A sacred space set in Northern Norway on a lake to watch the northern lights. Self-sustainable with water collection, energy and toilet waste. A getaway to unplug in the middle of the forest.

Technical Drawings showing the exterior front, back and side, and interior plans from front, back and side perspective:

Process:

First idea-to-paper sketch of my sacred space house

Primary steps was to get all the shapes cut out from regular white foam board

This is the 3 step process of the “stone look” on the walls of my house, 1) make glue globs for texture 2) brush and paint splatter three different shades of grey/black/white to create pattern 3) paint in between the bumps a light grey for depth.

Images of the Final Model:

Detail shot of the algae and water

Detail shot of the fireplace inside

Roof: shot of the solar panels that provide the energy + rain gutters that collect and store water

Model Presentation Board:

Image of my thinking process for project idea:

In seminar we were to vomit out ideas that came to mind for three minutes about possible topic ideas for our projects. The one’s I highlighted are the three that I chose for this project. This was a clever and very helpful method, that shows you how I got to that topic, and how my mind works out on paper. As I re-read the paper I see I come back to some ideas and how I started to think more deeper within the topic. It is hard to keep track of all the good ideas you have or how you branched off of one idea to another, this method definitely solidifies your thought process and allows you to go back to square 1 or 7.

Three project proposals from seminar:

System/Project Name:

Artificial Intelligence movement, self-driving cars the first step to job takeover

Summary:

The question for the next century is how far will we come to successfully creating an Artificial Intelligence system? There are elements of self-working machines like cars that are already undergo to being released. Google has self-driving cars that work but are not released for the market and are still being tested. The question is, if self-driving cars will one day be open to the public, will this be the start of technology’s massive takeover on people’s jobs? Basically self-driving cars instantly would improve truck delivery due to no human necessities like sleep, food and errors. By eliminating all truck drivers and taxi drivers, that is millions of people left unemployed. If an artificial intelligence system were to be successfully created, all jobs are at risk. Is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? Why pursue it? How can we not try?

Argument:

Artificial Intelligence is a unique but relevant topic to start researching because technology is exponentially advancing and this impacts everyone, even the highly praised jobs like lawyers and doctors.

If I were to investigate this topic, I would research by trying to find the most recent growth and the stage we are at in AI, what companies are trying to produce self-driving cars, and how they do it. The big question is, who will be or will there be someone to say to what limit we will use the AI if we successfully create it?

System/Project Name:

Public Surveillance System

Summary:

In New York City there is a small public surveillance system on the streets but there are people who want to renovate, expand and enlarge the system throughout the whole city and other states. A public surveillance system is cameras set up on the streets, monitoring people’s actions. A public surveillance system does not have any evidence that it lowers crimes, instead it increases amount of possible danger like footage selling, stalking and organized crimes. If everything was being watched every day, it would create an eerie feeling for the people. Who would be in charge of watching this personal footage? A policeman? A government official? Are any of them trustworthy? Wouldn’t cameras everywhere recording everything you do go against one’s freedom?

Argument:

From telling my peers if they knew about what all the cons to a public surveillance system are, I was shocked to realize that lots of people are first think it’s a good idea. I would like to investigate this idea further to see how big of a possibility it is that it will be implemented or not. I would start by seeing where and how big the PSS are in the city, who controls them, and conduct research on how many people know about this matter.

System/Project Name: Education System

Summary:

How often do the Universities improve and renew they education system? I decided to attend Parsons School of Design because it was one of the only colleges that seem to keep changing its views and curriculum, that fits the teaching ways and topic priorities that are relevant today. Many universities still have the core majors like medicine, law and psychology, but now a day it isn’t enough to do one, why not combine some topics? Why do students graduate core classes in high school to attend university for more core classes for 3 more years? University should allow the students to fully take advantage of the education if they want to, why pay so much money to attend a school if all the classes they are interested in are only for “seniors”. What if the freshman has more knowledge and drive than that senior?

