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By the fourth and fifth projects, I began to feel that I was slowly starting to understand what is expected from this course. The expectations are still somewhat unclear to me, but the process has become less intimidating than it was at the beginning.

Earlier in the term, I often focused too much on trying to “figure out the right answer” or to predict what kind of outcome might be expected. This sometimes made the process feel rigid and stressful. Recently, however, I started approaching the projects differently. Instead of trying to control the final result, I began focusing more on the act of making itself.

This shift has made the work more enjoyable.

Through these projects, I also realised something quite important about my own preferences as a designer. I found that I feel much more engaged when working with physical processes rather than purely digital ones. Activities such as carving lino, experimenting with materials, or printing by hand feel much more intuitive and rewarding to me than spending long periods working on the computer.

Manual processes introduce a different kind of thinking. The pace is slower, and the material often resists or behaves unpredictably, which forces you to respond in the moment. This creates a sense of dialogue between the maker and the material that is difficult to replicate digitally.

At this stage, I still feel that my direction within the course is somewhat undefined. However, I have started to recognise the kinds of processes that energise me the most. Exploring tactile, hands-on methods such as relief printing feels like a productive place to continue developing my practice.

At the beginning of this stage of the project, I decided to work with a single shape: the circle. The intention was not to produce a final image but to understand the behaviour of relief printing itself. By repeating the same form many times, I could observe how the medium responded to small changes in tools, materials, and pressure.

At first I expected the process to be relatively predictable. The logic of relief printing appears simple: carve the shape, apply ink, and print it. However, the moment I started carving circles, it became clear that the medium behaves differently than expected.

Straight lines were relatively manageable. Circles were not.

A circle quickly exposes the limits of control in carving. Even a small deviation becomes visible, especially at a small scale. The tool tends to drift slightly, and that drift immediately changes the geometry of the shape. Instead of a perfect form, the result becomes something closer to a record of the hand movement.

To explore this further, I began iterating the same circle across multiple prints while changing specific variables. I experimented with different carving tools, including traditional lino tools and improvised instruments such as scalpels. I also tested different surfaces and variations in printing pressure.

What became clear through this process is that the circle does not remain a stable geometric form in relief printing. It constantly shifts depending on the interaction between the tool, the material, and the physical act of carving.

Some circles appear controlled and balanced, while others become uneven or slightly distorted. Interestingly, these distortions were not always mistakes. In many cases they revealed how sensitive the process is to small gestures and material resistance.

Through repetition, the circle stopped being a simple shape and became a way of observing the process itself. Each print carried traces of how it was made, the speed of the cut, the pressure of the tool, and the behaviour of the material.

What I learned from this experiment is that relief printing is less about reproducing perfect forms and more about negotiating with the medium. The circle, despite its apparent simplicity, turned out to be one of the most effective ways to make that negotiation visible.

While researching sustainability, I became increasingly aware that environmental action often operates within a circular dilemma, similar to the classic question: what comes first, the chicken or the egg?

Sustainable systems require strong institutional support. Policies regulating waste, energy production, and environmental protection must operate at the level of governments, infrastructure, and international cooperation. For example, strict environmental policies in countries such as Singapore demonstrate how state regulation can significantly shape public behaviour.

At the same time, governments themselves are products of society. In democratic systems, political leaders are elected by citizens, meaning that environmental priorities ultimately reflect collective decisions made by voters. Even where political systems are less democratic, long-term environmental progress still depends on whether leadership chooses cooperation and development over conflict.

This creates a feedback loop between society and governance.

If sustainability is not prioritised politically, environmental initiatives remain fragmented and dependent on individual responsibility. However, when environmental survival becomes a shared collective goal, sustainability shifts from being a personal lifestyle choice to becoming a structural organising principle of society.

Historically, societies often mobilise collective effort in response to perceived threats. In the twentieth century, these threats were largely geopolitical, leading to massive investments in military infrastructure and technological competition.

This project proposes a different hypothetical trajectory.

If global priorities were reorganised around planetary survival rather than geopolitical rivalry, the scale of technological and environmental progress could change dramatically. Instead of competing through military power, nations could compete through scientific, ecological, and aerospace development, fields that expand knowledge rather than destroy infrastructure.

