Images of the endangered

Suphan Buri, Thailand: Birds fly over drained rice at a rice mill factory

Photograph: Chumsak Kanoknan/Getty Images

Shishou, China: Pere David's deer pasture at the Yangtze river swan islet. The nature reserve, a wetland covering an area of about 68.66 sq km, contains over 1,000 Pere David's deer, the largest wild population of the animal in the world
Photograph: China Photos/Getty Images

Images from "Tactile, high touch visuals" Berlin, 2007

Images from "Tactile, high touch visuals" Berlin, 2007

Images from "Tactile, high touch visuals" Berlin, 2007

Images from "Tactile, high touch visuals" Berlin, 2007

I am looking for images that give a sense of being "endangered". am thinking about creating a series of visual messages (photos, video, installation...) that evoke the "crisis of languages".

I am now seeing myself as a curator. What kind of artworks should I include in my exhibition? How do I arrange/design the space to give a totality for my project?

Some Visual Ideas

Letterbox, Australia, 2000
This poster is to show how logos and signage are seen and represented by kids. (Folk design might be a direction, as it is closer to life and offers something refreshing than a more sophisticated design)

Philip Carter, UK, 2000
These photographs offers a graphic story of urban signage....(government-sponsored graffiti?)
Another example of folk design.

Pentagram, UK, 1998
The Australian Rural Mailbox

Letterbox, Australia, 2000
I might also touch on the subject of "Helvetica" as a universal fontface choice to discuss the diversity in design.

Rough Structure

Babel Tower...When languages die, is design becoming the new global language?

I am really grateful of Wei-Wen's feedback and advise on my project. Her positive response gave me a "go" to dig further on this subject with more confidence.
What she suggested clears out for me most is the way I am to position myself in this project ( something I found quite troublesome and unsure for a long time), which is, to be critical and reflective, on issues concerning design, the world and the whole human being. I hope am not aiming too high in regard to my experience and knowledge, but at least this is something I find valuable, interesting, and worth pursuing.

With insightful hints from Wei-Wen, and after the short tutorial with Frank this Wednesday, I develop the rough structure of my essay.

Firstly I will be looking at the phenomenon of language death from anthropological, societal, and political perspectives.
Secondly, I will address the relationship between language and graphic design. Design is language / Language is design?
Finally, and probably most important part of my essay, will be discussing the significance of languages death to design practice.
Here is some initial thoughts that might worth discussing:
1. A homogeneous world view? Is design becoming easier? Is this a sign of crisis? Do we need designers anymore?
2. Lost of knowledge about the world => lost of creativity? Rethink about creativity
3. Lost of history & culture. Designer as cultural practitioner, what is our responsibility?
4. Tower of Babel: Does the lost of languages imply the surging of human pride? How to look at the rising role of design in the sense that design is the new “global” language?
Rethink about international style. I might argue that the diversity of design will keep human stay humble.

So that is the basic structure.

Since Tracey's briefing on our timetable for phase two this Tuesday, I realized that there will be an exhibit of work in progress on mid June. This is to compose of our research documentations and visual experiments. Realizing that I am not really a sketch-book person, I will try to use this blog to document my thoughts, discoveries, and visual developments. Long way to go, especially the visual part!

Disappearing Languages

I changed my project subject again. Dramatically, as each time.
I hope this is a sign of progress. Like what Andrew said " Nothing is wasted."
I really hope so. As on the flip side, this can also imply I am too short of knowledge to support the other ideas that I came up with previously.
For example, simplicity, getting lost, hesitation, choice, design & art, market, exhibition, festival, spectacle, alienation, mindlessness...
All these fancy ideas come forward easily and welcomingly, but be overthrown and given up over and over again by not being able to articulate or visualize it.
It is a truly difficult job to produce something while having to write 3000 words to "inform it".
I need 2 years to finish this degree.

Anyhow, today, the deadline of our second submission of research essay outline, here is the subject that I stick to. "Disappearing languages".

According to linguistics research, half of the approximately 6,900 languages spoken on the planet will be extinct within our lifetime. The book by K. David Harrison, titled "When Languages Die" look at the significance of this issue. I thought about relating graphic design to this phenomenon, and maybe I can find some interesting materials and thus produce some images in response. I can also explore our own heritage of Chinese character under this framework.

At this stage, this is the only subject that I can have a picture in mind while having some theory or text that I can refer to and discuss about, and not being too ambitious, unpractical, and boring.

This flow of thoughts came up after I visited the "China Design Now" exhibition at Victoria & Albert Museum yesterday. I just felt an urge to see something Chinese after done all the readings.

And maybe, in retrospect, one of my more sustained interests in learning foreign language is a support to my making the right choice this time.

Am I catching up?

Roland Barthes, Image Music Text(1977)

This week is all about reading, thinking, re-reading, and rethinking.
Vicious circle.

What I have read?
Barnard, M., Graphic design as communication.
Flusser, V.,The Shape of Things: a philosophy of design
Lefebvre, H., Critique of everyday life
Barthes., R., Image, Music, Text
Debord, G., On the passage of a few people through a rather brief moment in time: the situationist international 1957-1972.
Benjamin, W., Illuminations
...et cetera.

Of course I didn't finish reading any of those books.
But I think I have a better sense now about what they are trying to teach us, and what I am here to learn.
I guess I can ask less stupid questions now.

I am still very shallow about everything though. But at least I am quite confident about the core value of graphic design.

It is about visual language.
It is about image making.
It is about making your image speak and understood.

This will be the most important and fundamental lesson I need to learn in this year (Maybe this is a BA lesson?). Before I get a hang of this, I don't think I should be thinking about anything else.