ICT and Visual Communication 'A Sense of Place'

When I first heard our assignment was going to be on 'a sense of place' I initially had issues thinking about what I could do. After several brainstorms and squiggly lines and annotations, I came up with three words, Belonging, Home and identity.

I felt that all of those words and the meaning behind those words can be put together and just under the one word of ‘Home’. My home is very important to me and as my hometown is approximately 180 miles away from my current town I feel it is important for me to do. Also my house back in Aldershot had been sold and my dad is moving house whilst im here. This made me think about what home is and what it means. A house is a house, but a home is made by the people in it. A home can be moved but a house cannot.

The development of my ideas were mainly ICT based, I used pictures and media such as newspapers and leaflets. I also used ICT programmes such as ‘Wordle’ and ‘tagxedo’ in order to help me develop and discover my ideas. Wording and lettering became apparent to me after doing these research and development tasks, which made me think of newspapers, articles and writing.

Also after researching different artists and how they use newspapers and wording in different ways allowed me to explore my ideas clearly and openly. Knowing that media can be varied and can be used very differently made me realise that I have no real limits to my ideas and theories. One artist, Barbara Kruger gave me the idea of filling a room, or a house with lettering. She had done that as one of her pieces and as my idea is ‘home’ I thought I could cover a so called home, or house in newspaper. Shortly discovering this was nearly impossible I decided to improvise and use a cardboard box to represent the house. After much experimenting and deliberation and various ideas later I decided to have the word ‘home’ in my box to represent the home within a house, I though it best to have it swinging to also show a home can move with you but a house is stationery.

Going back to my research of words and media I thought to cover the box in welsh newspaper and the ‘home’ in a newspaper from back home in Aldershot. To show that both home and a sound may look the same until you look closer and ‘read the small print’ so to speak, you will see there is much difference between the two.