Week 1:
The Creative Act, Rick Rubin
Harnessing Energy and Trusting Intuition:
Are you comfortable in the vulnerability of letting the unknown guide you? Or do you feel the need to be in control to create?
J Cole has a 7 minute drill, write whatever comes to mind in the first minute and no matter what let the process unfold itself. I think this is a good way to let the universe take the wheel and is great for me.
I have found in my journey of making music that there is something about making things at 5 in the morning, perhaps it is just when the universe speaks to me but I know for a fact that when it hits I need to get it down right then and there or else it won’t be the same even if I remember it later. I’ll walk out of your classroom mid class if that itch strikes me (just kidding).
"Komorebi" is a Japanese term for the “Sunlight that shines through the Canopy”. I am only recently tuning out the noise like the canopy filters the sunlight. To let your mind be the canopy that lets the specific light you desire reach you.
Creativity as a Universal, Innate Force and a Way of Being.
How do you satiate the creative desires of your inner child while existing within the constructs of the corporatization of art?
I hate hearing friends say, oh maybe I’ll try it one day but I don’t know if I’m good at it… not everything has to result in you being good at it. I think people should express themselves without the pressure of the shit even being seen. Those are my favorite works.
We have been molded to judge our creations by the standards of what sells when creating has been a right to us from birth. Creating has been passed down generations as traditions since before society as we know it was in place… music, crafts… To the point that when I realized this I truly wanted to figure out if I even wanted to do what I liked to do for a living… I am shooting for NYFW tonight and hate the strings that come with it… perhaps I am better off growing radishes and shooting in my free time.
The Creative Process, James Baldwin
The Artist's Solitude as a Primal State and our avoidance of it:
How has your time alone affected your creative process? Do you fear it? Do you thrive in it?
I went through a phase of my life where my demons were running rampant, and I found myself doing anything to avoid being alone. And as a result I felt like my vision/creative drive all of the sudden became affected by everything around me but not in a good way. I felt like I was losing my own taste. I decided I had to lock myself in and just let it all crumble on top of me… but through the rubble I came other with things that I would have never been able to conceive of before… such as the strawberry Uncrustables shit on the grape ones
What is Design?, Victor Papanek
Degeneration of Commercial Design through Status and Gimmickry:
Do you find that some designs are made to be very complex only to portray the illusion that it serves a purpose grander than it actually does?
What are some real life designs that are "doin too much twin"?
Growing up in Hong Kong, I was surrounded by some of the most consumerist valued environments in the world. Every was a waddle through commercial after commercial. One thing I noticed was that the shittiest looking places/products were often my favorite. The hole in the wall restaurants with the lady cussing you out, slapped. That was because they didn’t need to hide anything.
Intuitive Design:
Do you find that form and function go hand in hand? If your intuition likes the ease of use and gravitates to the way something looks do they work with each other? Or should one be prioritized?
I am a big fan of the retrofuturism aesthetic (sometimes dieselpunk, sometimes decopunk), and hence the 1920s-40s industrial designs always appealed to me. I think there is a lot of nuance to this topic but I think form is a function. Something looking pleasing to me whether it is due to an associated aesthetic or a feeling serves a purpose for me.
Week 2:
Tharp’s "White Room" concept hits close to home. For me, that white room is the silence before I lay down a track at 5 AM or that blank screen before I start a visual project. It is terrifying but necessary. Tharp talks about rituals to enter that space, and I feel that. You need a trigger to switch from consumer to creator.
Brown and Rohde on doodling and sketching really validates my process. People often think if it is not polished, it is trash. But the doodle is the rawest form of the idea. It is the "7 minute drill" version of design. It is about getting the brain itch out on paper before you overthink it. I would rather have a messy notebook full of honest ideas than a pristine one with nothing real in it.
Week 3:
I want to focus on the topic of affordances and messy designs this week (I also think I did the wrong reading last week). Affordances, especially sequential, were rarely thought about when I started doing what I do now. It wasn't until I began working with interaction design that this really became important. As someone from some background of film, interactions present themselves as narratives. Good sequential affordances should play like a good narrative. Could it have multiple endings? yes but if done right one thing should lead to the next in such a seamless manner that it may almost constitute as foreshadowing.
This brings me to the idea of messy sketches being more powerful than some polished design. The messiness of an early draft holds the full potential of the design in its entirety before being stripped away to serve a specific purpose. I love that. I like that a design can have options. I like that it can "grow" and have multiple paths to grow on. I find that this is often why we step back from a polished design because it just doesn't feel as fulfilling as when the idea sparked.
