You begin to pique my interest with the collaborative posters and writing, and I think there is potential there for multiple sets of content that converge in the end. The fact that they’ve both more or less been done before does not terribly bother me, because of how you might make them go together in the end. I think it’s because one is strictly sight and one is words… they could be shown side by side to have some sort of combined effect, maybe along with sounds or something.

I also like the idea of people participating in your project without knowing it, though I don’t know if that really interests you. Like if you stand on a street corner and collected the first 5 complete sentences from passing conversations and used them for a written portion of a project.

Hang in there, I think you’re on to something!

I understand the posters and writing more, I feel like that could work. Would you have a topic first, then give a task to different people (Have someone take pictures, someone else do type, someone screenprint, etc)? Or would the message come later?

I like the idea of connecting the dots, but do you have to be the person that decides what the end is? What if you gave people a random scatter of dots, and had them make whatever they see or want from it? Then your beginning and their end create one thing (or something like that).

about the contributing writers, this could produce something interesting, but I’m afraid this sort of thing has been done before a lot–I have a friend who’s in creative writing, and this is the kind of project teachers sometimes do with their classes, have one person begin a story and the next one continue it. but maybe if the project was something like this: while the ten writers are working on the story based on the last paragraph of a famous novel, give the same paragraph to ten graphic designers and ask them to create illustrations for what might happen next in the story. then your job would be to put the illustrations and the text together in some way.

second, for the jenga game, could you somehow play with negative and positive space, maybe going back to your 25 objects where you were playing with this–maybe somehow, as people are taking away each block, they will create something new through this adding and taking away–in other words, a big gigantic jenga that people could play with.

third, for the mind map, i agree with Paul, maybe interview people from totally different areas but ask them to do the same thing–for example, talk about what they think “love” means–then you can juxtapose the results. maybe they can respond in whatever way they want–how would a graphic designer represent love as compared to a plumber or teacher or construction worker (like my brother, who is in the construction business and would be happy to help with this).

good luck.

i agree with sarah and grant that you don’t have to treat graphic design as you subject matter. i wonder if this idea is more interesting if you interview people from wildly different disciplines: plumber, graphic designer, teacher, dog catcher…

then if some synergy happens it will be a surprise maybe?

you do keep coming back to making your project participatory. as i have said many times this year, be careful with such ideas as you don’t have time to be waiting around for others to make/react/etc…

you do keep coming back to making your project participatory. as i have said many times this year, be careful with such ideas as you don’t have time to be waiting around for others to make/react/etc…

i am not sure i understand this direction. iT seems like this is just like the synergy poster idea no? if not you have to do a better job of explaining the idea.

i could see this leading to some pretty awful writing, but as with the posters, maybe thats ok. again, too many people contributing.

how can you guarantee your results will be worth while though? i think your outcomes are too vague and this can definitely cause some problems because without this amazing end product/conclusion, synergy was not achieved.

i think you can accomplish this without using graphic design as a backing, also. as grant said, graphic design comes in because these things have to be designed.

this whole idea, as of now, seems a bit contrived and complicated. i think it could be interesting if your project involved this idea of team problem solving, a very specific and unique end result that makes all the combining worth while, and your own hand in curation and maybe producing a forum for your results.

All of these products could really “do” something involving synergy instead of just taking something that involves multiple parts and comparing it to graphic design. I particularly feel that Jenga has such an arbitrary relationship with graphic design and that comparing them just doesn’t make sense. Not to mention you would just be taking a product that already exists (which brings along with it everyones own sentiments).

In the collaborative poster product you say a “topic related to synergy and gd”, but what are some examples? So far they seem too vague to be well understood. With all of these products I’m having trouble seeing the real connection with graphic design, the connections just come across as being very loose.

I think there is something you can do that would make all of your products reticulate and then they themselves would be synergistic. Maybe you can rethink what makes a product part of synergy and how it could actually involve people synergistically. I also don’t think you have to be so explicit with it being part of graphic design, that will come along with having to design things.

i like this (although i think the resulting posters could be a train wreck) but who cares. if the results are bad, it kind of doesn’t matter.

not sure what the manual is for, maybe just select 5 designers and give them a theme for the poster.
set up a simple rule. i participated in such a project last year and it was pretty interesting.

go here:
http://www.sonnoli.com/?p=135

i think this will work better if the blocks are less about roles within graphic design (as many times the designer takes on many or all of the roles). i would concentrate on the process of design. color (pms 234), style of photography (full color image of a sunset), typeface (bauer bodoni), composition (symetrical), type aligment (flush left rag right and so on.