Argument:

The education system should be changed frequently because systems, people, the world changes, how can we have the same topics/ majors and systems that applied 40 years ago? I would start by researching how universities implement change, how often they do it, and the concept of core classes in college if a student already know what they want to study.

Step four:

After the exercise in class, on the 16th, and after a discussion with Shana about my proposals, I realized which topic I am most interested in. As we had to create sketches upon our 3 proposals we thought of in seminar class, and I realized very early on which topic I was able to support with the most creations. My first project proposal about Artificial Intelligence is an area of interest that I would like to focus on and maybe just hone on the self-driving cars concept.

The reason why I would focus on self-driving cars is because it is the first and most advanced area in the A.I. world, and other sectors are very hypothetical and theoretical at this point (too early to know enough). Self-driving cars raise a lot of questions and debate already: will it be safer? will it eliminate all car jobs industries? will it be cheaper? will it take away human freedom? How I got here was through several process between seminar and studio.

The brainstorming in seminar definitely helped because it got me to the more concrete idea of self-driving cars, and now in studio I am thinking which area in the self-driving cars I would like to create a project on. The image below shows the two topics I started sketching on, A.I. and Public Surveillance System. This brief investigation revealed my interest as well as how my brain was able to expand to so many topics. I started from the middle, A.I. in general, and linked it to the few jobs or components it could takeover, and from there I realized that the car industry and A.I. has even more sub-topics because it is the furtherest path to success. Which is how I chose self-driving cars.

The image is separated into two, the first half is A.I. and how I branched it out to all the jobs (i could think of at the moment) it could take over, like a mind map with categories and sub categories. The second half is Public Surveillance System and how one person watches each angle of you where every you go, creating an eerie feeling if the system were to be implemented. After sketching just these two, I realized that I only had one image to draw for PSS and for the A.I. I kept going back and adding more and branching off to more questions and jobs. Clearly signifying me that I am more passionate about A.I. to chose as a long term project.

Apple Store west 14th st

notes:

• Lots of glass – futuristic, exciting, new

• Simplistic

• Technology advancements

• Advertisements

• White/clean

• Employees – lots of them, same blue uniform

• Glass grad stairs

• Wooden tables to display the hardware/software – looks like podium, effective way because it looks so majestic

• Big ad on top – lures customers, eye-catching

• All products were linked to chargers = working/functioning full battery all the time – gives a sense of no end of time

• How much do Apple employees get paid?

• It seems like such a high demand job since its “Apple”, how hard is it to work for Apple?

• How much does this store in particular make in a day? *Roughly on average*

• Apple inspiring to me because: can sell few amounts of products for a lot of money so their profit margin is high

• How hard is it to work for Apple’s designing team?

• How/where does Apple get their inspiration?

• How many design teams are involved in software? and in hardware?

• Will Apple be supporting and maybe creating public surveillance systems for the city?

• How private is the cloud?

• What are the chances of being hacked now a days? *my theory is very high

• Will Apple be one of the firsts to make big advancements on AI?

• How close are self driving cars to becoming legal on the streets?

• Apple is one of the leading technology companies, and was first to create their own software and hardware – total control of their products – important when making innovations

System Mapping:

I chose to start my research by visiting the Apple store on west 14th street in New York City because I know I want to direct my research question towards technology. Apple has always been an inspiration to me as a business woman and as a designer/computer scientist. Not only is Apple on of the leading technology companies in the world, it has innovational products that changed the way humans live and interact. Apple was the first computer company that was in charge of creating it’s own software and hardware, which enabled them to be flexible to changes and able to adapt the way the whole thing looked and worked by their own standards. It was the first company that embraced the idea of user-friendly. Meaning, not only did they want the product to work, they wanted people to want to use it. They wanted it to feel, touch, look good to the user and excite them to learn how to use it. So I started with visiting the Apple store, one of many, to get a feel of how they advertise, employ, display, sell their products. I used the second research process we learned in class to map my system of the Apple store, by noting down everything I saw or thought of when I think of: Apple Store. Then I chained them all with arrows to see if I knew who talks to who, who is involved with who, and if I can think of all the elements that went in and are in the Apple Store and products.