Within this framework, sustainability is not simply an environmental policy. It becomes a shared survival strategy.

Our group approached the UAL Net Zero agenda not only as a sustainability policy but as a broader social question: who can actually afford to be sustainable? This question emerged from the different backgrounds within our team. For some of us, environmental responsibility was embedded as a social norm. For others, growing up in contexts with issues such as safety, healthcare, or economic stability dominate public priorities meant that sustainability feels secondary to more immediate concerns.

Afonso Matos’ question Who Can Afford to Be Critical? helped frame this tension. Matos argues that the ability to engage critically in design is shaped by material and social conditions (Matos, 2022). Similarly, sustainability often appears accessible mainly to those who can afford greener technologies.

Our project examined sustainability across different scales. Charles and Ray Eames’ Powers of Ten demonstrates how shifting scale reveals relationships between systems that are otherwise difficult to perceive (Eames and Eames, 1977). Anna Tsing’s Feral Atlas further emphasises that ecological realities emerge from complex interactions between human infrastructure and environmental systems (Tsing et al., 2020).

In my speculative scenario, sustainability becomes a publicly funded system rather than an individual lifestyle choice. Redirecting military expenditure toward climate infrastructure would allow governments to make sustainability collectively affordable, reflecting what societies choose to prioritise and fund.

References

Eames, C. and Eames, R. (1977) Powers of Ten. Film. USA: Eames Office.

Matos, A. (2022) Who Can Afford to Be Critical? Eindhoven: Set Margins. Tsing, A. et al. (2020) Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Why do we assume precision as a default condition in graphic design, and what becomes visible when that assumption is removed?

I began this project by reproducing an existing linocut print in order to understand relief printing through fidelity rather than invention. The method appears prettz straightforward: transfer, carve, ink, press. But in practice it reveals where “control” is only an assumption. Straight lines and angular shapes were relatively manageable, circles were not. A circle is unforgiving: even a small deviation becomes immediately legible, especially at small scale. That resistance made the circle the most useful test form, because it forced the medium to show its limits clearly.

Once I hit that weak point, I did something slightly irrational but completely instructive, I stayed there. I kept returning to circles, not because I wanted a “circle project,” but because I realised that if you want to understand a method, you don’t pick the thing it does well. You pick the thing it does badly and insist on it. The circle became a way to strip the work down to process: no illustration to hide behind, no style to distract from the mechanics.

I iterated the problem with intention. I reduced scale until the method started to crack, tested positive and negative versions (outline versus filled forms), and watched how relief printing amplifies what the hand tries to hide: uneven pressure, ink pooling, and micro-slips in placement. I also tried the obvious “proper” tools. A compass cutter can draw a perfect circle as a line, but that perfection is often useless here: the cut can be too thin or too shallow to hold ink. That was a turning point. It taught me that precision in relief printing isn’t a drawing problem. It’s a physical edge problem: a form has to exist as a raised boundary that survives pressure, ink, and repetition.

That’s why I moved from carving to embossing. Instead of describing circles through cuts, I began pressing them directly into linoleum using improvised cylindrical tools, most successfully, a spent shell casing. Embossing felt like switching from handwriting to stamping: less expressive, more mechanical. But it didn’t “solve” precision. It exposed the cost of it. Each press altered the matrix. The surface remembered. The second circle never happened on a neutral surface, and the hundredth certainly didn’t.

My final work is where this became impossible to ignore. I drew a 1cm × 1cm grid on a rectangular piece of linoleum and embossed 300 circles, one per cell, attempting to centre each circle by hand. The number matters. A single imperfect circle is just a mistake; hundreds become a pattern. At this scale, the work stops being “an image” and becomes a stress test: how long can geometric precision be sustained before fatigue, pressure shifts, and material memory begin to write their own version of the grid?

Jencks and Silver’s concept of adhocism frames this as an enquiry rather than a workaround. Adhocism argues for using available systems in unexpected combinations to generate new outcomes and knowledge (Jencks and Silver, 2013). The casing is “ready-made geometry,” but it does not erase error, it makes it measurable. What the grid finally reveals is not that humans are imperfect (that’s obvious), but that “default precision” is not a natural state at all. It is a condition we are used to receiving for free. Remove it, and the body reappears slowly, visibly, and all over the surface.

