What drives me to make certain design choices?
Looking through my past work, I realized a common thread that I hadn’t noticed before.
Here are some examples:
12/23.
I have always had an issue with this date. This is the date of my birthday. Oddly, 23 is one of my favorite numbers. I’m sure there are many reasons to why I object to this date, but its most likely because its during the most “joyous” time of the year. Holidays in the past has brought on gloom and a sense of what I wish would exist in my life. There’s also a sense of loss when everything happens at once. Birthday, Christmas, New Years. My birthday becomes a foreshadowing of endings to great events. In order to reverse the negative association I have with the day I was born, I decided to research all of the great things that happened on this date by Wikipeding the date. Year by year, the events of 12/23 were not very uplifting. Wars, battles, people getting assassinated were the events listed under this date.
For this specific project, I was asked to portray the word “discovery” and “emergence” in some way. I was curious to find what new things could emerge from the day that I was born.
To gather this result, I set up a controlled system where the number combination of 12/23 would allow for something to emerge. Using 12, 23, and 8(which is the sum of 1, 2, 2, and 3) I assigned each number a different color in order to highlight every 12th, 23rd and 8th word and line in the paragraph. I chose silk-screening as the media, which allowed for the overlaps of these colors to make new relationships.
In a recent project titled “Deconstructing Narratives, Curating the pieces: dissecting an everyday article”, I came across a NYTimes article titled: “No Place at School for Aids Orphans”. It discussed how a group of parents in Vietnam were opposed to AIDS orphans attending school with their children. Appalled, disappointing, disgusted, and confused are some of the words to describe the emotions I felt while reading the article. I read over the article a second time–probably because I couldn’t believe some of the things written. This time, my reaction was more contemplative. I realized that although the perspective of the other parents seemed ludicrous, it didn’t make their viewpoint less valuable. The result of this project was deconstructing the article based on the viewpoints presented, and then curating the pieces accordingly, resulting in a new way to read/view the story.
From these two projects, I thought to myself, why do I design the way I do, or more importantly, what drives me to make the specific choices when designing? In both projects, there were matters where I just didn’t understand why things were the way they were. In order to make sense of this disorder, and make it my own, I gave myself a strict set of constraints to deconstruct and re-organize the chaos that surrounds me.