Week-5
Attempt to regain focus
Dissertation
Currently I have been more focused on the dissertation. I am starting to feel that the concept of ‘symbolism’ is a bit irrelevant to the whole project when my project should primarily revolve around interactivity, physical computing, papercraft and all concepts combined into an interactive storybook. I decided to eliminate the concept of symbolism from my project, after which I realised it was most of my research. And my literature review currently doesn’t provide a deeper understanding of ‘interactivity’ which is also one of the concepts of this project.
Thoughts
There is not much progress happening on the studio work, because I kept revisiting the literature review and I started to feel a bit disconnected from my project. I was struggling to progress further and I spent a lot of my time feeling blank. I think maybe because I ambitioned too high, I was struggling to take a step back and start simple first. I wanted to have a prototype and user-testing done by this week, however things didn't go as I had planned. It seems like I was experiencing a creative-block. However, in sight of the deadlines, I tried to regain my focus and do the next thing that comes to mind and keep going there onwards.
Image and Materiality making
This week I also had a workshop led by Andri and Vincente for more perspective and guidance on the visual style. So far I was considering digital printing but last week Andreas had advised me to see if there is any way I could block print. Andri and Vincente mentioned that I could use lino-print for block-printing, that it doesn't necessarily have to be a wooden block that is traditionally used in block-printing. They showed me a couple of examples of lino printing as well and also suggested that I could also begin with using a blue-foam and try to see if I can find techniques that are faster. But I was quite intrigued with the idea of lino-printing so I decided to experiment with it next. So I simply started to experiment with the most repetitive visual in my storybook, that is - the trees. When I began carving, I sort of carved a bit too deep that it destroyed the lino. I realised that this is quite time consuming and I may have to give extra time to this but also realising that my storybook has a lot of repetitive visuals I decided to go ahead with lino-printing. (fig)
