Preparing the Intellectual Ground for the Methodology
Where Week 16 was about gathering and deepening research, Week 17 focused on shaping that research into a coherent structure for the Studio Practice. This meant selecting which sources genuinely advanced the project and discarding anything that did not serve the methodological or practical aims.
I refined the themes into a clear sequence that mirrors the flow of practice:
- Dialect as cultural identity (Crystal, Edwards, Hall)
- Place based meaning making (Killip, Murtha, Temporary Contemporary)
- The politics of neutrality (Meggs, Klein, Müller Brockmann, Vignelli)
- Expressive alternatives to neutrality (Moross, Deuchars, Bunbury, SnoozeOne)
- Community driven design strategies (IDEO AMPLIFY, Open Works)
A major development this week was realising how tightly the research ties into the methodology. The idea of dialect as lived language rather than linguistic material clarified why visual decisions must be rooted in real voices. Similarly, examples from expressive typographers gave me visual vocabulary to draw upon when constructing workshop tasks around tone, rhythm and personality.
I also began writing summaries of each research source in a way that would easily translate into the Studio Practice PDF. These summaries needed to be analytical, not descriptive, so much of the work involved examining why each source was useful and how it feeds into the design decisions that will follow.
By the end of the week, I had a research structure that was intellectually robust and visually relevant, ready to be transformed into a methodological approach.
LSJ DESIGNS 
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