Hi!
I am Ranada Duffy, and I am majoring in Interior Design at Parsons School of Design in New York City.
The themes and working methods that emerged in several courses involved sustainability and awareness. The working methods included interviews, a lot of physical hands-on work and Adobe software.
I learned a lot of skills with Adobe Software which was convenient because it was very useful in many of my other courses.
What I had noticed between my academic studies and studio making was mainly how difficult it was to develop my ideas into physical work and projects.
I enjoyed creating the projects that required woodwork and a lot of physical hands-on activity because I feel more creative doing it that way and I have more experience with woodwork in my past.
One project I chose to highlight was in my drawing and imaging class where we had to find a Macro/Micro photo that resembled each other and we examined them and out of the two photos, we had to recreate one in our own way.
Planning: In order to complete this project, I had to focus on one specific picture that I chose. I looked at the details, colors, and sizes.
Thinking: I chose a color I wanted to work with and chose a medium that I preferred and thought would look best with the original photo that I decided to go with.
Outcome: My micro photo is a picture of skin cells under a microscope.
My Macro photo is a photo of rivers in Iceland that had similar lines to the skin cells photo.
The piece that I recreated was made with green watercolor on watercolor paper and I chose the color green because it is a very special color for me.
Another project I would choose to highlight is a memory quilt that I created for my first-semester studio class. In this project, we had to choose six specific memories that we wanted to talk about and show by creating on a medium of our choice.
Planning: For this assignment, I wanted to work with canvas and figure out a way to connect the six pieces without it looking tacky.
Thinking: The majority of the students in my class decided to go with good and happy memories for the most part but I wanted to include memories that weren’t the happiest but have always stuck with me.
Outcome: I ended up choosing three good memories and three bad memories to work with. The good memories are the time I got my first cat, the time that I went to Coachella Music Festival and my first succulent plant which I have become obsessed with ever since. The bad memories are when I witnessed my best friend almost cut her finger off in New Jersey over summer break, a car crash I had witnessed with a few of my friends and unfortunately the woman driving didn’t survive, and finally, the time I had surgery in both of my feet leaving me with permanent screws throughout my feet.
I chose to highlight these specific pieces because I enjoyed doing these the most and it was the one time, an assignment didn’t have specific requirements and I could kind of do what I wanted with the outcome.
I still want to continue with Interior Design as my major even though my first year was based on classes that every first-year student has to take but I’ve found that working with my hands is one of my favorite things to do and I know that my future years here will require that.
