Lecture - What is Research (Part 1)

Process is more important than outcome. When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we've already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.' 

Incomplete Manifesto for Growth – Bruce Mau Design 1998

[creative practice] doesn’t just straighten and clarify the world, it reflects the world as we venture beyond problem solving into process, experiment and discovery

Martin Venezky

Ideas are driven by your research, because my doing research you're surrounding yourself with stuff that's related to your subject. Random chance can be as influential as organisation, but without organisation you're less likely to be able to put yourself in a situation where random chance will influence you.

If you get your research wrong for any reason then you still have the ideas generated from that research in your head as well as the ideas that will be generated from the research that will follow, so doing the wrong research provides benefits in the long run. Doing research right and wrong both allow you to draw links between things, which is what research is about. That said, doing research right gives you more time afterwards to concentrate on growing and realising the ideas.

Stimulated Approach

By surrounding yourself with materials that will stimulate your ideas, you put yourself in a position where you can draw links between your ideas and improve them.

Systematic Approach

Planning ahead what processes you're going to go through with your ideas can inform your ideas and give you more time to refine them.

Intuitive Approach

Your process takes place automatically without it necessarily being evoked, just pulling ideas from no-where and seeing where it takes you.

Research: The process of finding facts. These facts will lead to knowledge. Research is done by using what is already known. A process of finding out by asking the questions, 'How?', 'Why?' 'What if?'. It involves collecting information about a subject from a variety of sources including books, journals and the internet, or by carrying out experiments or talking to people and the analysis of this information.

Primary Research

Research that is developed and collected for a specific end use, usually generated to help solve a specific problem and involves the collection of data that does not yet exist.

Secondary Research

Published or recorded data that have already been collected for some purpose other than the current study or the analysis of research that has been collected at an earlier time (for reasons unrelated to the current project) that can be.

Quantitative Research

Deals with facts, figures, and measurements, and produces data which can be readily analyzed. Measurable data is gathered from a wide range of sources, and it is the analysis and interpretation of the relationships across this data that gives the information researchers are looking for.

Qualitative Research

Explores and tries to understand people's beliefs, experiences, attitudes, behaviour and interactions. It generates non-numerical data. The best-known qualitative methods of inquiry include in-depth interviews, focus groups, documentary analysis and participant observation.

Censorship and Truth - My Thoughts

I'm not too sure what to make of this lecture, as seemed to have a similar underlying message as certain points of the Globalisation Lecture did, especially Chomsky's idea of manufacturing consent and the filters which only allow the successes of Western civilisation to be broadcasted.

This lecture was about taking that principle in a broader context, and was about how you can't always believe everything you see, which I would've thought would've been a fairly obvious concept to most people at an Art College anyway.

It reminded me very much of the first lecture from last year, where Fred explained the difference between an apple and a picture of an apple, and how important it is to understand the difference. The picture of an apple is a representation of an apple, you've got accept that the apple may not look like it does in the picture, but the key elements of what you know an apple has are the same as the key elements as the picture of the apple has, such as the round shape and the little stalk coming out of the top. If you go through life being concerned that when you buy an apple it's not going to look like the picture of the apple, it's going to make it more difficult for you to eat apples.

In the same way, if you're too concerned that the media may be mis-representing something, you're going to have a difficult time understanding it because you'll always be looking at it from a point of view which you are creating that may (or may not be) the real absolute truth. By looking at it from the presented view you at least get a portion of the truth, and from there it's up to you to investigate it to get the entire truth. Going back to the globalisation lecture again, it should be clear that everything that's presented to you as 'the truth' will have some sort of bias, and I think it's important for people to make their own decisions on what they believe the truth is, be it what they're presented with, what they think could be hidden behind what's being presented, or, most likely, a mixture of the two. 

Lecture - Censorship and 'Truth'

Ansel Adams is important for his documentation of American landscapes and his skills in the dark room. Some of his images make you think you're seeing an image from a different season or time of day.

Censorship in photography is a long running thing, as shown by these photos of Stalin with and without Trotsky, someone who's political views he disagreed with.

More recent examples tend to revolve around the use of Photoshop, the example used was GQ Magazine extending Kate Winslet's legs.

Simulacrum: A small scale or unsatisfactory representation of something.

Jean Baudrillard wrote a book called The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, where he argued that the gulf war was more a war of representation than a physical war.

An-My Le worked with the American government to take photos of war that made it seem more glamorous and less brutal.