Lighting, and its effects on human behaviour.

Assignment 3.
After exploring the main ideas of Malcom Gladwell's 'The Tipping Point' I chose to look at one of the theorys in the book that interested me the most,'The power of context'.
I started researching further into the idea of the power of context, and how humans relate to, and are affected by there surroundings, and found myself overwhelmed with the amount of  information received. So I decided to narrow it down to a more specific area that I have been interested in recently, lighting.

I began looking at the development of artificial light sources and how it has affected social and economic activity as we know it today.

Gerard W.Stoer, In The Light of the 20th Century, Licht/Light and design p.23-25.

Lucy Bullivant writes about lighting's ability to create our senses of security and awareness of our environment, as well as aiding communication between us.

Lucy Bullivant, Light Works, Licht/Light and Design p.105-118

Here Stanley explains that for good design to happen, we must think about all the possible ways a person may use a space and the lighting within it, and also the moods they may experience within the space.

Stanley Abercrombie, A.1990. A Philosophy Of Interior Design. First ed. New york: Harper and Row, pp111-124

This study looks at colour, and its effects on the mood and cognitive performance of 250 participants,
recording there reactions to different colours painted on the walls of a cafe.

Yildirim.K, Akalin-Baskaya. A, Hidayetoglu,M.L. 2006, Effects of indoor color on mood and cognitive performance(e-Journal) 42(9)Available Through: SciVerse Database. (Accessed 20 Nov 2010)

Furniture Project - Smashing Pallets

Moving forward with our furniture project , I  have recently been breaking up some pallets with my team.
This will give us a better idea on how the pallets are constructed, and make it easier for us to break them down to work with.
Here are the tools we used for the job.

and here is some evidence of the destruction.

Collective Thinking

Brainstorming
We have been developing our brainstorming and mind mapping skills further, and using them collectively to explore new ideas in more depth.

Here we are brainstorming our individual subject areas that we studied for the last assignment, writing our thoughts down and posting them up as soon as they come to us.

When all the brainstorming was over, we began discussing a few chosen areas in more depth.

 

The poster below, was a visual representation of one of the areas of the book I chose to look at, the way that the advertising company, Lambesis portrayed Airwalk's shoes, to grow there business and launch them into the mainstream market.

Make Things. Make Sense.

During Fridays lecture, Hazel White, course leader for the MDes and a graduate of the DJCAD jewellery programme and Royal College of Art, explained to us how she uses technology, along with traditional craft skills to explore and question how people behave.
One of the points she brought up initially, why we choose certain things/pathways, I found particularly interesting.
She also made us question why we chose to study our respective subjects. Which  for me, thinking back, was simply the way some of the CAD images looked on the presentation sheets at the open day.
Another point Hazel made was that as designers we all are good at:


Observing
gathering information on new design ideas,current global affairs, scientific discoveries and new potential trends.

Imagining
being creative, having aspirations, and coming up with new ideas.

Visualising
developing the technical skills to depict our imagined ideas and communicate them with others. 


having these skills, we should not limit ourselves, designing only within the discipline we are studying, but be open to new paths, that we may not initially have thought possible

Bomb Project

Over the past two days we have been working collectively on a small project where we have been asked to come up with a response to four different words.
Dwell
Play
Shop
Care
My team were given Shop, after an initial brainstorm we decided to focus on advertising, looking at the different ways we are exposed to it.
We chose to explore how intense some adverts can be, so began to research and gather images of bold, brightly coloured - in your face ads.
I recently saw a film called 'Enter the Void' which is packed full of very intense, flashing colours, often pulsing and strobing.

Here are the opening credits  from the film.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPxgi-PiNFE

After seeing this we decided to create a short video flashing adverts and slogans at the viewer in a similar manner.
Here are a couple images I created to go in the Video.

Furniture Project.

For our next project working in teams we are to design and make a piece of furniture or object that reflects  contemporary culture and domestic life.
Materials are obviously going to play a big part in this project, so my group has decided to research initially, pre-existant materials that can be re-used or  re-cycled.

Pallets!
After seeing numerous unused pallets lying around the university campus, I looked further into how they could be re-used, as there structure is ideal for re-cycling.
A design company called  Studiomama have looked at re-cycling pallets, and have come up with some great simple solutions.

 

The simplicity of these designs allows them to be constructed fairly easily, this is something I will bear in mind when designing for our project.

Lighting is also another aspect to look at and incorporate into our design. Here are just a few of the designs I came accross.

During a trip to the local re-cycling center and dump, we came accross a large amount of tube lights still intact, these could be used to create some sort of mood lighting in our design, similar to the ' Re-cycled Tube Light' by Castor Canadensis.

I love these lights made from large quantities of  disused objects.

 

'Millenium Light'   by Lighting Designer Stuart Haygarth

The Lighting designs above play on the translucent quality of many everyday objects that can be easily collected.This is something I will look to incorporate in our design.

The Tipping Point- Case Study

The image below is using Mind Mapping again to analyse a section of The tipping Point in more depth.
I chose to look at a section on the Airwalk Shoe company's success in conquering the mainstream shoe market .

 Referencing for Mind Map.

Bruce Ryan and Neal Gross (1943). The Diffusion of Hybrid Seed Corn in Two Iowa Communities. New York: Free Press. 15-24.

Geoffrey Moore (1991). Crossing the Chasm. New York: HarperCollins.

Gordon Allport and Leo Postman (1947). The Psychology of Rumour. New York: Henry Holt. 135-158.

Thomas Valente Robert K. Foreman and Benjamin Junge,"Satellite Exchange in the Baltimore Needle Exchange Program",in press.

Donald H Rubinstein (1995). Love and Suffering: Adolescent Socialization and Suicide in Micronesia. .: Contemporary Pacific. 21-53.

David Phillips (1974). American Sociological Review. 340-354.

V. R Ashton and S. Donnan (1981). psychological Medicine, 735-739.

Norman Kreitman, Peter Smith, and Eng-Seong Tan (1970). British Journal of Psychiatry, 465-473.


What interested me in this section of the book was the tecniques that the advertising company Airwalk hired - Lambesis, used to 'tip' Airwalk and its image from a small boutique company into a 175 million a year business.
One of the campaigns Lambesis ran included a collection of striking images that were connected in some way to a current trend in youth culture.

 The image above, a monk cheating in an exam, reading notes of the side of his shoe was successful as it tied in with an interest that youth culture had with Tibet at the time it was designed.