Items where Subject is "2D Design"

Erratically embellished with sprayed stencils, logo-rich stickers, elaborate murals, and unintelligible doodles, our urban environment overflows with irreverent and unlicensed imagery.

Classic New York freehand and wildstyle graffiti has evolved, adapted, and atomised into a democratic and divergent forms of visual expression that is captured under the nebulous term ‘street art’. ‘It is characterised’, states curator Riika Kuittinen, ‘less by a visual style than by an approach to transmission: it is unfiltered visual communication, fluidly moving across the derelict buildings,bus shelters and hoardings of cities across the world.” Armed with attitude of irreverence, equality and freedom, it is in fact a new genre that mutates and morphs at the rate of a viral pandemic. Lacking a common aesthetic, street art, a term loathed by classic wall ‘writers’ speaks loudly to a passing population, even if it remains entirely obscure to most.

The exhibition asked a number of questions about the evolution of graffiti into ‘street art’, and more recently into ‘urban art’, by way of the alleyway and backwall. Where do such images truly belong now: in the alleys of our urban centres or on the white walls of the gallery? Can they belong in both? What happens when the urban calligraphy of tags and stencils is subsumed by the auction
house, and why do we feel a sense of loss when the raw energy of street art, of urban writing, is absorbed by the mainstream media, and effectively tamed. Why is that some of the best illicit art of the street is promptly ripped off the wall, taken out of its context, seized into private hands. In effect moved from the public wall to
behind a pay wall.

This study focuses on mind-maps as an aspect of design culture – the conventions and practices adopted by a community of designers. The research aims to work towards establishing the effectiveness of mind-maps as a tool for ideation. It questions the extent to which mind-maps enable students to break away from the cultural frames evoked by design briefs in order for creative cross-space associations to occur. By comparing mind-map-like diagrams produced by nine undergraduate students with codes emerging from the analysis of the corresponding briefs, the study seeks to answer the question: What levels of cross-space mapping are evident in the knowledge representation diagrams produced as part of an undergraduate graphic design, practice-based project? The study found 301 cases of internal linking, as opposed to 23 instances of cross-space mapping, however it concludes that there is value in knowledge representation diagrams for ideation and makes recommendations for their use.