References

Jencks, C. and Silver, N. (2013) Adhocism: The Case for Improvisation. Expanded and updated edn. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Two Paragraphs, Ten Versions

This experiment investigates Hito Steyerl’s concept of the “poor image” by transferring it from the digital realm into the human one. Instead of watching a file lose quality as it travels through networks, I observed how a text loses fidelity while travelling through memory, attention, and individual interpretation. Two separate paragraphs were selected from Steyerl’s essay In Defence of the Poor Image. The first was used for audio reproduction; the second for reading-based summarisation. Five participants interacted with both — creating a total of ten derivative versions.

For the audio stage, each person listened to the same paragraph read aloud three times in a row. After the third hearing, they had to retell the paragraph from memory. Despite identical input, each retelling diverged quickly. The opening sentence remained surprisingly stable across all participants — almost everyone repeated “A poor image is a copy in motion” with minimal distortion. But from the second sentence onward, the text began to erode. Complex vocabulary disappeared first; long noun chains collapsed; metaphors were flattened. The verbal versions became shorter, more fragmented, more repetitive. Participants remembered motion, deterioration, copying, ripping, remixes — the verbs survived, but the conceptual architecture dissolved.

The oral retellings behaved like Steyerl’s “poor image”: highly compressed, low-resolution, and shaped by the limits of the transmission.

For the reading stage, a different paragraph was given to the same five participants. They had exactly one minute to read it silently. After the minute ended, they wrote a summary based only on memory. These written reproductions showed a different type of degradation. The writing was calmer, more structured, but far more selective. Readers preserved abstract ideas (“quality becomes accessibility”, “the image becomes more abstract”, “uploaded, shared, reedited”) rather than the original phrasing. Instead of mishearings, there were omissions. Instead of linguistic drift, there was conceptual prioritisation. Each participant kept the parts that felt meaningful and discarded everything else.

What emerged from these ten versions is a two-part model of the “poor image”:

• audio → chaotic degradation, where the text breaks down through noise, forgetting, and improvisation;
• reading → strategic compression, where the text becomes a reduced conceptual skeleton.

Together, they reveal that the poor image does not depend on screens or file formats. Human cognition itself produces low-fidelity copies. Memory is lossy. Attention edits. Understanding transforms.

Meaning survives not through accuracy, but through circulation. In this experiment, the idea travelled — and in travelling, it became something new.

References

Steyerl, H. (2012) In Defence of the Poor Image. In: The Wretched of the Screen. Berlin: Sternberg Press, pp. 31–45.

Queneau, R. (1998) Exercises in Style. Translated by Barbara Wright. London: John Calder.

Order

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This response draws on Michel Foucault’s discussion of discontinuity (Foucault, 1966, p.76) in The Archaeology of Knowledge — the idea that history and thought progress not through continuity, but through rupture. Foucault questions the assumption of smooth transitions between eras of knowledge, proposing instead that culture periodically ceases to think in familiar ways and begins anew.

To reflect this, I applied a simple but deliberate operation: reordering every letter of the passage alphabetically with the help of coding, while keeping punctuation and spacing intact. The process dismantles meaning but preserves form — a gesture that mirrors Foucault’s own method of unearthing the underlying structures of discourse.

The resulting text becomes an artefact of its own archaeology: language reorganised by an invisible system, coherence reassembled through fragmentation. In this sense, the act of sorting enacts Foucault’s theory — turning discontinuity itself into a visible, material condition of reading.

Order

Establishing discontinuities is not an easy task even for history in general. And it is certainly even less so for the history of thought. We may wish to draw a dividing-line; but any limit we set may perhaps be no more than an arbitrary division made in a constantly mobile whole. We may wish to mark off a period; but have we the right to establish symmetrical breaks at two points in time in order to give an appearance of continuity and unity to the system we place between them? Where, in that case, would the cause of its existence lie? Or that of its subsequent disappearance and fall? What rule could it be obeying by both its existence and its disappearance? If it contains a principle of coherence within itself, whence could come the foreign element capable of rebutting it? How can a thought melt away before anything other than itself? Generally speaking, what does it mean, no longer being able to think a certain thought? Or to introduce a new thought?