My major is design and technology, which makes me a huge fan of this idea of combining the computer science “software” side to the design “hardware” side. I have many questions and possible research questions that can steer off from this topic because it is a broad subject. I am very intrigued with Artificial Intelligence, AI. Many companies and teams are investigating this idea of a computing software that could potentially think and process like a human. It is far from being successfully completed but there are elements of AI in many products that are on the way of being created, like self-driving cars. Self driving cars might not be the best idea, in terms of taking a person’s free will to drive on their own, but could be a huge advancement on taking over truck drivers because it would be an efficient way to ship products. Then again, that causes thousands of people’s jobs to be taken away, so there is a huge debate on advancing the AI concept to products that can take over many people’s jobs.

Another topic I can branch off to is public surveillance and privacy. Apple products are huge on privacy yet they also have a high amount of product theft. Now a days, there are countless hackers worldwide only getting better and better at cracking people’s accounts. While the Apple users are less and less aware of how to keep your data private, which means that if a person has not been hacked chances are they could soon. Apple’s entering code is very secure, as they keep prolonging the code digits to make it harder to guess the code, also wipes it clean if too many wrong attempt, find my iPhone app for stolen phones etc. Public surveillance systems are being implemented in cities which also interferes with people’s privacy. How can we keep our lives private when the computer asks if we want it to save our password for our bank account? How can we not get our identities stolen when all our photos and credit card information is on the cloud?

When creating the system mapping of the Apple store, couple questions arose. How many different designer teams are needed for such innovations? Who is in charge of privacy advancements? How can we be sure our privacy is in tact? Will Apple be a part of creating public surveillance systems? Does Apple have a team working on AI software? Will AI software take over everyone’s jobs even the artists? To concise my research question I will have to pick a branch and pick more specific idea, because these are all very large questions. My next steps could be to make a system mapping for the individual questions them selves and see if one has enough information to base my research on. That is one issue with this topic, a lot of my ideas are futuristic which means that some ideas like AI might not have enough data to support or deny my theory.

1. Your images of your process and notes / ideas from the visual analysis exercises

• Three different sites

• Visuals

• Categorized into three parts: still life art, text, moving video elements

2. Your images of your process and notes / ideas from the design-led systems mapping exercise

• Mall system

• Started with sticky notes of all parts that go into creating and running a Mall

• Used animals to symbolize the different parties

• Mapped out the system of communication within the parties

• At the bottom are questions raised after the research process

3. A new reflection (one to two paragraphs) on these experiences and what they revealed

The two experiences of research processes were very different. The first experience we brought in visuals, each from a different location, and had to find common similarities with our group members, and organize them in such categories. While the second process was a collaborative idea, ours was the mall, and we as a group had to investigate the systems that go into creating and running the mall. The visuals process revealed that there are similarities in types of media or art in different locations, although I did not find this process to informative. The first process was interesting to see the different art displayed in various, and stated the obvious visual differences of similarities, but did not help me investigate any aspects of these areas. The second research method on the other hand, was very informative and raised a lot of questions. It was a great way to visually comprehend how a system in a mall could work, after being able to pin point and move around elements we could think of. The combination of sticky notes and animal figures allowed us to vomit our thoughts out but then concise them into a chain of order. This process made our group think very in depth of all the details and complicated aspects that need to be done, to successfully run a mall. This process also raised a lot of questions we were left with unanswered, because when we created all the chains and links between the groups of working people, we realized we had some holes that we did not know what job would fit there. For example a question like, does the people who work for the stores talk to the owners of that company or the people in charge of the mall if things need to change? Do you design the interior and exterior separately or together?