Field Study: Older Visual Artists
| Timeline | 10 weeks |
| Role | Interviewer, designer, bookmaker. |
| Team | Four students. |
| Topics | design research, publication design |
What do older artists need to thrive? That’s what we asked when we began researching the problem space around older visual artists for our Design Field Studies class project. We interviewed ten older artists and two lead staff at organizations that support older artists around Seattle.
We led semi-structured interviews, better known as interesting and useful conversations, in pairs, for two or three weeks. After the interviews, we asked the participants to send a calendar table detailing how art fits into their daily schedule, a photo of their workspace, and two sketches about what inspires them and what frustrates them.
Here I am on a call with Ciam, a cartoonist and the first of our interview participants
Ciam talks about feeling “aged out” of comic books:
This studio belongs to Judith, another artist we interviewed.
Judith talks about how it took her a while to break past hanging her work up in her home for the first time:
Finding Insights and Ideating
We synthesized our research into insights into the design space, and from there a series of twenty concept sketches to show some of our participants. We refined and combined the ideas into six more developed sketches.
The final deliverable was a string-bound book that detailed our research, ideation, and refinement process for these ideas.
This is a design workbook, meaning these ideas are not fully developed. The purpose is to inspire other designers who may want to explore this design space.
Here I am trying to saddle stitch the pages together with a makeshift sewing needle I fashioned out of craft wire. Thought it was funny how desperate a deadline can make me.
The Impact of This Project
When we went back to Ciam to get his reactions to our initial concept sketches, he said, “I came away from our conversation before really inspired. And now the comic book work that I've been working on, I’m within a couple of days of being completed.”
This moment was super special for me. I didn’t really do any work for Ciam, but my design research work still directly impacted him in a positive way. Frankly, the conversations really inspired me as well. It was such a joy to tour the lively Seattle arts community through the lens of older folks.
My group: Tara, Nat, and Ben!