You can choose anything from Project 1: Change, Project 2: Public Poetics, or Project 3: Communication, or a combination of, if some of the ideas overlap. Was there any idea or making process that stood out to you? Did a theme emerge in your work so far? Is there a topic that you would like to further research or spend more time with?

Please write, in your own words, to accompany your images, to tell the story of a project that stood out to you, along with inspiration, sketches, questions that came up, and final results. Submit a link to your post here on Canvas. 

I chose the third project Communication. This was my very first collaborative project, and the making process stood out the most to me because of having to collaborate and communicate with another student who I’m not familiar with. In this project I was able to challenge myself to step out of my comfort zone and merging my culture with another student, I learned how to write Hindi, learned how a new foreign language works, learned about its system, and learned about the similarities and differences between my language/culture compared to my partner’s.

The intention of this piece was to act as a personal dairy. Everyday me and my partner wrote down our deepest doubts, insecurity, and random feelings throughout the day in our own language, which is the most intimate language to us. I then translated it into Hindi and English to see how similar our language look like side to side and hopefully to understand and being able to ‘read’ our partner better.

The inspiration of this project was to make a combined language of Thai and Hindi. During discussion, we realized how similar it is between Thai and Hindi, we realized the apparent similarities and the spelling similarities. We made the ‘alphabets’ based on English’s alphabets. We matched the most similar sounding alphabet from our language to English, and finally we look for similarities between Hindi and Thai to create Thandi.

The Challenges: One of the biggest challenge was to communicate with my partner, its complicated when it comes to finding a time where we can sit down and talk about this project in person due to our polar opposite class schedules. We communicate through texting and calls to make this work. The second challenge was keeping the booklet together. At first I tied knots through the holes on the edge of the booklet to secure the paper, however, the knots became loose and eventually fell apart. My solution to this problem was to use book binding tape to join the paper together.

This is a time laps of me writing Thai characters that sound similar to English alphabets. (Made this in Procreate)