Lizon TijusBA (hons) Graphic Design

3rd stageCID: 08/162

is a tale for people of the city.

It is a will to show the importance of spaces affecting senses, emotions, and feelings, a will that emotions should shape cities; a will

of telling people to dream their town, and telling town-makers to dream for the people.

It is a series of projects that works on the boundaries between Design and the environment, urban and public spaces and their citizens, and

questions designers’ responsibilities in shaping the future.

My aim is to combine Design & communication and the built-environ-ment, researching the ways graphic design can be used in spaces, and

the ways spaces can be idealised within graphic design.

All the projects are suggestions and ideas for creative and social solu-tions, bringing Interaction, Communication, and Imagination to the streets, improving the social value of spaces, creating conversation

communities and re-exploring the idea of cities as Spaces For People.

Using Graphic Design, Illustration, Video and Set-design as tools, I hope to bring dreams into spaces, telling fictional and imaginative information, re-inventing the environment with a will to improve the

citizens’ well-being and happiness.

Our everyday spaces are our day-to-day inspiration, let’s dream of a better world.

What if Design could play with people’s experience of a city? A set of tools aiming to help users develop their thinking of urban and public spaces, a help to discoveries and to the imagination.

A fancy story about the underground scene of the 100 Club, London. Cockroaches invading the disappearing jazz club, and enjoying all the crappy features of the last cultural gem of Oxford street.

Imaginary Environments - The story booth is a story-telling space in the heart of London, aiming to bring the tale and dream to the citizens in urban and public spaces. Set in a phone booth, it is a space for escapade and dream, willing to liberate the imagina-tion and fantasy, as there is no other.

Database of Humans Emotions -Emotions are a universal language that enables all living creatures to communicate. This database aims to show the importance of humans’ emotions for our future creations.

The Urban Interactivity Kit

Content

What if Design could play with people’s experience of a city? What if the usual streets street interactions could be challenged?

My first ideas for “We Space Emotions” this year have been inspired by my research for my context final piece - Case studies:

“Designers work for Sidewalks”, where I questionned how designers can play an important role in society while transforming and re-planning public and urban spaces, in a will to create interactive and

operational environments for citizens, as a social ideal.

I had researched different space design projects that work on the functionality of public spaces, safety, traffic, systems and rules of a city, the

mobility, experience, participation and wellbeing of citizens as well as their perception of their everyday environments.

They encourage the thinking about how people live in a town, organize their journey though spaces, and interact with the people around

them, as they share the common point of being in those same spaces everyday.

The designers successfully improved the interaction between citizens, the observation, the participation and the enjoyment of

citizens through Architecture and Space design.

My approach to design has always been influenced by social and user-centered design ideas and I believe that studying behaviour to design behaviour is an important responsibility of designers and a

powerful strategy to build a better society.I started to think Graphic design as a tool to construct

interactive environments for people.

The urban interactivity kit is a set of tools aiming to encourage users to develop their thinking of urban and public spaces.

It is not a code or instructions about how to act in public spaces, but a help to discoveries and to the user’s imagination. It tries to involve people to

develop a different approach to the city and perception of spaces and to create a new kind of interaction and participation

between the user and his environments (people & space), through the object.

I do not try to design an object with the intention of changing the user’s behaviour, I would like the user to take place as a designer itself and as

the generator of ideas that could bring more valuable interaction to spaces.

toolset to interactive discoveries of urban imagination.Walk, watch, perceive, feel, think, talk and play.

Interact.

- The residents Handbook

- Everyday little stories for everyday little changes

- The street maps of the roads to imagination

- Street games

The “residents Handbook”

which is the start of my research, is a guide to

understand the concepts through other similar

design projects and open the user eyes to the

importance of everyday public spaces.

“Every day little stories for everyday little changes”

are urban tales, that the user can identify with. It gives creative and social solutions to everyday issues someone can experience in a city. It aims to open the user’s imagination to little changes that could occur in spaces with strangers for a better livelihood.

“Street maps of the roads to imagination” are London street maps aiming to create an immediate interaction between the user and his environment.

It uses the existing representation of a city and of its systems and codes. The cuts and see-through holes are the immediate link between the representation of the city in the map and the real environment the user is in. The coloured details added are a symbol of how imagination can change the idea of a city. They come from the user itself (where he holds the map) and arise to the architecture, bring a new approach, perception and design to the dark and grey environment.

The user has many choices of how to interact with the map as it can be fold and used in many ways. At the back are instructions for the user to participate to the design and bring his own imagination to the map and so to his environment through thinking, observing, drawing, and writing, folding the map for his own design to interact with the town.

The map is not then an object to locate, but to recreate through imagination.

