Week 15

A week spent researching, comprehending collaborative creation, and contemplating the visual poetics of sound.

Our team has been experimenting with small activities to better understand the essence of collaboration. We've been taking turns to organise small workshops for this. Muskeen, one of my peers, designed an exercise this week in which we created shared drawing tools to draw together. The process was fun and interesting, and I enjoyed working together in creating the outcome.

Based on the data and context shared by the partners, we also collectively defined the editorial angle for our project. We chose to focus on the individual narratives in order to highlight the varying journeys to our audience and have been collating visual references to consider the representational aspects.

I spent a large chunk of this week researching for my final major project and writing some literature and practice review for my references. I had a one-on-one tutorial to discuss my direction and considering potential avenues of discovery.

We also opened up our research through a participatory data vis exercise. With my research centred on heritage and interpretation, I asked my peers to write down words and draw an image of what came to mind when they thought of heritage. This activity became a starting point for discourse around the subject and understanding perspectives by means of asking questions. I am curious to conduct a similar research among a non-design audience.

In our programming session, we moved on to look at functions, arrays and objects. I compiled a small dataset of mountain ranges & visualised their elevation to scale and displayed their name and range as strings.

Now that we've entered the data space, I'm looking forward to exploring D3.js for it’s potential.

For our data dérive project, we started exploring ideas for the outcome. We began by categorising our recorded sounds based on arrival, departure and transitions. We felt inspired by Henri Chopin's work and futurist poetry to capture the poetics of the sound and visualise its characteristics. We developed a potential visual vocabulary by mapping elements of sound to native aspects of letterforms - size, weight, and so on.

As for the next steps, I'm excited to use the letterpress studio to experiment with form & texture and shape this into a visual, sound poetry.