Week 4:
"Nothing About Us Without Us" is a bar. Growing up in Hong Kong, I saw so much design that felt like it was imposed on people rather than created with them. It was all shiny surfaces and commercialism that ignored the grit of the actual community. Costanza Chock is right. If you are not letting the community lead the design, you are just gentrifying the problem.
Metaphors in design are tricky too. If the metaphor does not match the user's actual lived reality, it feels fake. It is like when corporate art tries to look "street" and you can tell immediately it lacks the soul. Good design should feel like that hole in the wall restaurant: authentic to the people inside it, not performing for an audience that is not there.
Week 5:
Tharp’s chapter on memory resonates with how I view my work. Muscle memory is everything. Whether it is cutting film or coding, I need it to be instinctual so my brain can focus on the vibe.
Turkle’s "Evocative Objects" made me think about my shift away from materialism. I used to think the value of an object was the price tag or the status it gave me. Now, the objects I value are the ones that are heavy with memory. An old battered camera lens that has seen my best work is worth more to me than the newest gear. The object is just a vessel for the experience. If it does not have a story, it is just clutter.
Week 6 Reading Response
So on the idea of memories, materialism and how we value our possessions. I heard a talk recently that we often consider things that are hard to acquire as things that are valuable, mainly because we deem them as things that we ourselves are not able to acquire. This is how things of low value but are difficult to attain get slipped into the list. Somewhere along the lines of society we decided that anything that was hard to get MUST be valuable and I think that has misdirected us as a community and species into harmful valuation of things we desire. I was a victim of this mentality early on as I came from a relatively toxic family culture where there was pressure to look successful and be successful without truly defining the term"successful". I stepped out of this mentality when I lost my father. This was something that was irreplaceable. Now the only possession I have of him is in my memories. These things mean nothing to anyone else, but to me it is the most expensive car or the biggest house.
Week 7:
McCloud talking about time and closure in comics is basically film editing on paper. Coming from a video background, I know that what you do not show is just as important as what you do. You have to trust the audience to fill in the gaps.
As for "Iterate" and failure... I think we are too scared of looking stupid. Like I said before, people do not create because they are scared they won't be "good" immediately. But failure is just part of the narrative. If I am not failing, I am probably making something safe and boring. You gotta be willing to make the ugly version to find the good one.
Week 8:
I struggle sometimes with the academic way of defining "Research." Frayling and Zimmerman break it down, but for me, research has always been physical. It is "research through doing." I do not want to read about the theory of a sound wave; I want to mess with the synth until it breaks and see what happens.
That said, the "Field" aspect is crucial. You cannot design in a vacuum (the "Lab") and expect it to work in the real world. You have to get out there. It goes back to trusting your intuition but verifying it with reality. If the vibe is off in the real world, the research does not matter.
Week 9
Growing up in Hong Kong I spent a lot of time around an Angolan refugee family on my basketball team as well as an Indian family who were born and raised there. Their understanding of the world is so unique as it comes specifically from a foreigner of darker complexion that grew up in the rawness and insensitivity of Chinese culture. To the point where it has almost been a cause of perplexity and confusion for those who meet them later in life as they made their way into western communities. This has caused me to realize that we can never really go about research with categories because it seems as though we miss so much of the nuances that comes with human experience. Perhaps we need to categorize the outcomes of the product rather than the customers themselves since there is really no way to gauge the degree in which an individual falls into one specific category.
Week 10:
Houde & Hill ask "What do prototypes prototype?" To me, this connects back to the power of the messy sketch. A prototype should not just be a pretty mockup; it needs to test the narrative. Since I view interactions as stories, the prototype is the storyboard.
Saffer’s points on interaction design remind me that we are designing behaviors, not just screens. It is easy to get caught up in the aesthetics (the "look and feel"), but if the "role" of the object does not make sense in the user's life, it is just more noise. I want to make things that feel like they have always been there, not something you have to force yourself to use.
Week 11:
I have a hard time with Personas. People are too complex to be boiled down to a stock photo and a few bullet points. "The Busy Mom" or "The Gen Z Creative" feels reductive.
When we synthesize research, we have to be careful not to scrub away the nuance just to make it fit a category. Real humans contradict themselves. They like high fashion and cheap street food. If we design for a "Persona," we end up designing for a caricature. I would rather design for a specific, messy feeling than a fake, clean user profile.