Week 17

It’s been a fun week packed with printing, book making, collage, cultural probes, and data sculptures.

I began this week with some photolithography. It was fascinating to see how the mark-making and the amount of light blocked varied the texture of the exposed print.

As we continued to develop the data dérive project, we refined the rules and collectively defined the visual attributes. At this stage, we also picked our colors and paper. We chose to keep certain aspects of the experiment subjective in order to allow for individuality & creative freedom.

To visualise our sounds, we began experimenting with different compositions and test printing them at the letterpress studio.

This week's collaborative workshop was organised by Mizuki, and we had fun making a collage composition out of newspaper cutouts. Each of us took turns selecting and pasting an image, and it was interesting to see how we attempted to connect otherwise disparate images.

We studied various design research methodologies in class this week. Each of us developed a poster to better understand the strengths and challenges of the research method that was assigned to us. I looked into cultural probes and found it to be a very humanistic approach to research, with a focus on people's lived, subjective experiences. We then shared our findings with our peers, serving as a great exercise in thinking about research for my own project.

I learnt how to case bind a hardcover book from the ground up. It was such a satisfying process requiring precision and patience.

We created a prototype for our collaborative unit outcome, experimenting with physicalisation and sensory perception. Our team used mount board, wires and pom poms to develop a lo-fi version of a data sculpture. In line with my argument for visceral data experiences, I envision this becoming a proposed model for a larger, data-driven architectural experience.