Year One. Done.
My first year of grad is complete!
At the end of the fall semester I came away with five goals for the spring:
- Don’t do what I normally do
- Incorporate more humor, satire, and play
- Explore new tools and technology for creating
- Create projects to meet designers I admire
- Use projects to explore social and political topics of interest
I feel as through I accomplished four out of the five goals this semester. “Creating projects to meet designers I admire” was the exception.
After presenting my work to a panel of guest reviewers, I received the following feedback:
- My projects have a clear relationship between concept and form.
- My work succeeds in making the intangible tangible.
- My approach feels a little prescriptive.
- Is there a way for me to let go of control and experiment more?
- What if I included more participatory aspects to my work to relinquish control over the outcome?
The question I am sitting with most after the conversation is how to ease up my rigidity around design in the future? I agree that my work tends to be highly controlled. Chaos is very uncomfortable for me. It is a challenge to loosen up my design without feeling like things are chaotic, messy, and unclear. I value clarity a lot, and creating work that is cryptic and ambiguous isn’t fun for me. Then again, maybe I am being too binary with my thinking? I tend to equate ambiguity with chaos and feeling completely lost. I am someone who flourishes in structure but flounders a little when there aren’t clear frameworks. Many of the open-ended projects this semester challenged me, due to the lack of structure. It’s definitely a healthy growing edge for me.
Some helpful questions for me to think about over the summer are:
- How can I bring my free-flowing process from Improv Comedy into my design work?
- What helps me move quicker from the research phase to carving out a project with guardrails?
