Further narrowing down my topic focus was the main objective for this weeks work schedule, and to do so I used my current range of secondary research into branding (i.e. Alan Fletcher), and expanded into looking into the effects of advertising, as this was the main area of exploration in this project. To do so, I separated my research into political theories and art movements to look into corporate advertising and the opposition it faces in social media.
I looked into the use of exploitation of the human mind that many brands use purely for profit from the viewpoint of the theories (such as anarchism, Marxism and Situationism) I had already studied so that I could connect theory to method. Contextualising like this helped to see the effects of ideologies and philosophies in play in society today and how people react to this.
I discovered a website called "Adbusters" which follow and anarchic and situationist approach to satirising modern media and corporate branding through its use of exploitation and manipulation. Through this, I was able to further delve into the Situationist art movement and came across some useful artists to look in to for their radical belief and theories and also their method of satirising corporation by displaying their unethical methods in a very "in-your-face" way.
I then carried out some primary research in the form of a survey which aimed to use the information I had gathered from looking into psychological studies in advertising to gather some raw data to be used to compare and contrast with the artist research I had from more radical art movements and to then connect to designers who work within corporation for profit.
Designing this survey, I attempted to keep the questions quite open so as to gather some real first hand experiences to work from. I also then decided to use the survey as an advertisement in itself, by sharing it on my Facebook profile in the hopes that this could also affect the answers to the survey by showing who (in terms of age, gender, occupation, etc.) actually clicked on the survey in the first place.
Using the results to this survey, I connected the effects described by the people who had filled out this survey to the studies I had looked at that described the effect of advertising and how corporations exploit mentality, often in unethical ways, to gain popularity and profit.
This week went well in terms of keeping to schedule and I was even able to do additional research which was scheduled to be done next week which can now be freed up to add to the design development process.
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