Ran Cai
PUFY IS2: Visual Culture
Instructor Alvarez
5/16/17
Bridge #5 Cross-Course Reflection
My name is Ran Cai, I’m 18 years old. I’m a international student that currently studying in Parsons the new school of design, and my major is Interior Design. I’m passion about fashion and makeup, and of course, food. I went to high school in California, people always ask me why do I chose to came to the east coast for college, well, I love people and I love the city life, I guess that’s what brought me to New York.
The Beach Chair
During my first year of study in Parsons, I learned quite a lot things, first is photoshop, illustrator and other adobe softwares. I can use them almost in all my classes, they are really helpful tools. Such as for drawing, after I finished my drawing, I can scan it into the illustrator and continue working on it through illustrator. Also the skills I learned from making center, which is wood cutting, shaping and how to nail them together. I can use the skills I learned in classes such as studio, space and 3d modeling. Oh, speaking of 3d modeling, I learned many paper folding and building shapes skills. Also I learned how to 3D print, and this made my final project for 3d modeling really exciting. There are many connections between my academic study and studio study making, the project I make are always combining the idea from both of them. In seminar I write about my project, in studio I make my project.
I‘ve done many projects this year, one of the highlight was the chair I made for space class. So we were all assigned to a group and we had to chose a theme, my group chose beach culture. Speaking of beach, we immediately thought of white, panel chairs, that’s the part we decided to have the similarity, other than that we can add our own idea. I started with some sketch, one of the requirement was it had to be easy to carry. One of my group mate hint me about the crab cages and I immediately came up with something. My chair is going to be look like a small rectangle shape panel box, and when I stand it up it’s a basket, when I lie it down it’s a chair. I’m going to make a gate that can open and close, when i go to the beach I can put everything I want to bring in there.
After I figured out what I wanted to do I went to get woods from the shop that located at the parsons building next to blick store, which is behind the university center. (I have no idea what the name of the building is) I had to order it online first, the pick it up. The woods that we were required to get was skinny, but really long, long than me. I bought two, and they were really heavy, I had to carry them all the way from the shop back to making center, that was a mess. After I drop off my woods, I again went out to get the nails and other supplies such as the rob that I’m going to use to carry the chair. I went back to making center, and started cutting, I cutted the woods to smaller and shorter panels.
I need six sides in order to made the chair, 4 sides which are the top, bottom and front back, has the same height and width, two sides with a shorter height and width. It has about six panels per one side. I went back to the shop to get more nails. To nail two pieces of woods together, you must drill a hole first, and you need to make sure the positions of the wood won’t change. I drilled all the woods together, and then I painted the chair all white.
After all my group members finished their project we went to a park that is in Williamsburg to shoot our final. The park got some sands and it’s next to the river, that’s the closest beach like place we could find in New York. This is the project I spent most of my time in making center. I learned many useful skills that I can continue use in my future projects.
The Studio Final
The second project I’m going to talk about is my studio final for this semester. I’m going to be honest, my final wasn’t that hard to do. (messing up my room, yes) But it did took me a long process to get to this point. And I’ve learned the most through out this project. So here is my story. I’m going to start with my first idea. At the beginning, my domains were fashion, color and makeup.
Here is one of my sketche.
These three things came up to my mind first when I hear the topic.I love fashion and makeup, and they won’t exist without colors.I was thinking about making something 3d or actually paint myself.This went into a failure because it was really hard to write a 7 pages research paper in seminar, so I give up. Then I came up with the idea of fashion, emotion and makeup.
Here is a prototype of mine, thats where my compare and contrast idea came from.At this point I want to focus on how fashion and makeup can change emotions.But still, I couldn’t find enough informations to write the research paper, so I want to change my domains again.What inspired my to my final domains are two posts that I posted on Instagram.
The first picture is a selfie of mine, the second one is a self-portrait i designed of myself. And the selfie gets way too much likes than the art I make. Of course people will want to get more likes. So they post more and more selfies even some inappropriate pictures.
It made me think a lot, is it right? That’s how I came up with social media, communication and personality as my final domains.
And its easy to fins informations to write research paper. So I continued with my previous idea, the compare and contrast.
I wanted to show people with different personality has different life style. And thats how I get here.
I had a lot of fun making this project, messing my room was actually a lot harder than clean up.
And I also learned a lot during my research, because this does not just happen with other people it also happens to me.
Over all I had a great year, I’ve learned many useful things, in academic and also in how to be a real person.
