Month: March 2026

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.