The Frame
The Framework
A project gantt chart was created for the remainder of the design research project.
The product design specification was refined to reflect the research project's outcome direction.
Metrics that were highlighted in red are to be removed and metrics that were highlighted in green, with key alterations bolded, are to be edited.
Metric 11 was removed as the various YANA design products generated, as part of the Close to Home system, have varying installation duration requirements.
Metric 15 was removed as the IOT system, developed for the frames, is designed without the need for additional software downloads. Additionally, the phone application will require manual authorisation to be updated.
Metric 8 was altered from identifying concerning behaviour to identifying irregular behaviour. This update reflects the Close to Home's project objective of seeking to instigate interfamilial communication, in regards health developments (both good and bad), to optimise relationship building.
Metric 19 was altered to acknowledge that wall power points are rarely positioned near doorframes, making it difficult and potentially dangerous, to power the doorframe device from a wall plug.
The finalised product design specification is shown below.
The Showing G.UTS Reflection
Preamble
The Close to Home Exhibition seeks to explore the housing and contextualisation of valuables to facilitate, document and exhibit the acknowledgement of the personal inventory’s significance to workshop participants. It is hypothesised that participants who deeply engage with the workshop exhibition, through admitting meaningful artefacts and exploring their interrelation with the object’s physical and emotional presence, will develop a greater appreciation for how they view and contextualise entities of great importance. The participant’s engagement with the workshop activity is to be documented through observing a participant’s exploration of the contextualisation of their artefacts within a shared gallery space, the physical and symbolic frames generated during the workshop and a discussive reflection had with each participant regarding the frames they produced and whether these capture the value of their artefact. This participant-driven exhibition has emerged from the Close to Home’s studio practice which is seeking to develop frames which showcase supportive presence and foster communication between those aging in place and their community carers.
The Exhibition Workshop Plan
The exhibition workshop asks participants to bring in an artefact of personal value. The artefacts brought by the workshop participants will form a collective inventory of personal valuables. Participants will then be tasked with developing a frame, from various construction and drawing materials, which convey the value of their artefacts within a shared gallery space. The participants will be advised that they are to remove their artefact from the frame after the workshop, therefore they had to consider how their ‘empty’ frames would be perceived to passing audiences. Participants will be prompted to consider whether they wanted to produce a frame that conveys the literal presence of what their specific artefact is or the emotive value that it holds to the designer of the frame. The workshop will encourage participants to reshape the boundaries between items of value and how they are contextualised within space alongside utilising material experimentation to consider the frames as artworks for the artefacts that they are housed within.
The exhibition workshop is to be held within G.UTS during the week 7 theory class, where the frames developed will remain exhibited until week 10. The workshop has been designed for the 2022 design honours cohort and the design honours theory lecturer, Dion Tuckwell. The outcomes from the workshop are to be exhibited for all Monash University attendees to view. It is hypothesised that the workshop will feature participants who will wish to deeply engage with the making activity and individuals who will demonstrate reserved contributions. Therefore, as the facilitator of the workshop, I will not be participating in the making activity to encourage engagement from inactive participants.
Figure 1. Frames in Focus: Sansovino Frames, photograph.
Courtesy of The Frame Blog, accessed 7 September, 2022, https://theframeblog.com/2015/04/18/frames-in-focus-sansovino-frames-an-exhibition-at-the-national-gallery-london/.
The workshop exhibition is to challenge traditional artistic showcases, where the physical item of value is the central spectacle, to instead focus on how the treasured artifact is housed. This style of exhibition pays homage to the international museum exhibitions which have been devoted to the presentation of artwork frames. Notably, the National Gallery in London, 2015, exhibited Fames in Focus: Sansovino Fames (Figure 1), which sought to present frames as a work of art in their own right (Zane 2015).
The exhibition workshop has been designed as a research exercise which will advance the refinement of the form language to be utilised in the Close to Home’s research project outcome. This is to be done through examining the materials, shapes and themes explored during in the workshop, alongside the responses to the frames generated.
