Friday 25th March 2011:

I continued recording the questionnaire results. I found out that 13 out of the 20 respondents know someone who was/ is being bullied. This is quite a high number, yet again showing how common bullying is. Also, 12 said that they feel that schools, etc, don’t have effective anti-bullying policies. This could be something to further look into and see how my organisation and awareness campaign could tackle this issue. An interesting result was that for the question ‘why do you think that people bully?’, 18 votes were given to ‘to make themselves feel better than others’. This could perhaps show that maybe the bullies have their own insecurities which need addressing. However, the next highest voted answer was ‘to impress others’, so maybe this is something else to look at which doesn’t include underlying psychological reasons. I was very surprised that, out of 20 people, only 3 people said that they had been a bully to someone else. I don’t think that this is true as I feel that everyone has been a bully to someone else at least one, even if unintentionally. However, 14 of the remaining 17 answered ‘not that I’m aware of’ rather than ‘no’, suggesting that perhaps they recognise that they may have been a bully without realising. 12 people agreed that the bully could be just as much a victim as the victims themselves, showing that maybe there are psychological reasons behind why someone bullies. Many people felt that friends would be the best people to help those being bullied, and that professionally trained people would be best to help those who bully. This suggests that my organisation needs to make the friends of victims aware of bullying so that they are there to help, and also that maybe the organisation should act in a friend-like way to those who need support. Also, perhaps professionally trained people should be those who help the bully, and this would need to be noted if my organisation were real.

I also added the images of the prints (which I didn’t print into my sketchbook) into my sketchbook so that I am able to compare these to the prints in my book and see which ones work well, and what backgrounds look good with the writing in the print.

One thing which I haven’t been doing is keeping track of what ideas I have suggested throughout my formative evaluation, and which ones I haven’t yet pursued. I decided to go through my writing and take note of any ideas, which I could focus on and create work for. A few examples are: looking at the graphic designer, Milton Glaser and create pieces with words coming from images of people (eg: their emotions) inspired by this designer’s work, looking at the work of Ros Rixon, and creating pieces related to bullying inspired by this work, looking further at the different stages of the anti-bullying strategy mentioned in the ‘Bullying’ book, and edit the photos which I have taken digitally to make them more interesting. I have listed all of these ideas, and more, and will try and follow as many of these through.

Target for today: Continue to record questionnaire results, add images of prints to sketchbook, and look through blog/ formative evaluation notes to see what ideas I have suggested but not yet pursued.

Target for tomorrow: Take photos/ print screens of technology and bullying through these forms and create image for screen-printing.