Week IV

The Brief and The Start of Research

“Having female references to whom we can look up to in the school’s agenda would have been very helpful when I was studying Graphic Design. We must demand parity in the academic agendas”. I was listening to a podcast (HeyStudio, 2022) this week while working when I heard this sentence. It was an interview with a graphic designer from Barcelona, Ingrid Bicanyol, and my heart jumped a little: I was not doing research and I hadn’t picked the podcast purposefully, and yet somehow this information had found me. The next episode, an interview with Anna Kulachek, also mentioned something similar. It felt like this debate or conversation came up one way or another if the interviewees were feminist designers. As a result, it made me wonder if most of the female students in creative arts feel the lack of women references, and have to spend their own resources to find them outside education. This is something that I will have to find out with my primary research, but for now, it seems so unfair and makes me want to do this project even more; that’s why I started this entry with that quote.

This week we had to start writing our brief. Barry Horne came on Monday to talk to us about his experience with the Major Project and gave us some insight on how to organize our brief and research. It was very helpful, especially with the organization of the contents in the brief, designing a timeline, the best ways to do the primary research, and some personal comments that I wrote down and will be very valuable in desperate times. With Fiona, we talked about the customer journey and the customer persona. This next week I will try to develop my main target audience’s needs and incorporate the learnings from Monday.

My research progresses mainly in a general scope. I’m slowly gathering a contact list of people I want to talk to, but before talking to them I need to know more about this topic, gather facts and statistics, and come up with questions and problems. I’m sure that preparing the brief and setting a good problem statement, as well as writing down the aims and objectives of my research will make this process easier.

I have attached here some notes I took from a book by Ángeles Caso, The Forgotten (Caso, A. 2005), about important female artists in History. I found her opinions on the topic very interesting and most of all, really inspiring. It’s in Spanish, but here’s the transcript:

• This phenomenon [to the artists] of condemnation to forgetfulness and the denial of authorship, if not to the greatest contempt and disqualifications on the part of the critics".

• There is something that radically differentiates the male and female creative world: the conditions in which this work is carried out (...). Their personal lives [women’s] were affected by their artistic vocations. Each one of them, from the most successful to the most unsuccessful, was an example of courage and firmness against countless adversities.

• Loads of gaps in the situation of women artists in the History of Spain. Spanish women have been way more precluded in the past (and silenced) than those women born in France, Italy, England, or Germany. // My note: maybe that’s one of the main reasons why our own historians and museums haven’t invested time or resources in investigating women artists.

“Poets, essayists, painters (…) of which all of us women who love or practice some form of art are heirs and debtors”.

1. Caso, Á. (2005). Las olvidadas. Planeta.

2. Fajardo Galarreta, A. (2016, May 24). La inclusión de mujeres artistas y la perspectiva de género en el currículo de historia del arte de bachillerato. Universidad Internacional De La Rioja. https://reunir.unir.net/bitstream/handle/123456789/3981/FAJARDO%20GALARRETA%2C%20AMAIA.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

3. Hey Studio (2o22) Women At Work - Ingrid Picanyol. Spotify.

Feel free to read my other blog posts! You can find them here.