For today's session, Klaus was coming in to help critique at our interim presentation. He was coming into class about an hour into the session, which gave us time to get some critique from our peers first.
For class today, I brought in a far more refined version of my poster, which I am really happy with. I got a whole heap of good critique from my peers, Annette, and Klaus.
The main feedback I got was that it was super clear on what it was about. It was easy to understand that the plane was showing a crash, the blues and whites suggesting an arctic/snowy setting, while the crosses then suggested death.
There are a few minor changes to make, such as playing around with separating the crew/passengers slightly in the New Zealander deaths section, and then obviously I will go through and kern the headings to make them perfect.
I'm looking forward to next week's presentation to see how everyone develops their posters across the next week.
I have attached the poster from my interim presentation below.
Over the past week I have been working on a whole bunch of concepts in preparation for today's class. We were asked to have around 3-5 variations of a poster concept in order to present at today's class.
Bearing in mind that there is only two weeks until hand-in, it was crucial to get critiques this week, so that you still have one more critique next week. I was surprised at how many people decided not to present anything, which meant they would only get one critique before the final hand-in which doesn't seem like anywhere near enough to get a well refined poster.
I presented a few different variations, my few strongest ones, from the bunch that I had printed out over the past week. I got some helpful feedback from Annette during the class which has steered me in the right direction.
Annette liked the use of crosses as the symbols, although said that although the colour palette suggests death, there is nothing about the colours or symbols used to suggest it is about a plane crash in Antarctica. She suggested trying to make it so it is super easy to understand what it is about right from the start. People should be able to have a strong idea of what the poster is about without needing read the text. The text is just there to further inform them on the disaster.
I stayed around for a bit after class and started developing the next concept, using a lot of blues and whites to help represent Antarctica and Mt. Erebus. I already like the way that this is developing, and am looking forward to how it develops in the coming weeks.
All of these have been printed out and placed in my physical workbook for hand-in.
I have also attached a couple of these initial concepts below:
Over the course of the past week, I had been doing some research into multiple different 'milestones' or events that I could do for this brief. The ones I had mainly looked into were the Hawkes Bay Earthquake, the 1918 Influenza Pandemic, as well as looking into the Mount Erebus Disaster.
We spent the class discussing these with one another, and then trying to come up with ways we would be able to represent our data sets that we had.
Initially I was quite set on doing the Influenza Pandemic, and using data sets around the number of deaths, and different nationalities, speed of the disease spreading etc. This could then expand throughout the narrative by looking at how the disease initially arrived in New Zealand, and the timeline of it arriving until it died out.
Since I was still not fully convinced that this is what I wanted to research, I continued to research and try to find data sets during the rest of the class. The more I researched, the more I became intrigued by the Mount Erebus plane crash.
Not only did the whole thing intrigue me in general, I found it interesting that I hadn't really heard much about it despite it being New Zealand's deadliest peacetime disaster, claiming 257 lives. Even more deaths than during the Hawkes Bay Earthquake. I also really liked how well documented it was, with all of the transcripts from the flight being printed, as well as intended flight paths and co-ordinates etc.
By next week we have been asked to have roughly 5 different ways of interpreting these data sets in A3 posters, since this whole brief comes to an end pretty quickly. I want to make sure I have some solid concepts, considering we technically only have two feedback sessions before the final poster hand-in. One next week, and then another critique the following week with both Annette and Klaus.
I'm looking forward to solidifying my concept and am excited to start working on designing some poster concepts and seeing what I can come up with.
Today's class was our first of the semester, where we got an introduction to the brief, and an overview of roughly how the whole semester is going to pan out.
We spoke as a class about the whole brief, as well as how we can accommodate an ISTD brief within it. I found it extremely interesting the fact that it is in essence one large project, where the outcome from the first brief ideally sets you up for the second brief.
The brief revolves around milestones, with several examples being given for people, geography, animals, flora or fauna. For example, doing a project on the extinction of the moa, the dramatic increase of the opossum, or even a historic event like the Mount Tarawera eruption. In terms of running the ISTD brief at the same time as our project brief, we would be required to do a 'milestone' as such which revolves around death and extinction.
I'm quite intrigued in doing the two briefs together, although ultimately I want to choose a project which I'm going to enjoy, find interesting and be able to invest a whole heap of time into.
By next week, we have been asked to research and come up with a couple of ideas as to what we might do our project on, as well as some relevant data sets for each. It is crucial to the project to make sure we have a whole bunch of data we can use right from the start so that we don't run out of information to use later on in the second brief.
Initially I was thinking I would do the Lake Taupo eruption, although I'm unsure as to how much data will be recorded since it was so long ago. However, I'll have a look and see what I can find, if not I will come up with some other possible options. I'd quite like to do some sort of disaster, which could hopefully tie in with the ISTD brief as well.
