Master of Design (MDes) 2018

Disrupting the designer

Master of Design (MDes) Thesis Project by Sarah Jackson (2016–2018)

To view all my MDes Thesis videos, visit vimeo.com/officeofsarah

There is a mystery at the heart of interpretation in the visual design field. We still do not fully understand how visual designers make the design decisions that form their work, and perhaps more importantly, how these decisions can be disrupted and changed for the better, particularly if our current paradigms are problematic. This mystery—how decisions are made within visual design practice and how we might disrupt existing interpretations to reveal new and useful understandings—was the focus of my master’s research.

This thesis project took an experimental approach to explore how hermeneutic phenomenology—a practical philosophy that looks at understanding lived human experience through interpretative back-and-forth dialogue and storytelling—combined with a feminist and embodied research strategy, might be used as tools to better understand and disrupt existing ideas and practices within visual design.

The documentary film I created for my MDes engages in three types of hermeneutic dialogue: between myself and existing texts; between myself and other people (through semi-structured expert interviews); and between my past and present selves through the creation of written, oral, image-based, and performative texts. I used these dialogues as a means of critically exploring myself as designer (in particular my embodied experiences) to question, critique and reflect on my own design practice.

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