Categories
New Making

The Edinburgh International Book Festival Journal

The Edinburgh international Book Festival itself does not offer many souvenirs, apart from bookmarks and passes or tickets. This may be because a signed book will always hold the highest value to an attendee of the EIBF, as it provides a personal connection between the author of the literature that an attendee may have owned previously or felt connected to.

Moving forward, I knew that I would not be able to create a souvenir that would replace the value and experience that comes with a signed book. Instead, I decided to create a tool that allowed attendees to document their experiences at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

The design concept I decided to develop was to create a festival journal that allows users to document their experience at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in creative ways. Taking inspiration from Wreck this Journal and the general concept of journals, I decided to assign each page to a different event at the book festival, with each page containing the same elements. The elements that I thought were important to include were a section where the name of the event could be written, a section for signatures from authors and speakers, as well as section that varied with each page, where it gave small writing challenges to the user. 

Another feature that I decided to include was a section for venue stamps; each tent at the book festival village would have 3D printed stamps that correspond to their names. When the user attends an event in that tent, they can stamp the page they documented that experience on using the specific venue stamp. I thought it was important to include the stamp because it provides a sense of physicality and proof that you actually attended the event; the only way to attend an authentic stamp is by actually going to the event. 

Alternate pages that are included in the journal function as storage and display for bookmarks and postcards, other common souvenirs collected at the book festival. The arcs represent cut sections that allow the items to be slotted in; as bookmarks come in two standard sizes, there multiple slots to allow for this.

Categories
New Making

New Making – Hidden Vessels

My final artefact for New Making features a 3D printed shell that employs the cross pattern infill as small vessels. While infill material is often hidden from view, this artefact showcases it. Despite the fact that it no longer supports the object encasing it in the intended way, the vessels now provide a new kind of support for different materials.

The base object originates from a dodecahedron that has been sliced at various axes to create different geometry. However, instead of completing the print, it was halted during the process to create an unfinished and unrecognisable shape, as well as to showcase the infill pattern.

Each vessel contains a different colour of cured resin with varying finishes. The acrylic dyed resins have a more opaque and flaky finish, which gives the illusion of depth. The resin dyed with india ink has a clearer finish and allows the details of the 3D print to show through. 

Abstract wire flowers painted with resin, along with thread ‘bushes’ create the image of an abstract garden. I wanted to highlight the juxtaposition of nature with digital fabrication, while using various materials and craft methods to create different textures and finishes.

Categories
Projects Social Narratives

Neutra: A tool for a better future

Our project stemmed from a personal interest in gender, particularly the way it’s communicated and perceived through language. Language is one of the most powerful vehicles through which gender discrimination is reproduced. Gender stereotypes dictating that women should display communal/warm traits while men should agentic/competent traits trickle through to society through the lexical influences of everyday communication. Consequently, language also produces and reflects the societal asymmetries of power in the favour of men and their attached societal roles. Gendered language is so common that it’s difficult for some people to even notice it. From job postings to laws, the omnipresence of gendered language can affect a wide range of behaviors and lead to indoctrinated biases. The gender stereotyping and discrimination perpetuated by the English language is unnecessary. Our mission is to dismantle these stereotypes and combat the discrimination.

The most common practice for dismantling stereotypes is the reversal of the binary: taking the inferior side having it supercede it’s opposition. This technique highlights how harmful and unnecessary these implemented structures can be to the non-marginalised. However, our project is too subtle and our binary too complex to simply reverse. Pronouns can’t just be flipped, they needed to be neutralised in order to create a truly equal society. We achieved this by creating Neutra, a web browser extension that neutralized all gender pronouns on the internet pages our users visited.

 

Neutra provides users with a unique opportunity to engage with genuine cultural change. As an interface, Neutra is easily accessible to a wide demographic of internet-users. Furthermore, it is one of the most relevant ways to spread the concept of gender neutral language, as the internet is by far the most efficient way to spread information in our day and age.

Neutra’s focus on natural language allows for cohesion and a seamless reading experience. The subtlety of the extension is one of its strongest points: its a non-disruptive and simple solution to a pervasive cultural problem. In the same way that we don’t notice the bias and sexism inherent to the english language, people won’t notice when that language is removed.

Another important benefit of Neutra is it’s message; allowing people to see the world from a different perspective, separate from the confines of gender. We hope Neutra will provide our society with an illuminating view on the way language interacts with gender.

Despite it’s subtlety, Neutra has given us a unique opportunity to enact genuine cultural change. As women, we were both hyper-aware of the impact gender has historically and institutionally had on females. Working on this project has been an empowering experience that has further deepened our understanding of not only the english language, but also of the roots of feminism. More so than our own experience, this project has also allowed us to research and explore the male perspective more thoroughly. While our understanding will never be as comprehensive as that of a man, we made particular effort to ensure our product was inclusive and relevant to their own experience. Despite the fact that our entire intention was to remove gender from mainstream media, we have both vastly expanded our knowledge and understanding of the constraints gender inflicts on men, women and everyone in between.

Please view our final product and video here:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/neutra/hdfnnijgjecbfejflneedlioedhcmddf

Social Narratives Project – Ladina Brunner and Natalia Gulbransen-Diaz