rational


 * Rational**

For this project, I decided to do the radio. This was not a hard decision for me. The first few concept maps I made of different concepts didn't really interest me. I thought photography could have been interesting but ultimately I was much more interested in the radio. I really love music, and last year I took a course about Rock and Popular Music which was really interesting and gave me some information about the radio. I thought I would be an interesting topic to research more and find out more about. As well, I really liked the idea of a radio being a medium, a means of communication. I wanted to focus more on the music side of the radio than the technical side so I tried to focus my research more on music than the other aspects of the radio. I found this really helped me center my research around one thing.

In terms of how I layed out my map, I had a hard time because I want to imclude the history part of the radio, but wasn't sure how it really fit well with the rest of my information. My solution to this was the make the history separate and put it at the top of my map. This would hopefully draw the viewers attention to that first (ish) and they would be informed of the background of radio before they got into more information. I then decided to sort of split my information into two topics, Listeners and Broadcasters. In critique we discussed having an element of the concept map more dominant, something that the viewer can enter with, something they might already know. So this was my way for drawing the reading into my map at a particular part, so that their eye travels down to learn new information.

The way my concept map looks was a very difficult desicion. I decided to hand letter most of the type and then put it in the computer to make it easier to work with. I chose to hand letter it to illustrate the vast number of different genres of music that is played on the radio. It can sometimes be a mismatch of music, and the random type helps to illustrate that point, I think. As well, I decided to subtlety make the connecting lines between section different colours, just so it was easier to read. Above the word radio I made a sort of time line for the history section, it is suppose to sort of look like a dial for a radio.

What I had trouble with was the actual layout of the piece, because initially I really had no idea what was wanted. Whether it was to look like a diagram, a traditional concept map, a chart...this part of the project really stumped me. So, I guess my solution to that was to just go with the idea I liked best and what came the easiest for the topic. Overall, I am happy with the way my project turned out. I got to research more about a topic that I was interested in which was fun. As well, hand lettering was a lot of fun.