I created the publication ‘Please May I Be Rude’ as part of my final project in my last year on university, on the topic of exploring politeness. This was one of the outcomes I approached first as part of the politeness topic as I needed to create a foundation of understanding of politeness. I initially though the topic wasn’t going to have enough content to go on, but to my surprise the variety and variability of politeness from person to person showed me that it was far more complex than I thought. I decided to exclusively use paintings from the 18^thcentury, or at least in the most part, and used them as the visual to aid the exploration of politeness. Because the 18^th century has been referred to as the politest century, I felt that editing these paintings to incorporate my design motif, having them feature objects like laptops and getting them to relate to the personal accounts from people where their intended politeness has backfired made the publication as a whole more relevant and a bit quirky to look at.  

After researching ways to visualise politeness in journal articles, I found that many of them don’t work for most situations because of the unpredictability of how people see people intended polite actions. This resulted in my contributing my own model of how visualise politeness, which involved positive and negative interactions along a an ‘acceptable line’, interactions existing within 5 social circles and how self-awareness can lessen the time we spend just before we go to sleep revaluating all of our life choices. The illustrations of these becoming the design motif thought the publication. The chapters, First Things First, A Polite History, Saving Face and Saying No, Modern Politeness and Finding the Right Balance, all explore different areas of politeness and present the information I gathered from various journals and other research. each of the chapter ending with an interview that relates to the chapter topic. I Hoped that these personal accounts would be relatable and the situation we can often find ourselves in when navigating the labyrinth that is politeness.  

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