Mid-semester review
Hi all,
I have done a pitiful job updating this blog semester, which is saying a lot since I wasn’t the best at updating it last semester either. I can honestly say it’s not from negligence. It has been an extremely busy semester where there has been absolutely no time for non-essential activity (this includes sleeping). I have not even been procrastinating, which tells you the severity of situation. :). While difficult, it’s been nice to be so productive and I wouldn’t want to give up my two electives anyway (processing & calligraphy). I decided to stay in town for Spring Break, and have been absolutely adoring it. I don’t know that I’ve been so happy since school started. I accomplish one-two professional/school tasks a day, look for housing for the my summer internship, exercise, and spend the rest of the day reading. It’s like mundane heaven.
But anyway, on to my class updates. Here we go! (You can see descriptions of the classes on my courses page).
Seminar II:
This class has been a really wonderful. We’ve been reading things that have enhanced my rhetoric background from undergrad, which I really appreciate. Some new stuff, some old stuff, but regardless I’ve been able to dive deeper into the subject matter and feel like I can understand it better. We’ve talked about agency, visual rhetoric, the need for communication design, rhetorical situations, and genre studies…to name a few. Going forward, we’ll be talking about how social sciences can inform design work–needless to say I’m over-the-moon excited for that!
Studio II & Research Methods:
As mentioned previously, we’re working on a semester long group project with regular deliverables. You can see our group’s page at thecmujoneses.tumblr.com or my progress blog at jacklynnthinks.tumblr.com (I know, I know, another blog! But they said it had to be a singly devoted blog). I have been pretty excited about the project and have worked surprisingly well with the team. The second-years set it up as a dreaded project, but I think we’re pretty good at supporting each other. There have been some frustrations, of course, and going forth, I will try to be more vocal about my things I question.
To be brief, we’re looking at a world of a billion sensors targeting in the home, specifically as way to facilitate communication and better relations among family members. We’ve done a territory map (where we narrowed our scope), exploratory research, and just finished our generative research. It’s been really interesting learning about new research methods and implementing them, and feeling affirmed or challenged by the interviewees.
Activity during research methods. Everyone in my group was jaded, but I thought it was fun and drew this little picture.
Processing:
This class. Oh man this class. It’s an introduction to programming and is supposed to be an easy language to learn, but it’s been a uphill climb for me. My brain doesn’t work so systematically or mathematically. I’m good at literally coding and can do so with precision, but actually structuring and working out the logic around it is difficult. However, I’ve been keeping up, have completely all the assignments well, and can feel real progress! The break through moment came when I took the first exam, finished it ahead of time, and was pretty sure I did everything correctly (I did!). I couldn’t believe it.
Our last project was also pretty fun, we had to create a game:
Calligraphy:
Calligraphy has been a real treat. The slow pace of the class is actually so completely disruptive to what all my other classes are like that it’s a little disorienting. We have class once a week for three hours and it’s been so wonderful to learn from Myrna and work with my hands. Learning capitals has been quite hard though.
It’s not even supposed to be “thing” it’s supposed to be “turn”