“Street Games”

are a set of cards aiming to give ideas to the user on how to enjoy his town as a playground, where he can play, draw, share, and make choices about the spaces, the people. He can create his own idea of the space through imagination and small actions like drawing, interacting and sharing. It helps giving to the user another idea about his belonging and owning public spaces, importance and responsibility towards spaces, his part in society.

What is coming? The imminent closure of the 100 Club in the center of london.

1964 - rock’n’roll age, the Who, the Clash, the Kinks, Oasis, Sex pistols - They were there. In this tiny hole

in Oxford circus, playing live gigs and sweating, drinking warm beers and getting famous.

40 years old later it is still running, the sweat, the sound and the heat remain. The punk attitude, the

fresh gigs, the crappy holes in the stage, nothing changed, except the rent.

The nice jazzy heritage we got is disappearing, our precious underground dump might just leave the last cultural bit in oxford circus to another tourist shop.

Is it worth to save it, sponsor it and change it completely when it will lose its all charm and

authenticity? Or shall it die in dignity and stay in our memories as one of the best live-music clubs of

all times and engrave our musical history?

I have decided to draw some cockroaches representing the people and rockstars going there, enjoying the “crappycool” atmosphere, use quotes

of some famous people who played back in the time. An illustrated underground story of some rock’n’roll

bugs having gigs and fun in a place as there is no other.

r The Story Booth is part of a project called Imaginary Environments that aims to bring

narrative and fictional information to our everyday urban and public spaces.

Researching the type of information given to citizens, and the impact of built-environments on the citizens’ senses, emotions, well-being and behaviour; I wanted to create a space for

escapade and dream, willing to liberate the imagination and fantasy, engage leisure and maybe education.

Story-telling is a field that we usually relate to children and education, but tales often have moralities that are much better understood by adults. According to Freud, both fairy tales and

dreams use symbols to express the conflicts, anxieties, and forbidden desires that have been repressed into the unconscious. So why should such tales be contained

only in children books?

Being carried away myself by tales and dreams, I believe fancy stories and simple moralities can play a leading role in arousing the imagination, creativity, social values and well-being

and so contribute to the happiness of a society.

Story-telling usually takes place in the comfortable confines of a home, where people have a better sense of owning the space and feel good. I have been looking at the character and

definition of both personal and public spaces and trying to merge these two ideas. I believe that public spaces today have a defined, rigid structure and functionality, that doesn’t

enable the discovery of different ways to perceive a space.I have decided to bring story-telling to the public space in order to make those spaces

more important and valuable to the people.

I created a discrete story-telling space in the middle of East London, where the audience enter a different world, where they can interact with the space and the story simultaneously.

It is a world where they have the right to dream their environment and relate the story to their area or to their own life and behaviour.

The Story Booth takes place as a Discovery Environment or Environment of the Imagination, a place to learn how to dream in a city where there is no space like it,

using “Augmented Graphic Design” (adding fictional elements to reality) in the real environment.

wood, screws, white paper, white boards, illustrations and paper cuts, threads, white tack

I have chosen to rehabilitate an old and rarely used phone booth

with an installation containing illustration,

shadows, sound and movement.

The story of an old fox living under a tree in East London, whose family and home were destroyed

by humans when he was just a pup.His routine of messing up the city to avenge the

past is disturbed by the appearance of a little girl, who will change his life forever.

What if we were to communicate with what’s out there, outside the horizon of our planet? And how would we try to communicate if we don’t know what’s out there ?

Graphic Design and Visual Communication (but also design in general) analyse and define the specific audience to be able to communicate a message efficiently. But if we don’t know about the

audience, how do we make the right decisions to visualize and communicate the informations, and make them understable?

Sending a message to an unidentified audience about our world. Firstly what would be the message? Would it be to describe humanity? or the earth?

Industries and products, systems or people? would it be a ask for help? Or just a will to communicate and share?

And secondly, how communicate the message? Would it be a book? a sculpture, a video, or sound frequencies? But what are the assumptions about what this unidentified audience can feel,

perceive, and understand? Do they have senses? Do they understand symbols and signaletic?

We designers are no scientists.

I started thinking about communication in our world. Do we have a universal language or something that can be understood

by anyone? What links us?

To make something universally understandable, we need to reduce the informations to their minimum, to the most basic and simple data, as we don’t have the same cultures and knowledge.

I thought about the human condition, our physical perceptions and awareness, genetics, nature connecting all the living

creatures. We all feel and perceive the world around us, and we all respond with emotions and behaviour to situations. We all use body language, we all have the same senses that respond to what is around us. And wherever you go, even when language barrier takes place, people understand responses to fear, and joy (even

cats and dogs can feel if you’re angry or sad) and to others primary emotions. All this theories should make emotions the

most understandable data in our world.

