Learning Portfolio Reflection

My name is Jing Dong. I am a freshman at Parsons School of Design. My major is Design and Technology. I developed my interest in art when I was very young and I started my exploration in technology since 7th grade.  I was born and raised in Shanghai, China. I moved to New York at the beginning of my freshman year and I enjoyed the city life here. Living independently in New York gives me the chance to think and reflect more deeply and the city brings me a lot of inspirations. My favorite game is the Sims and my favorite movie is Inception. I like collecting stationaries. I have a Marino ball called Max.

Integrated studio and seminar are definitely the most time-consuming courses. I chose the theme “shift” in the first semester (2018 fall) and “systems and strategies” in the second semester (2019 spring). The studio class in the first semester lasted for nearly six hours. During these six hours, we were supposed to sketch our idea, present it in verbal forms, work on our projects, develop different ways to present the final outcome and experiment with different materials. It really helps me to cultivate my practical ability and problem-solving ability. Whereas the second semester focuses more on how to develop a system and how to understand the relationship between different systems. Studio 2 involves the application of strategy, so we did a lot of researches and interviews. I remember when we started the toolkit project, we went to the MOMA of the “Good Design” exhibition to find the similarity between the good designs and our designs and see what we can incorporate into our idea. After we finish making the toolkit, we are asked to get some feedback from the interviewees. This is really helpful for designers because we can rethink our designs from the perspective of a potential customer. The class is conceptual and ideological, which is very different from what I learned from the first semester. Since in the second semester, we have less time to do the handcraft works in class so we have to figure out how to deal with problems after class. Fortunately, I have learned a lot of craftsmanship skills in the first semester such as sewing and painting so I was not that frustrated while working on my projects.

As I mentioned, I picked the theme “shift” for studio one, and the concept of “shift” went throughout my first year. “Space and materiality” and “time” are the other mandatory courses I took. In these two classes, the understanding of “shift” is incorporated into my understanding of time and space. At first, I felt reading the reading materials assigned by my teachers was very torturing because the selected writers usually express their ideas in an abstract way, and they are writing about the shift of time and space in a very academic way, which I was not very familiar with. Later I found reading these materials help me to build an interconnection between these three themes better because I started to have a more systematic overview of the time and space. It is also beneficial for me to think about how things shift and how to represent this kind of shift while editing videos and doing handcrafts because representing the change in time and space is an interesting topic for me to develop.

The first highlight in my first year is the animal motion project in Space and Materiality. For me, it is hard to imagine how to use simple materials to mimic the motion. The most difficult part is, the movement of animals usually involves many different parts of the body but we are only supposed to have one switch. I chose to mimic the motion of an owl, while the owl wave its wings, the tail also moves upwards and downwards. So I have to figure out how to connect these motions together. I came up with the idea of using gears so that when one of the gears revolves, the other gears are going to revolve with it and thus making different part of the body move. I also watched some videos online and found some examples of how other people use wood to mimic the bird’s motion. I found a really helpful model on my teacher’s website that uses gears and I decided to use it. We are required to find a video that shows the animal motion, split it into five parts, and trace the motion of the animal to have a better comprehension of the motion. Since I didn’t go to the laser cutter orientation, I made four gears by hands and that is a lot of work. I have to sand it down until it totally fits each other. The next problem I met is that the motion of the wings did not go very smooth. Some of the wing bones stuck with each other while I rotate the gears. It cost me a lot of time to figure out what’s the problem. Eventually, I found that the length of the wing bones should be really precise. I only add 3 millimeters to two of these wing bones and it gives much more space for the movement. The motion became really smooth.

The other highlight is the final project for “time”. Before this class, I knew nothing about coding and I was very afraid of this project initially because I thought coding was related to math and my math is not that good. We are asked to select a site and think about the difference between our mediate experience and immediate experience of this place. We are going to intervene the viewers’ immediate experience by our own immediate experience. I drew the map of the site I selected and planned the shortest and more logical route for my audience. I also sketched the wireframe to show that I am going to put on each page of my site. I chose to use some videos and verbal guides, and I put a few simple buttons on my website so that the instruction is clear for everyone. I wish the guidance can be more professional, like the voice guidance that we can borrow at the museums, so I generate the robotic women voice with software and insert it into my video to help explain what is happening on each part of the site. And I am trying to guide my audience to do a circular tour on the site so I was linked all the videos together with the codes. Coding it really complicated, we have to code the font, size, color, transparency, alignment, location, and everything and it was very time-consuming. Sometimes I can’t find anything wrong in my codes but the changes just did not apply to my website or the effect was not as good as I imagined. I spent a lot of time on debugging my codes and it nearly drives me crazy.

 

I found I have a strong interest in fabricating and I cannot feel the flow of time while working with wood and wire. I enjoyed the sound of drills, saws, and sanders, and I enjoyed interacting with these tools and materials. They make me forgot all my stresses and negative emotions. I will try to explore more materials and mechanisms in the future study, maybe incorporate some coding skills into my fabrication. If I have the chance, I will add some sound effects and project the movement of the owl with various patterns in my further study in the field of design and technology. I would like to develop a stronger skill of coding and I want to apply different coding languages in different fields, not only using “html” and “css” in websites.