Project Statement

My name is Ankita Shrivastav and I plan to pursue product design as my major. I am interested in constructing and coming up with creative methods to deal with a project to make sure that my submission is interesting and unique but also something which makes me learn new skills so I can improve my skillset to become a better artist.

For my studio and seminar class, in bridge project 1 we were asked to present a true and a fake story with physical proof. So, I decided to write about a true story where I had met with an accident and had a scar on my back and for proof I presented a photo. For the fake story, I wrote about having a twin sister and present a photo of me, my elder sister and mother. I chose these stories since both were easily believable but also confusing at the same time. To come up with a story was the most interesting part because we could write about anything but I was trying to connect with people emotionally so it could confuse people easily to choose the true story. This project made me learn about human psychology and how people unconsciously relate to people emotionally.

For bridge project 2, we were asked to interview an assigned person from our class and get to know them and their beliefs, personality, art interests, hobbies and interesting things about their life further we were asked to make something that would enhance their belief system. After interviewing my partner Ciera multiple times, I understood that she believed in healing gem stones among other beliefs. To understand her belief system, we came up with basic questions that we asked each other. The most interesting part of this project was me trying to come up with a way to make gem stones in an interesting way and then I came up with making gem stones using hot glue gun which I painted them in the same color and gave them that texture. The stones I included were the ones she regularly used which included her birth stone and some other stones to bring out positivity, good luck etc.

For our bridge project 3 we were supposed to come up with a fake person and prepare a background/Wikipedia page for that person which could be easily believed by the society. My group members included Luis, Viki and EB and since all of us are somehow interested in rock music we planned to come up with an upcoming rapper but as we started processing this idea it became difficult to source articles to this fake person and create music so we had a discussion and came up with this person to have a feminist personality because yes, people do claim they are feminists but superficially and we wanted him to have opposite personality i.e. someone who is an upcoming rapper but also a feminist and thus we projected this guy to be a person who was grown up in a loving family and respected women of his family and therefore as he grew up, he protests for respect of women and gender equality in terms of wage gap, respect and other matters. The most interesting thing about this project was to build the personality of this person as it included some qualities of all four of us and this project was important as it made me understand how to source articles to make a page look legit on Wikipedia.Unfortunately, our page could not be live because when we tried to upload it said we did not have enough sources but overall it was a great experience.

For our bridge 4, we were asked to come up with a manifesto for world issues that bother us personally. For me the main three are Mental health, Gender inequality and Violence of any kind. Based on interests of everyone we were placed in groups having common interests. I was placed in a group with Clio, Charlie and Zeina and our group dealt with police brutality. To begin with our research, we started looking for groups and organisations that were against police brutality and what their main objectives were. Further, we looked into news and videos that focused on police brutality mainly racial police brutality and we were shocked since all of us easily found 15 different videos each which then was a total of 60 videos and yet that doesn’t cover every video and that upsets me. Through these resources we were mainly trying to answer and create awareness among a group of people so that people who don’t know about this situation or don’t acknowledge this as an issue can understand and be aware about how deep the problem has become. We presented our manifesto in the form of a presentation followed by self– made quotes and made stickers for everyone present in class. This project was important for me because I learnt Photoshop a bit more and created the logo for our group.

In conclusion, I would like to state that most of my project submissions for this class included 3D work being it the gem stones and its box or stickers for bridge 4. Through studio and seminar classes this semester I have learned to think of creative ways to project my work, learnt to do teamwork and co-operate even when opinions don’t match, do in-detail research and critique each other’s work, learn and appreciate others who project their work in different media and be ready to take risks and experiment with different medias out of my comfort zone.