5:1 Student Design Show

Untainted design thinking, or what 200 students have to do with the world of 100.

Here’s to spotting tomorrow’s great design thinkers today: The London College of Communication’s School of Graphic Design is holding its annual degree show this week, titled 5:1 — an exhibition showcasing work by the program’s 200 graduates.

Although the show is divided into five segments reflecting the program’s central pathways — Information Design, Advertising, Typo/graphic, Illustration and Interaction & Moving Image — it fosters interdisciplinary curiosity, featuring cross-pollinated, experimental work across all facets of design.

Creative, compelling, provocative — it’s all the things we want design to be, oozing the freshness of minds not yet tainted by industry expectation and artistic grandeur.

We couldn’t help noticing that some of the work in the Information Design focuses on the symbolic representation of the world as a 100 people — perhaps a course professor stumbled across Toby Ng’s brilliant World of 100 poster series we featured a while ago, and repurposed it as a brief to students? Regardless, some of the interpretations struck our fancy.

5:1 opens to the public tomorrow and closes July 3, so if you’re in the London area, stop by Elephant & Castle SE1 6SB for a burst of delightful design freshness.

Ordering The Chaos: The Internet Mapping Project

Dissecting the interwebs, or what digital toddlers have to do with infinite loops.

You know we’re in dire straits when Tim Berners-Lee, father of the World Wide Web, says we no longer fully understand the Internet.

But Wired magazine founder and chronic digital culture explorer Kevin Kelly has set out to dissect the fabric of the web. His Internet Mapping Project is an effort to understand how people conceive of the Internet through a series of user-submitted hand-drawn maps.

The internet is intangible, like spirits and angels. The web is an immense ghost land of disembodied places. Who knows if you are even there, there. Yet everyday we navigate through this ethereal realm for hours on end and return alive. We must have some map in our head.

So far, there are close to 80 submissions by people of all ages, nationalities and expertise levels, ranging from the concrete to the conceptual to the comic.

The project has also sprouted further analysis of people’s understanding – Argentinean psychology professor Mara Vanina Oses has distilled a fascinating taxonomy of the maps themselves.

Our favorite submission is a visceral stride-stopper that manages to communicate the nature of the Internet with brilliant simplicity, capturing the sea of interestingness that surrounds our homebase of curiosity.

Each submission asks for the person’s age, occupation and average daily hours on the web. And while the diversity of entries is astounding — from an art student to a jazz musician moonlighting as an IT consultant to the manager of the 10,000 Year Clock project — we did notice some interesting correlations.

Those who spend the most time online, for instance, have the most abstract of drawings — perhaps an indication that a truly rich understanding lives in the realm of the abstract and conceptual, not the concrete, providing a big-picture view not of what the Internet does or offers, but of what it is: An infinite loop of possibility.

At the same time, those who spend the least amount of time tend to put themselves at the center of the Internet — a sign of the “developmental psychology” of the web, wherein “web toddlers,” just like real 1-4-year-olds, adopt an egocentric worldview, while “web adults” are better able to shift perspectives and see the collective context of it all.

Download, sketch, and submit your map today.

HT LoloBloggs

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The Consequences of… Jacob Livengood

The colors of existential truth, or what an apple has to do with the culture of collaboration.

Everything has consequences. And artist Jacob Livengood is out to dissect them in his series The Consequences Of… — a beautiful play on the human condition.

The Consequences of... Friendship

From friendship to pride to possession, the series is a wonderful creative exploration of existential truths through a flurry of pattern and color.

The Consequences of... Possession

The Consequences of... Pride

There’s a peculiar recurring apple element in a number of the illustrations, the symbolism is somewhere in the limbo between the artist’s vision and your own interpretation.

The Consequences of... Sight

The Consequences of... Evol

We’re particularly taken with this visual ode to the emerging culture of collaboration — a wonderful badge of a movement going stronger by the second of the digital clock.

The Consequences of... Sharing

Explore The Consequences Of… in its entirety — it’s well worth it. You can support Jacob’s work on Society6, the brilliant new social platform for empowering artists by matching them with grants from art supporters, and follow him on Twitter.

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