The remarkable opportunity has come up for me (through work of all things) to visit Vietnam. I will be doing some photography for Plan Vietnam around sanitation/hygiene. I leave in two weeks – which is scarcely enough time for me to work out if I need vaccinations let alone get any. I don’t know too many details of the trip yet, but should be enlightened post long weekend. I will be away probably a tad over a week. This is truly exciting way to branch out the photography further (for it is definitely something I’d like to be doing more rather than less – but is a wee bit tricky when you work full time already). I’m hoping to catch a few more weddings this year as well.

It’s also really interesting in light of the vocation question. But I’ll leave that one there for the time being.

Photography Social Justice Work

Watch it.

Coffee Social Justice

RAIN_PRINCESS_by_LeonidafremovI feel kind of nerdy. But I’m doing this assignment on water at the moment (for a class on Systems and Services Design). And I have realised that we as a lovely population of well endowed off Westerners are VERY VERY ignorant about the issues associated with water and the world and the ties to poverty etc. My assignment is more specifically about domestic water situations and urban metabolism but really it all applies. It should be of concern.

Please begin to educate yourself:

FAO Water

UN Water


beautiful rain painting by Leonid Afremov

Social Justice Sustainable Uni

visualizing-information-design1While sitting in class I was imagining the possibilities of information design in regards to voicing stuff I care about when they suddenly sprung us with this link.

Information Visualization for AdvocacyJohn Emerson (Title will download the pdf approx 7mb)

I do value Swinburne for hammering on about stuff that matters, even if this particular example was more a general resource to kick us in to action with our assignments. I intend someday to have a crack at a piece, so if someone wants to throw some data or an idea at me, it would be welcome.

This was not just written for designers the lovely Ellen Lupton (I’m sure she’s lovely – not that I’ve met her, but she’s a twin like me so of course she’s lovely) goes on about making design accessible to all. You go right ahead.

Sometimes I wish I’d discovered information design sooner. On a side note, my assignment piece is on John Friedrich and I will potentially be mapping relationships between him and Iago from Othello (Shakespeare). Should be interesting.

Create Culture Design Social Justice Sustainable Uni