Monday 27 June 2016

L5 Entry 8: I had a discussion with my lecturer.

Q1: Analyse in depth a design related issue that has courted major controversy in both professional and public domains. Evaluate if the negative accusations of the media artefact are merited.

Like I mentioned in my previous post, I needed to talk to my lecturer to clarify my essay structure direction, so I did.

Starting off with the Introduction, there is no right or wrong in both of the intro I listed out in Entry 7. 

If I were to start my essay off with several controversial designs in Malaysia, then the rest of my essay must be in relation to that so that a study of how the attitudes and behaviour of Malaysians to certain issues can be examined. 

Several controversial designs in Malaysia would be the KL Logo which I mentioned before, and how people are building softwares to imitate and mock the RM15k logo design, or even utilise Microsoft Word to replicate the logo. Another example would be the Ramadan Ad that was done in 2011 which got pulled off from 8TV due to its racist contents. It was supposed to be an ad that talks about the rules of attending a bazaar but it shows an asian girl being very rude and loud and crazy—which is a don’t in the ad. 

If I were to start it off with a brief history of sexist advertising on how it started and the situation back then, then my whole essay would be about sexist designs from different countries and the similarities or differences each country has. 

Taking the Firefly airline advert for an example, women’s bottoms were displayed on the ads which caused major controversy in Malaysia, but people in the western countries don’t see it as a big deal because generally, Malaysians are more conservative and reserved whereas the western people are more open, which leads to a cultural issue.

Both introductions share the same main topic which is sexual advertising but the direction of the essay would be different. Also, I asked if the controversies between the professionals and public are based on one particular design/topic or the overall of all designs and it should be based on one specific topic because, different designs will receive different reaction from people with different professions. 

My lecturer also did mention that it is possible to go beyond sexist ads and not just on one classification because it can be branched out into a lot of things; I need to research more on that.


After the discussion, I think I’ll go on with option two, which is to begin my essay with a summarised history of sexist adverts. Seems to be more interesting to me.

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