Less than 5mm — The unseen threat: A practice-led investigation into micro-plastics effects on coral reefs

2023

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This article discusses a graphic design project about unsustainable habits around the home and their effects on climate change. The article reflects on practice-led design research, asking: How can graphic design be used to provoke young adults to make positive changes towards their unsustainable consumer habits in their homes? The design project entitled: Second Nature - is an awareness campaign that combines the researcher’s passion for environmental sustainability and creative practice as a way of expression through graphic design conventions. The project responded to the research question with a communication campaign, consisting of a series of design artefacts, including a poster series, a zine set, social media presence and a website. The artefacts allow the audience to consider the negative impact their habits cause, providing ways to make small changes towards a more sustainable lifestyle. In conducting the study, reflective and heuristic enquiry was utilised as an approach to problem-solving. In the enquiry, the project employed methods such as contextual review of knowledge, mind mapping, sketching and mock-ups to ideate, reflect and test. The article adopts a commentary on practice and evidences the design decisions to the context, including how the artefacts engage with the audience. The research contributes to the current discourses about climate change in a world dominated by consumerism, proposing and unpacking how an awareness campaign can be used as a tool to combat the depletion of our greater home, earth.

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Conclusãounclassified

Second Nature, a Practice-led Design Investigation into Consumerism Responding to Sustainable Home Habits

Chambers

2023

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Grounding: A Practice-led Graphic Exploration of Ecofeminism, Wellbeing and Ecological Consciousness for Young Women

Falconer

2023

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This article presents an artistic practice-led visual design research project that employs a reflective inquiry methodology to write and design a series of outcomes responding to a rhetoric approach that looks at how a female designer can develop connections to nature and how the design outcomes can empower women to care for themselves and the planet. A vast amount of literature articulates nature's healing powers (Miyazaki, 2018; Hardman, 2020). There is also an emergency in thinkers discussing the connections between environmentalism and feminism, looking into the ways nature and women are similarly deemed inferior by patriarchal structures (Escobar, 2018; Gruen, 1993). This research project aims to bring these two views together, looking into the benefits of appreciating nature as a form of self-care to empower and strengthen young women and subsequently increase a desire to care for the depleting natural world. Therefore, this thesis asks: how can communication design strategies and conventions encourage young women to connect with a dialogical relation with nature, fostering wellbeing and ecological consciousness? The study is positioned as a reflective inquiry, meaning that the research process utilises the researcher's personal experiences and writing, with reflections about action, in action and after action, as well as stories and photographs anonymously retrieved from other young women. These inspired an exploration of handmade collages and a graphic set, which led to the generation of a series of outcomes that seek to empower young women to care for themselves through nature. The project has been influenced by overarching issues facing women and nature but approaches them through optimism and positivity. It seeks to highlight the fact that small changes matter, and activism starts from caring for your life and the lives of others, which is what the final outcomes seek to instill in the lives of young women facing an uncertain future.

Forgotten: an autoethnographic exploration of belonging through Graphic Design

Shan

2023

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This article presents a practice-led artistic research project that asks: How to represent an international Chinese student’s sense of belonging (or not belonging) through the aesthetics of visual poetry? The project looked into concrete poetry as a visual strategy to develop a design outcome consisting of two publications using an experimental typographic layout and two corresponding posters. This research employs autoethnography and heuristic inquiry as a methodological approach to the creative process to achieve high levels of originality. Based on personal experience, this research project explores the lack of sense of belonging faced by a Chinese student in an unfamiliar place when initially studying in Aotearoa New Zealand. In a design response to this temporary loss of belonging, the project investigated profiled individuals to analyse two specific negative emotions: restless and lonely. In addition, the study applies poetic writing to self-narrative to enhance the potential of personal expression, metaphorically telling stories while creating a visual typographic artefact that breaks with the traditional written prose form. The project is a retrospective of the self, graphically articulating two unforgettable emotions arising from two of the most profound periods affecting the researcher. On the one hand, the project takes a further step towards self-understanding and helps the viewer understand the issues of belonging experienced by Chinese students in a foreign country. On the other hand, it contributes to the discussion of autoethnography and heuristic inquiry to achieve originality in graphic design.