Technology Lecture

Technology has become a way in which we're able to communicate our ideas and thoughts and to be able to put them into a visual format. The means in which we are able to do this are limited to us as individuals, depending on funds, space and the man power to do so. Fred, who was giving the lecture, gave a perfect example of South Park who still do this in an animated fashion today. They usually produce controversial episodes on people or a topic that may be floating around in the media at the time for example they recently did an episode on the Hilton/Trump presidential election and of course it was very controversial.

Social media formed a lot of what we know today as our digital culture, which was all made possible because of advancements in technology leading to most people having a phone or laptop in which they can access these sites. The functions of these devices and the devices themselves encourage, enable and extend our abilities to develop, communicate and distribute content, that content being our own work, other people's work etc.

Mentioned also was interactive technology, which has given us the ability to interact with work now through the use of VR and scannable QR codes that might for example bring your cereal box to life with animation. This has opened up a lot more opportunities as far as a designer's practice is concerned.

Nowadays brands are heavily linked with technology, through means of social media, their website and any other method of advertising themselves. In fact it has become such a big integral part of branding that companies who fail to keep up with this shift can often lag behind those who are active in their ways of advertising.

Concepts that once started as digital forms, for example the smartphone game Angry Birds has become much more than just an app, it has developed into physical plush toys and a film, which then ultimately sparked off McDonalds to create it's own line of happy meal toys, and then along came LEGO and Play-Doh to have their own spin on it. So this along with everything else supports this idea that technology has had a huge impact on not just a graphic designers practice but designers as a whole.

In terms of my dissertation at level 06, technology is something I'm considering to be my theme for my question considering it's huge contribution and involvement within the design industry. I feel it's something be interesting to fully understand it's impact on us.