Discontinuity – the fact that within the space of a few years a culture sometimes ceases to think as it had been thinking up till then and begins to think other things in a new way – probably begins with an erosion from outside, from that space which is, for thought, on the other side, but in which it has never ceased to think from the very beginning. Ultimately, the problem that presents itself is that of the relations between thought and culture: how is it that thought has a place in the space of the world, that it has its origin there, and that it never ceases, in this place or that, to begin anew? But perhaps it is not yet time to pose this problem; perhaps we should wait until the archaeology of thought has been established more firmly, until it is better able to gauge what it is capable of describing directly and positively, until it has defined the particular systems and internal connections it has to deal with, before attempting to encompass thought and to investigate how it contrives to escape itself. For the moment, then, let it suffice that we accept these discontinuities in the simultaneously manifest and obscure empirical order wherever they posit themselves.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, during the period that has been termed, rightly or wrongly, the Baroque, thought ceases to move in the element of resemblance. Similitude is no longer the form of knowledge but rather the occasion of error, the danger to which one exposes oneself when one does not examine the obscure region of confusions. ‘It is a frequent habit,’ says Descartes, in the first lines of his Regulae, ‘when we discover several resemblances between two things, to attribute to both equally, even on points in which they are in reality different, that which we have recognized to be true of only one of them’.

Reference

Foucault M., (1966) The Order of Things: An archaeology of the human sciences. Editions Gallimard

Tracing Boundaries at Bunhill Fields

At Bunhill Fields, boundaries are not only spatial — they are visual, material, and temporal. Walking among the gravestones, I encountered not just fences or gates, but designed thresholds between what is remembered and what is lost. These limits appear not only in form, but in erosion — in the slow disappearance of typographic detail. Some letters remain sharp; others dissolve into the stone, nearly unreadable. This absence is not accidental — it is designed by time, weather, and human neglect.

The visual logic of absence tells us as much as presence. A name partially eroded might still evoke emotion, memory, and form, even if its full identity is gone. In that way, erosion itself becomes a form of boundary: a visual line between the known and the forgotten.

To explore this concept, I created a series of edited pictures and two short animations based on a single gravestone: one reconstructed the alphabet of visible letters, the other removed them by frequency — from rare (B) to common (E). These visual experiments asked: when does a name become unrecognisable? When do letters stop meaning and start simply being? At what point does memory cross the threshold into visual texture?

A gravestone drew my attention — that of Mrs Hannah Lindsey. Its inscription reads: “Relict of the late Reverend Theophilus Lindsey.” Her identity is mediated entirely through her husband’s. Her name survives in stone, but not her story. This encounter reframed my understanding of the cemetery. The question was no longer just who is remembered — but how is memory designed? In this case, through omission, indirect language, and absence. This is a conceptual boundary — one that emerges through inscription. Language, like stone, chooses what to preserve.

This reframing also resonates with how graphic design history is constructed. Scholars like Blauvelt (1994, p. 208) note that graphic design’s ephemeral nature often prevents its preservation, with archives favouring “worthy” or iconic works, while others fade unrecorded. The same happens in cemeteries: not all inscriptions survive, and not all stories are deemed worth preserving. Like design objects, gravestones undergo cultural filtration — shaped by time, value, and human intervention. Memory becomes curated.

Time, too, becomes a natural designer. It wears away what is not protected. Some names remain, not because they were carved deeper, but because someone maintained them. Preservation is a political act. And so is forgetting. This echoes how Sara Ahmed (2017, p. 15) frames citation: not just as academic method, but as feminist memory. “Citation is feminist memory,” she writes — a form of care and resistance. Perhaps it is symbolic, then, that I focused not on Reverend Lindsey’s grave, but on Hannah’s. Though reduced to “relict”, her stone became my site of attention. In that gesture lies a kind of citation — a feminist act of seeing.

References

Blauvelt, A. (1994), An Opening: Graphic Design’s Discursive Spaces, Visible Language, 28(3), pp. 208–219.

Ahmed, S. (2017) Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press.