Dict.: EmotionsComplex psychophysiological experience of individual’s state of

mind as interacting with biochemical and environmental (external) Influences. In humans, emotion fundamentally in-

volves: “physiological arousal, expressive behaviours and conscious experience”.

A psychologist, Paul Ekman, worked on the different primary emotions: Paul Ekman (born February 15, 1934) is a

psychologist who has been a pioneer in the study of emotions and their relation to facial expressions. Ekman’s work on facial expressions had its starting point in the work of psychologist Silvan Tomkins. Ekman showed that contrary to the belief of

some anthropologists including Margaret Mead, facial expressions of emotion are not culturally determined, but

universal across human cultures and thus biological in origin. Expressions he found to be universal included those indicating anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise. He developed the

Facial Action Coding System (FACS) to taxonomize every human facial expression. Ekman conducted and published research on a wide variety of topics in the general area of non-verbal behavior.

Ekman devised a list of basic emotions from cross-cultural research on the Fore tribesmen of Papua New Guinea.

He observed that members of an isolated culture could reliably identify the expressions of emotion in photographs of people from

cultures with which the Fore were not yet familiar. They could also ascribe facial expressions to descriptions of situations.

On this evidence, he concluded that the expressions associated with some emotions were basic or biologically universal to all

humans. The following is Ekman’s (1972) list of basic emotions:

AngerDisgust

FearSurprise

HappinessSadness

Assumptions about the unidentified audience:

Audience can perceive and recognise external (biochemical and environmental) influences, create responses and stimulus to those , have survival mechanism and instinct like humans and animals,

so create (and understand) basic natural data (primary emotions) such as face expressions and behaviour

(body language), as responses to emotions.Audience can understand body language.

But my research on emotions doesn’t involve only that they are just universally understandable data.

For a long time now, and in all my projects, I have been working on design and the environment, with social and moral concepts for a better society. I have been focussing on people’s behaviour and the influence of the environment and the different systems

(politics, economics, architecture etc.) on citizens’ well-being and livelihood.

My best interest is working on how people feel, and how designers have a leading role and responsibility on people’s

happiness. This is linked to the idea that the environment and systems affect people’s feelings and emotions and these feelings need to be prioritized over any systems for our future creations,

for a better world.

My message to an unidentified audience (aliens, martians, designers and politicians, people all over the globe) about our

world is: Telling the world and the outside-world that Earth have humans that have feelings and emotions before any systems or any creations and that is the beauty in Humanity, and that is

what we need to take care about.

In a response to that Idea, I first created a simple, personal database of human emotions, showing different recognisable face

expressions, using representations of systems (maps, economic magazines, aerial pics) to show that systems affect people’s

emotions but are only in the background, and should be seen as shaping people’s feelings and not destroying them.

I started looking into how representing emotions. Emotions might be the most universal data in our word, but is a 2D flattened layout enough to make those emotions understandable and perceived? Face expressions and body language involves movement, sound and context, volume and hormones, and

that is how we perceive emotions. So what would be the perfect way to communicate the emotions

in a piece of design?

I first thought about masks, that would involve volume and touch, but it would still be static and soundless. I figured that a video

(forgetting the fact that aliens would need a machine, and understand how to use that machine, but this is another matter)

would be the best way to show the facial expressions.

If emotions are the best communication between people and all living creatures, shouldnt it be seen as a language in its all entity?

I am telling a message: “Humans live (with and for) emotions”, I am communicating it through the universal language of responses to emotions: face expressions, micro-expressions,

movement, and sound.

What makes a language and what are the system and structure of a language?

I have categorized the criteria, steps and elements, the process and structure of a language, and assigned symbols (parts of the

body, visuals, sound) to each of them, as a metaphor to it.

I have chosen to represent Ekman’s list of primary emotions:

AngerDisgust

FearSurprise

HappinessSadness

1. Perception: through senses, hear and visual

2. Analyse: through thinking, brain, context and situation

3. Reaction: through movement, sound and expression

4. Communication: through the overall behaviour

1. Perception

1. Perception

1. Perception

2. Analyze

2. Analyze

2. Analyze

3. Reaction

3. Reaction

3. Reaction

4. Communication

4. Communication

4. Communication

Metaphorical symbol: Eyes and ears

Metaphorical Symbol: Nose and face details, flow, movement

Metaphorical Symbol: Mouth and sound (onomatopoeia), skin

Metaphorical Symbol: Overall face

Structure of the language

1. Perception

1. Perception

1. Perception

2. Analyze 2. Analyze

3. Reaction

3. Reaction

3. Reaction

4. Communication

4. Communication

4. Communication

- Database of Emotions