[1] Mark Making
April 5th
We were asked to bring mark-making tools for an in-class activity. People brought items ranging from paint and pastel chalk to string and sweethearts candy. We were told an adjective and then given 2 minutes to draw it out on tabloid-sized paper. The following words were used: clumsy, shy, and overwhelmed.
After grouping our representations of each word together, we started to notice the similarities across our drawings. For instance, in clumsy, we see how strokes were often curved and broke some kind of pattern. For shy, we saw two types of representations emerge–an external one (looking at a shy person) and internal one (inner feeling of being shy). The external representations used few strokes, low contrast colors, and took up a smaller portion of paper. The internal representations had more strokes and high contrast in color. For overwhelmed, we saw vibrant colors, bigger use of space, and centralized points of “explosion”. We also noticed how some of the pieces had a structure in them, where the sense of overwhelming was acting on something (black squiggles with yellow straight line).
This activity reminded me of how there are common qualities in the way we think about, feel, and visualize different moods. Beyond literal representations, there are nuances in color, the shape of a stroke, size, pattern, and such.
Next, as a group, we brainstormed words that we would use to describe our topic. We narrowed down our list to safe, stable, reliable, rewarding, loving, and patience. Amber brought up a good point to include the word loving because people usually do consider managing money unless they have a compelling reason too. This could be as simple as loving the latest pair of shoes or as big as wanting to start a family and providing them with the opportunity to go to college.
4/7 — Money Management Research
Possible topics:
- Budgeting
- Saving
- Banking (Credit/Debit)
- Credit Report
- Loans and Debt Management
- Crisis and Fraud (https://www.smartaboutmoney.org/topics)
- Education and Career
- Family and Finances
- Housing and Transportation
- Insurance and Taxes
- Retirement and Aging
- Saving and Investing
- Spending and Borrowing
Questions to answer:
Who are you designing for? Why?
- Children — learn about financial literary early on
- College students — most have new freedom with how they manage their money, exposure to expenses
- Post-graduation students — starting to make own income, big milestones (house, car, etc.)
- Families — starting family (more dependents), saving up for home/college/etc.
- Retirement — how to make savings last
What do you want to convey? Why?
- Managing money is an act of care/love — to bring out the human aspects of dealing with money. (What are the reasons why people save up?)
- Managing money takes time/planning –– it is a process with a lot of steps and considerations
- Managing money requires seeing the bigger picture — encourage long-term saving, reduce impulse buying
What do you want your audience to do? Why?
- Know what they have so they can see where they stand in their goals and what they have to work with (benchmarking)
- Know their priorities and their strategy for managing money
- Know how to take care of themselves and others financially
What contexts do you think would be effective for your messaging? Why?
- Analogy (how to take care of a pet, how to grow a plant, etc.)
What mediums do you think would be effective for your messaging? Why?
- Tangible — a lot of credit card/debit card purchases can feel out of touch
- Personal comparisons — the amount you spent was equal to X chipotle burritos
When thinking about reliable, I immediately thought of a thick, steady line. Then I proceeded to draw structures that reminded me of reliability (the stacking of logs or fence-like). In the third picture, I wanted to show the black line as the silver lining among all the other “unreliable” lines. I used the color black since it is a very standard, classic color.
Here, love is a little reminiscent of overwhelming. I felt like making big, curvy strokes in bright colors. There is a lot of “loopy” qualities to these two drawings because I feel like love is such a strong feeling that it is hard to capture even though it is trying to contain itself.
As I was making these two pieces, I realized that they resembled dandelions and fireworks. Both fireworks and dandelions are rewarding because there is a sense of build-up and then release.
