OUGD603 / Extended Practice / I Need You to Change / Sagmeister Happy Talk

I watched Sagmeister's happy talk again today, for no reason in particular, but it struck me that a lot of his work asks the public to intercede and interact in order to make his work better, and the viewer happier.

Abstraction ' if you abstract an image you open more room for the unrepresentable and therefore involve the viewer more'. Sagmeister on  Yves Klein Blue Field

He spoke about two projects in particular that struck me as being interactive with the audience, projects that needed the audience to interact, in order to change:

Ji Lee - The Bubble Project :

http://www.designindaba.com/articles/interviews/bubble-project

It provides a platform for people "to speak their minds about any subject, without censorship. It transforms a one-way communication into an open dialogue. Our public spaces are returned back to the public, carving out a clearing within the media bombardment for self-expression. The writings are infinitely diverse in their subject matters. Some of them are political and social commentaries, some are jokes about sex and drugs, some of them are personal messages, to mention a few re-occurring themes. 

The designer (and a mentor) Stefan Sagmeister wrote an interesting insight about the Bubble Project in a book called Area: 'Everybody wins with this project: The advertiser gets more people to look at its (now personalised) posters, the public finally gets a chance to talk back to the advertisers, and the rest of us are able to enjoy these little jolts of joy by seeing and reading the transformed poster. And how much more interesting they become.' I also find that the writings many times speak the truth.