Unscripted Stories
Date: 2022
Role: Responsible for entire project
Type: Honours Capstone
Role: Responsible for entire project
Type: Honours Capstone
Context
Design Honours was a pivotal point in my growth as a Designer. It allowed me to explore many avenues of design and improve my conceptual thinking. Having a whole year to work on one project had its many challenges but it also taught me patience and the ability to know it is ok to change your design!
Queer Theory
From the beginning I knew I wanted to work with engaging queer theory into my concept. The first insights I got into this was through Sara Ahmed’s ‘Queer Phenomenology’. I was excited by the idea of subverting orientations and what it means to practice in nonlinear spaces. This informed my early experiments of creating work that could exist across multiple mediums and had multiple ways of interpreting it.
My Nonno's Memoir
I had also recently read my Nonno’s memoir which had discussed his struggles of immigrating to Australia and starting a new life in rural Queensland. It was very inspiring to read, and I felt it had a lot of avenues that could be explored. My early experiments included a variety of Zines that could be taken apart and rearranged with the intent of showing non linear ways of story telling.
Initial Concept
My first concept by the end of semester one was overcomplicated and messy to say the least. I was trying to engage too many different ideas into one project. There was a struggle to see the connection between my knowledge on queer theory and using a relatives memoir to portray this. Despite this uncertainty a lot techniques and ideas I had learned could still be utilised.
Change of heart
I decided to shift towards telling a more person story reflective on my connections to Queerness growing up and in the present. This become fleshed out through a series of postcards I experimented with. Using a collaged approach with poetic and strange messages it felt like something that was a lot more clear with its intentions.
Postcards Concept
I intended for these postcards to exist in digital spaces beyond what a typical postcard might function as. I started experimenting Augmented Reality (AR) to show how hidden stories connected to the postcards could be revealed. These stories would also exist on the postcards but in more hidden formats as they were printed with clear ink.
Final Concept
As my project needed to exist as its own artefact I designed these postcards to be situated inside zine that they could fit inside. Inside this zine included instructions on how one could interact with these designs without enforcing a strict order to do so. The intention was that multiple variations of the zine could exist with different postcards in each. That way there never could be a single way for someone to view this project.
Final Designs
