Design Thinking is a more digitized frame of reference for artistic expression, with an emphasis on cognitive concepts of perception and memory. It intersects with Digital Arts and Humanities in its aim of creating more nuanced, user-friendly and accessible data visualizations and art. The following projects are a representation of Design Thinking where it most prominently showed up in my learning experiences at Carleton.
UX Research for Spark & Stitch Institute
Skills Learned: UX Research & Design, Figma, Miro
Goal: Redesign the website for the Spark & Stitch Institute to better communicate its goals & improve navigability and user retention on the website.
Process: We met with our community partner, Erin Walsh, co-founder of the Spark & Stitch Institute, to identify the pain points of user interaction with her website. I learned how to conduct contextual inquiries, create Work Action Affinity Diagrams, User Stories and Work Roles and create prototypes in the form of Website Wireframes on Figma. The end result was presenting the wireframes and a written report to our community partner that addressed how our designs improves user navigation through the website and alleviated pain points.
Visual Representations of Political Thought & Actions
Skills Learned: Installation Art, Videographing the Process
Goal: Use a political image as a springboard to create a bigger art piece that served as a contribution to the class installation. Create a digital archive of the art-making process of visualizing political thought.
Process: Our image was of a fire from the Rodney King Riots in 1992. My idea was to utilize the powerful image of protest fires to create a collage of a fire for the installation. My group decided to print out images of fire caused and created during protests from various different geographical and temporal contexts. This included but was not limited to more pictures from 1992, the protests happening in Paris this year (2023), pictures of protests for George Floyd, etc. These pictures were printed out on paper, the fires were torn out by hand and then wheat-pasted onto the wall of our installation.
The archival process involved taking several timelapses and overlaying them to create a complete video of our artistic process from start to finish. We also took a video of us walking through the installation and talking through/explaining our vision.
Printmaking
Skills learned: Intaglio Printmaking, Photoshop
Goal: Integrating interdisciplinary artistic styles and knowledge to create a piece that fused my learnings of aboriginal art in Australia and folk art from India to create a fantastical landscape of my hometown, Mumbai.
Process: I used the Intaglio process of etching a copper plate, repeatedley inked the plate and used the chine collé technique while printing onto paper to create an edition of 3 prints. The reproducibility of artwork captured by printmaking embodies a more manual method and understanding of digital printing. The art form also holds the promise of more digitized processes like digital printmaking which involves printing out layers from Photoshop artwork layer by layer using a digital printmaker, just like one would manually print using different copper plates to build up a print.
Wood Sculpture
Skills learned: Visuospatial Reasoning, Woodworking, Gestalt Principles, Color Theory
Goal: To communicate the action of 'compartmentalizing', creating a puzzle that can be solved in multiple ways to represent multiple ways of organizing thoughts, patterns, actions.
Process: I made a ‘Compartmentalizing’ Puzzle that used several design principles like color theory and Gestalt pattern recognition to eventually become a compelling wooden block puzzle that can be solved in two ways – by color and by pattern. The cumulative process took about 35 hours, the use of a table saw, wood glue and paint.
This relates to the digital arts as making a sculpture makes use of visuospatial reasoning and a 3D construction of ideas like in digital methods like 3D modeling.
Production Design
Skills Learned: Principles of Design, Digital Research, Costume Design Research, Lighting Design, Google Slides & Forms, Excel
Goal: Design the costumes, lighting and set for the play Anon(ymous) by Naomi Iizuka. Moreover, as a Costume Shop Assistant, design, tailor and repair costumes for all theatre and dance productions at Carleton.
Process: Collect and create a collage of images representing the various themes I wanted to highlight in my prodcution design, create a coherent dark and light color scheme for the production to base the design of the costumes, lights and set. Create mock up designs of the costumes and present the work along with its explanations to class.
For my costume shop assistant position, I helped digitize the costume rental process to create a more robust record of all the items that were checked out of costume storage and by whom. Through this role, I was also exposed to bigger production design projects happening on campus that involved the use of digital manipulations of light and sound.