Study Task 03 - Summarising and Referencing - OUGD401

There are many forms of referencing such as Chicago, MLA and APA, but this study task is solely based on the Leeds College of Art referencing system; Harvard.

Referencing is the easiest and most basic way of citing sources within your academic writing without having to type the whole source within the body, instead, you would use a bibliography at the very end of the essay. A bibliography lists all of the sources you have used in your research, this allows a smoother reading experience reducing the need to keep tracking to the next line of text.

Summarising is when you give your reader a condensed version of key points made by an author. This is the preferred method of citing points you wish to make within your writing, this is because it is easier to translate the point you're making and the reader will understand it more clearly than if you were to just copy a reference word for word. However, when applicable, it can be more effective to use traditional referencing rather than paraphrasing, it is up to the interpretation of the writer.

During this session we set out to find books in the college library that would best help us in the process of backing up statements made during the writing process. To do this, you need a solidified and grounded hypothesis of what you set out to research.


Hypothesis.
To investigate and identify the uses of visual semiotics within advertising, how it impacts designers and how they choose to represent technology in various consumer markets.

Books I had found that could be useful.

Wally Ollins On Brand

How Cool Brands Stay Hot

'How cool brands stay hot' makes excellent points on age difference and how technology is  impacting the current generation of users and the previous generation, they refer to these generations as X and Y, Y would be in regards to myself (19~ years old) and X being my parents (40+ years).

This could be useful in many ways as I could use it to pursue points of attitudes towards certain brands and how it is represented and perceived within different age groups. Are they branded to a younger audience? Could this be received as intimidation to the Gen X'ers? 

'Wally Ollins On Brand' seemed like a good go-to for how tech has been represented in the past all the way up to today. I want to focus slightly on how tech was branded as being for business, big calculators for people in offices. Ollins makes some great points on the current branding strategies; “In a visually sophisticated age (present day), with competition increasing exponentially and products/services becoming increasingly similar, design remains the great differentiator. Design always has been an immensely influential power in creating differentiation and it always will be.”

I realise that by choosing to study consumerism, and having a hypothesis such as this, I have not made it easy for myself. There are so many variables I could look into, with part of it being semiotics, branding and advertising it's going to be difficult to cram it in at 3000 words.