In Vivo
The five frames produced by the five participants demonstrated vast explorations of a frame’s form language and varied levels of engagement with the workshop activity. Participants were first asked to share their objects with the workshop group, highlighting the personal importance of the artefact. Notably, a common theme of storytelling and personification emerged in the introductions to the artefacts. Storytelling presented through the participants’ contextualisation and reminiscence over the personal discovery of their artefact’s significance. Additionally, personification featured in the projection of the participant’s self, or loved ones’, qualities, skills, and heritage through the physical artefact. Participants were then asked to share the themes they sought to include in their frame and any material or form ideations the artifact prompted. Predominantly the participants referenced the emotive themes that they had hoped to include in their artefact’s frames however, all workshop members demonstrated openness to exploring the generative nature of the frame making workshop. Throughout the workshop the participants were prompted to consider how they wanted to memorialise and contextualise their artefacts through the frames they were generating. Probes such as “will you house your item within a form that demands attention, or will it be a discreet shell to showcase the artifact? How does the frame connect to the artefact? Is it centralised or decentralised? Are there overlapping boundaries?” were asked to the workshop cohort. Additionally, Aristotle was referenced through a provocative quote, “the aim of art is not to present the outward appearance of things, but their inwards significance”. This sought to inspire participants to artistically demonstrate the internal essence of their subject. From appreciating that the frames generated will serve as the three-week G.UTS exhibition, participants were reminded to appreciate their role in supporting others to understand the value of the frame’s occupant.
Figure 2. G.UTS Exhibition Workshop, photograph.
Courtesy of Jacqueline Johnstone, captured 8 September, 2022.
Figure 3. G.UTS Workshop Reflection, photograph.
Courtesy of Jacqueline Johnstone, captured 8 September, 2022.
Throughout the one-hour activity, participants exhibited varied engagement (Figure 2). Some participants displayed considerable vulnerability, by featuring highly personal visual themes and symbolic materials within the generated frame. Conversely, some participants offered limited participation as they attempted to take a literal approach to capturing the artefacts within the frame. These participants were reminded, during the workshop session, to consider whether the frame they were producing outwardly conveyed the intrinsic essence of their artefact. Once the frames were produced, the workshop participants were regrouped to share the frames that they had created. Participants were asked to validate whether the frame that they had designed appropriately contextualised the artefact and the emotional value of the object. The conversations that evolved from the presentations and reflections of designing the artefact frames (Figure 3) proved to be incredibly insightful into each participant’s beliefs and values surrounding the contextualisation of worth. Participants centralised the discussions on the role of an artwork’s frame and the opportunity for designers to position themselves within their work. The participant-led conversation recognised that frames have historically shaped an audience’s experience of art and that progressive art and design seeks to challenge the boundaries between a piece’s external housing and its internal inhabitant. Similarly, the interdisciplinary design participants acknowledged their liberty to communicate personal values, philosophies, and identities through the designs they generate. The workshop activity was successful in its acknowledgement of a possession’s inviolability and, through the generation of a custom frame, facilitated the creative demonstration of the collective inventory’s value.
In Vitro
The workshop exhibition allowed for participants to deepen their engagement with their personal inventories while facilitating an advancement of the Close to Home research project. The exhibition’s reflective responses to each frame highlighted the value of implicit, thought-provoking frames, as the non-explicit designs proved ignited discussions and saw multiple participants projecting their own views and values through the outcome. The symbolism and form language explored by the participants within the exhibition will underpin the refinement of the design intervention’s physical form. A future development for the workshop would see participants encouraged to explore how their frames may interact with another participant’s frame within the communal canvas space. This may allow for a more synonymous gallery outcome to emerge from the workshop. As hypothesised, participants who actively engaged with the workshop gained a deeper insight into the association they have with objects of value, through recognising how they immediately view and wish to outwardly present their artifact. Participants recognised their design background’s relevancy to the workshop as they could explore the symbolic, fabrication and the aesthetic of the representational framing of valuable artefacts. This representational and materialistic exploration of boundaries then prompted the consideration of a frame as a mental barrier that determines the relationship between the viewer and their environment. The rediscovery of the frame’s role, as a decorative transition between the subject and the outer world, elicited the realisation that there were no rules as to how borders may be used. The dynamic exploration between the subject and matter of contextualisation, led to the exploration of Lao Tsu’s Tao Te Ching philosophies. Lao Tsu identified affect nuances and evaluates value through the acknowledgement of the beings (such as the subject) and the non-beings (such as a frame) (Lao-Tzu 1989). Lao Tsu, in his 1989 Tao Te Ching, quotes “Cut door and windows for a room; It is the holes that make it useful. Therefore profit comes from what is there, usefulness from what is not there.”. This philosophy may be interpreted to reference how a frame may host usefulness from the profit it houses. Additionally, in reference to the studio practice, Lao Tsu’s doctrine speculates that the home may act as a utility for its aging inhabitants. This philosophy is to be explore through the research project’s design solutions generated. Therefore, the development, conduction, documentation and further research generated from the workshop exhibition has been invaluable for the research project’s studio practice.
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