction allowed me to look at a wider, more diverse range of things at the begging of the project but I think it harmed me in the long run when it came to defining what I had actually achieved with it all.
The full essay can be found under 'Written Work' on the RPR webpage.