Semester in Review: Fall 2020 Senior Studio
Reflection
This semester was a blur, consisting of a lot of imposter syndrome, intense emotions, and frustration, but also a good amount of gratefulness, hope, and inspiration. Being back on BU’s campus after feeling disconnected for so long (since sophomore year for me, since I was abroad last fall in Venice) affected me in a lot more ways than I expected. I had to face the prospect of being a senior in my last year of design education, being a student during a pandemic, and being a designer in the current state of the world. Even the positives came with negatives; whenever I would feel joyful about being back on campus, my brain would start nagging me with thoughts of how much time on campus I had lost. While excitedly preparing for Senior Reviews, I’d be hit with the fact that our class will only have one in-person final review in our entire college design career. I spent a lot of the semester feeling happy to finally be back, and simultaneously frustrated and jaded about all of this (not to mention very anxious about EVERYTHING else happening around me). I had to learn how to compartmentalize all these thoughts, and stay as positive as possible so that I could get the most out of the time I do have left at BU. I discovered that the one truly rewarding constant through my education at CFA has been the peers I am surrounded with. Our senior design class is incredible — so many talented artists and designers, with such a wide range of skills. I loved being able to work on some collaborative projects with my peers this semester, and was lucky to be put in several groups with close friends of mine. After a year of such isolation and disconnection, it was really rewarding to be physically collaborative again.
Project 1: Impact & Empathy
We started Senior Studio with the Impact & Empathy project, and I was super excited to be working with some of my best friends in the program, Greg, Lena, and Eme. We began by exploring the Hyperakt website to find a project that struck a chord with us. Upon finding Spotify’s Encouraging Meaningful Impact project, we got super excited about the possibilities surrounding Spotify’s branding and visual system, as well as the project’s basis in community engagement. As we went on, our project evolved considerably through many, many iterations, experiments, and deep conversations. We ended up landing on the idea of an installation that physically represents what it’s like to be a member of the “Gen-Zillenial” generation in 2020. It started to become a big passion project, allowing us to dig deep and discover what is truly weighing on us at this point in our lives — and use design to understand and communicate these feelings. I loved every second of the process of this installation, from the initial conversations/rant sessions where we aired our grievances with what our generation is facing, to the last late night in the studio before it was due, fine tuning the projectors and putting vinyl accents up on the walls. This project was really cathartic for me in a lot of ways, and I feel like it was exactly what I needed to start the semester with. I got to collaborate with some designer friends whose work I have always admired, we took on a subject matter that really hits home for all of us, and it gave me so much joy to work together in person in the studio again (can’t express how much I’ll never take that for granted again). I really loved the outcome of our installation, and enjoyed seeing how my work interacted with everyone else’s.
Project 2: Research Video
Our second project of the semester was independent; a research-based exploration of designers/artists/people who inspire us. I loved the short responses we wrote throughout the semester, each week sharing another concept that excites us — I have a lot of these. When it came time to compile them all together into a cohesive video, I thought it would be easy… I was very wrong. I couldn’t find any narrative thread for the video to follow; I had so many different inspirations that it was really difficult to tie them and my work together in a way that made sense. I struggled more with this project than any other one this semester, and had to start from scratch several times throughout the process. My breakthrough finally came when I scrapped the narration that I had recorded to guide the video, and began looking for music to add instead. I had the idea to search for Wes Anderson instrumentals, and found one song from Fantastic Mr. Fox that fit perfectly. Once I added that in, I was able to edit the rest of the video to flow with the music. I included my own work in a sort of annotative contrast with the rest of the video, showing up whenever I found a connection between my work and my inspiration. The finishing touch was adding one more artist to the sequence, and I ended up with something I was pretty happy with!
