505 - 2 - Refining Issues

I started looking more deeply into a couple of my options to refine which I was to focus on for the brief...

1. Skateboarding
Skateboarding is everywhere. You see it on TV, in movies, on cereal boxes, the Internet, and around town.

It’s easy to find a basketball hoop or swing set almost anywhere you go. Yet when it comes to skateboarding, skaters are often restricted of choice, with no skatepark they ride on the streets, school campuses, parking lots, and other places around town… or simply don’t skate at all. They show an uncommon dedication to their sport. And what does this commitment to physical exercise and outdoor activity earn them? In many areas it gets them a big fine.

When a community treats its skateboarders as pariahs, outcasts, and nuisances, they are telling skateboarding youth that they are not welcome there. 

Skaters are routinely confronted and ticketed by police. Skaters see this as an un-winnable situation; they are passionate about skating but every attempt to find a place to skate inevitably leads to a confrontation with authority. 

After decades of this treatment, “illicit” street-skating has become an indelible part of the skateboarder’s experience. This is NOT because skateboarding culture has an anti-authoritarian tone, but because so many communities have systematically confined skateboarding that skaters treat each place to skate as a temporary situation until they are kicked out. For many, it is a daily ritual. Every experienced skateboarder can share a story of being treated like a criminal.

So if your city doesn’t have a skatepark, where are you meant to skate??

Even where skating is tolerated, skaters put themselves at risk of being hit by vehicles. On average, nearly one skateboarder dies a week in the United States in an accident that involves a motor vehicle. (Skaters for Public Skateparks Casualty Report, 2011)

Nobody really wants to criminalise skateboarding. Unfortunately, there are few people that can offer a different solution to “the skateboarding problem.”
There are more towns with laws preventing skateboarding than there are skateparks. Balance is getting closer one skatepark at a time, but without more skatepark advocates, communities gravitate towards a “solution” that seeks to prevent the activity rather than direct it toward places where it’s appropriate.

A park is a gathering place for the community. A skatepark is a gathering place for the local skateboarders. Through the skatepark, the public sees skaters for what they are: brave, athletic youth with a passion for skateboarding. That’s all! The stereotypes that may have plagued skateboarders before the skatepark are quickly forgotten.

There are over six-million skateboarders in the United States. Most of them are 24 years old or younger. According to the U.S. Census there are about 85-million people in the United States between the ages of 5 and 24. Therefore, 7.7% of youth in the nation have ridden a skateboard within the last year. (In the larger context, 2.1% of all Americans have ridden a skateboard this year.) That’s a huge number that cannot be ignored.

BELOW: An infamous video of skateboarders being admonished by local security personnel. This video reveals the kind of humiliating treatment many skateboarders receive from people in positions of authority.

Skateboarding is an old hobby of mine which I have grown up alongside. I can heavily relate to the issues faced by a skateboarder, but now I am older I can also see from society's perspective of it being a nuisance. 

- It would be interesting to look into this and see how it varies in the UK to the US. 

- I can be heavily inspired by all the skate graphics and the new era of design and approach in skate ads

- See how all this can inspire a new campaign fighting for skaters rights and encouraging the development of more skate-parks/street spots?

2. How technology is turning us into robots

- Thinking about how technology has affected human nature and the 'anti-social' society in which we live in.
As we were growing up advancements in technology have always been introduced as this amazing pioneering development to us as humans - we are able to connect with practically anyone from anywhere around the globe and this in turn should eventually allow for a more connected and peaceful world. Yet after spending a lot of time considering my own relationship with technology and reading various articles discussing the many ways technology has made living easier, and in some ways harder, I have developed my previous view. 
* It would be horrendously contradictory of me to completely put down and discourage technology as I do love it and rely on it so strongly as a modern day graphic designer, but I want to encourage small steps towards evolving socially alongside technology rather than solely relying on it - thinking back to life before it was as prevalent
- We have to ask ourselves…
Is an increasing use of technology making us more like robots and less like humans?
Technologically Dependent

There is no denying how dependent human beings have become on technological devices and the internet. Technological dependency leads to a lack of face-to-face interaction, especially among teenagers. With people texting and communicating via social media rather than engaging in real face-to-face communication, what happens to our compassion and our ability to empathise?






In an article written on timesunion.com entitled “Technology Only Hurts Interaction” the author writes that:
“With our digital wands — TVs, smartphones, iPhones, iPads, etc. — we trick ourselves into believing that we are better connected… But are we?”

He goes on to write that face-to-face interaction is the “ground of compassion and connectedness.” In a world where people are increasingly connecting with others using less and less physical interaction, we must be becoming more distant and less humane… correct?

Recently there was a great amount of controversy in the news regarding the sexual assault of an intoxicated young woman committed by the young men in Steubenville, Ohio. An extremely large amount of people have been speaking up on various popular social media sites regarding this case and its consequences. This article called “A Lesson on Empathy” discusses how within hours of the sexual assault, and perhaps even before the young woman knew what had tragically happened to her, social media blew up with pictures of the event.Have We Lost Our Hearts?
Shocking images of this poor young girl circulated around the web which showed teenagers being extremely insensitive towards the topic of sexual assault. - Have we always been this way and social media has just allowed us to see the evil that exists out there? Or has our intense use of social media and our addiction to sharing every little detail of our lives turned people cold?

In a relevant article published on UCLA.com entitled “Is the Internet Killing Empathy?“ the author compares our obsession with images and videos online to the ways in which people often slow down on the highway to stare at an accident. The author discusses how the internet has allowed the world to become a form of comedy, and us: its audience.

It’s insane how many videos you can find on Youtube of people falling down or getting hurt, that have millions and millions of views. This alone, shows me that the internet is a new form of playground where bullying reigns, and ultimately demonstrates that connectedness is leading to a lack of empathy.

For example, here’s a video with over 4 MILLION views of a woman who is simply texting and falls down some stairs.It’s incredible how much of the world take humour in a video of someone getting hurt!



This topic does provide me with a much wider scope of research, and possibilities for what and how I am going to respond to the issue. 

It is more applicable to a wider target audience of nearly everyone in our modern society, so it would be interesting to respond to something which influences everyone, trying to intrigue and attract as many people as possible with a single campaign - broader terms of distribution and product.