Project 3: Design in Question
The third project of the semester was our Design in Question Installation, another collaborative project that allowed me to work closely with more designer friends who I’ve always admired! My group consisted of me, Abby, Morgan R., and Eme. After reading through the essays James supplied us with, we kicked off the project by discussing these readings and all the questions we had. This conversation lasted almost 3 hours, and was incredibly cathartic — we were able to discuss all of our grievances with design itself, BU’s design program, and the industry as a whole. Collectively, we came with 100 questions, and ended up discussing almost all of them in one way or another. The one sentiment we kept returning to was our feeling that design can seem pointless in a time of such turmoil. We wondered what the purpose of a project like this was — one that, selfishly, exists mainly for ourselves. In order to address this feeling, we decided to shift the project into an opportunity for play and experimentation; by taking all the pressure off, we allowed ourselves to create for the sake of creating, and just have fun with design again while responding to all of these feeling swirling around in our brains. I enjoyed this process a lot. I got to work with the risograph for the first time, and LOVED the results (even though the process is pretty draining). I layered colors and design elements, collaged things together, and created a mass of risograph prints that captured my thought process perfectly. Admittedly, I was worried about the actual installation process, and felt unsure whether or not our collective theme of collage and layering with the riso would translate or fall flat. Once we got to Gallery 5 though, I was able to set aside these anxieties and work with Abby to create a really effective system. We organized the chaos of prints through color, creating a gridded gradient as a base structure for the installation. The next day, all four of us met up and began collaging. We cut up our prints, stuck pieces together, and layered everything on the wall. I loved this part of the process, throwing caution and precision to the wind and letting the rhythm of the piece dictate our decisions. The finishing touch was a vinyl print of one of Eme’s drawings, a little doodle of a man dropkicking his brain, that we felt would represent exactly how we felt throughout this process.
Project 4: Thoughts on Thesis
The final step of this semester was the Thoughts on Thesis project, which honestly snuck up on me quite a bit. Luckily, a few weeks ago I was struck with an idea for my thesis that has been bumping around in my brain ever since. I’m still not completely sure if this is exactly what I want to do for my thesis (I have some other ideas I’ve collected over time), but I am going to start here and see how the brainstorm process goes.
My idea involves working with childhood and memory… I have always worried about memory; it’s been one of the biggest factors of my anxiety for my whole life. As I stated in my thesis statement, “I have a significant fear of getting older, losing important memories, and being unable to recall and visualize my past.” I try to document as much of my life as possible to avoid this, but there are still huge gaps in my childhood and young life that are missing to me, and this drives me crazy. Essentially, I would like to use my thesis to tackle this anxiety, and create a tactile, visible representation of my life thus far. This idea came to me initially not as a thesis idea, just as something I felt like I really, really needed to do. Though once I started thinking about the ways I could execute this, I realized how much this project would need to be based in design. I would need to create a visual system, represent information and data in a way that makes sense to me, maybe create some illustrations as additional context… essentially, I would need to utilize all of the skills I have developed over my 4 years of design and art education. My current statement-in-progress is here:
Memory is elusive. It is an essential faculty of the brain, allowing us to encode, store, and retrieve learned information over time (something we could not function without), but it’s also one of the most ambiguous systems in our brain, one that is difficult for us to fully understand. Memory and anxiety are tied closely together; anxiety disorders can manipulate our brains and abilities to recall certain information or parts of our lives, for better or worse. Memory has been one of the biggest factors of my anxiety throughout my life — I have a significant fear of getting older, losing important memories, and being unable to recall and visualize my past. As an only child, I am afraid of eventually living without my parents and being solely responsible for any recollection of my childhood or what life was like. Because of this, I try to document my life as much as I can through photos, videos, journals, lists, documentation apps like Letterboxd and Goodreads, etc; gathering concrete visual information and data about myself comforts and reassures me.
For my thesis, I want to tackle this fear. My goal would be to create a visual representation of my life thus far; this could be through several different media combined, whether it’s a graphic novel/some kind of illustration, archives or catalogs of items/people/places of influence, a book or other piece of design/data recording, anything that helps me make everything tangible and visible. I envision it being a collection of data, physical items, people, home videos and photos, etc, organized chronologically and in a way that mirrors how I perceive my own life.
As a very visual learner who thinks often about the way my brain visualizes concepts, I think it would be fascinating to approach this through that lens as well, exploring how my brain conceptualizes ideas visually. Specifically, I would experiment with realizing the imagery I see in my head when I think about the concept of time, location, etc.
I’m excited to discuss this idea in my Final Reviews, as well as to dive into this possibility over winter break and see where it takes me. I do want to explore some other alternative ideas in my time off, in case there is something that strikes me with a similar level of passion and inspiration. (In particular, I want to see how I could combine my love for theater — musical theater in particular — and design in a thesis project.)
