Thesis - 00 Brainstorming Begins

A Thesis Begins

Exploration, Ideation, and Strategy

I've been having a wide range of feelings about confronting the challenge of a thesis project. I also recently started a subscription to George Saunder's substack, and as happenstance would have it, was able to read this short piece  "On Worry". It's an excellent little read, which includes this great little exchange:

I was writing a script with, in it, a kitchen scene between a husband and a wife. And I was…worried. I said to Stuart, “Well, I have a draft written but I’m worried that if we shoot it the wrong way, it will be banal.”
There was a pause and then Stuart said, “Well, how about we don’t shoot it that way?”

Mr. Saunders reiterates the point of the essay with a gentle reminder. "...worry can be a form of craft.  It tells us what not to do." Reading this made me feel much better about the worry I've been harboring over thesis preparations. I can feel myself starting to over-work and over-analyze myself into not very good results. It's going to take some active but gentle self-reminders to trust processes, find the enjoyment, and to make the most of my worry.

Ideation - Take 1

In the week leading up to this term, the ever-incredible Sarah Hakani and I have been exploring thesis support and accountability partnerships. Starting with some light research, conversations, and digging through my own past project seeds/ideas, I started by formulating a few broad areas of inquiry.

1. Probability Theory as a method for organization
2. Type Specimens for a better society
3. to be [a person] and an artist
4. Continuation of Amazon research
5. Zoom better

For each of these, I have more that I can elaborate on. But for the purposes of this post, I want to be documenting thesis development process. For each of these ideas, I have a decent sense of what to start researching and learning about. For 2,3, and 5, I have a sense of what the end result could/would be. Ideas 2 and 5 are predominantly technical explorations, 3 is a strongly conceptual exploration, and 1 and 4 are broad research areas with no clear output. Below, I've listed out the Conceptual and Technical questions that I imagine encountering, with the omission of #2, with I'm going to remove from the running.

1. Probability Theory as a method for organization. Conceptual Question: Does reframing our organizations through the lens of probability theory have an impact on the structures and strategies that we use to organize? Technical Questions: TBD‍
2. to be [a person] and an artist. Conceptual Question: What does it mean to be a working woman artist in a capitalist society? What does it mean to try and create while also trying to be a full-person in so many different areas? Technical Questions: TBD
3. Continuation of Amazon research. Conceptual Question: What is the impact of the proliferation of politically-charged products? Does it matter if these objects never exist in a physical form? What is the purpose of these objects, if not to be sold? Technical Questions: Data analysis and visualizations.
4. Zoom better. Conceptual Question: What does it mean to rebuild a familiar product with a very specific user experience in mind? Technical Question: Web RTC, chat applications.

Ideation - Take 2

In class, we tried an exercise where we map out areas of interest, then map out skills, and lastly develop some rough outputs based upon combinations thereof. We did this on a Miro board and it was a bit of a muddled mess for me. First off, I plopped in my pre-existing ideas and then started listing skills I didn't have, and just continually misunderstood the exercise from there. Taking the L on this one, I sat down two days afterwords, with some real-life sticky notes and tried it again on my own, to much better results.

While I didn't get to all of the permutations, I was able to explore 5 combinations of interest areas and a skill, and develop 3 ideas for each. The full output of 15 ideas can be viewed here, but upon evaluation here is what seems notable to me:

1. Interest in Written Language/Poetry + Skill of Web Development: Attempt a series of code sketches that place poetic constraints on the code itself. Could you write a code sketch in iambic pentameter? With a rhyme scheme? In haiku? Conceptual Question: What is the relationship between code and what code produces? How do we let these mediums control our messages? Technical Question: Is there a benefit to placing abstract constraints on our code? What solutions do we reach for when we have these abstract constraints?‍
2. Interest in Written Language/Poetry + Skill of Web Development: Instagram or Twitter poems that utilize user's names to write a new poem or acoustically imitate existing poems. Conceptual Question: What does it mean to take advantage of the affordances of digital platforms and to use them as the primary experience for your artwork? Technical Question: Can you connect users based upon their usernames? Can you programmatically use usernames to generate pleasing poetic results?
3. Interest in Expectations (Social and Self) + Skill of Writing: Start documenting my own expectations prior to interactions throughout my day. Can I discern if they stem from internal or external forces? Use this mix of qualitative and quantitative personal data to create pen-plotter artwork that can represent this exploration. Conceptual Question: What is the relationship between expectations and actions? Where do these expectations stem from and what happens when we confront them? Technical Question: How to balance qualitative and quantitative information into one visual? What are the mathematics behind expectations?
4. Interest in Expectations (Social and Self) + Skill of Writing: Really, big letters. Looking at predictive text and typing, but also our own relationships and expectations with words. We anticipate certain letters will come next, certain words will come next. What if this was done at a large scale and you had to define/interact with these word paths by walking through spaces. Conceptual Question: Expectations are built upon patterns. How does scale/awareness of expectations change our decision-making process and what artifacts can we collect along the way? Technical Question: How to do user-triggered projection mapping in space? Looking at the technical decisions and determinations in predictive text.
5. Interest in Expectations (Social and Self) + Skill of Writing: We write code and expect it to work, but what does code expect of us? Write an interactive narrative where the code itself, who longs to be debugged, coaches the viewer through the process of debugging. Conceptual Question: Coding languages are tools made by humans. Looking at the hidden humanity in the medium of code, what do we see reflected back? Technical Question: Building an interactive debugging simulation. How can something work when it's not working? 

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OK. So, I know have 9 rough ideas with associated conceptual questions and a range of tangible, potential outputs. I think I need to develop some evaluation metrics so that I can start to rule out ideas or see what has legs for further development. (Maybe you need an idea bracket? Could be a nice little tool to develop as a thesis side-quest). Finding the right size project for a two-semester thesis seems to be an important point of comparison. Important comparison points could be:

1. Ideal amount of time to execute this idea well
2. Potential for development of employable skills
3. Resources needed for development
4. Resources needed for execution
5. Clarity of project goal/intention
6. Potential career doors from this project
7. Would I be interested in talking about this project when it is over?
8. How flexible is the current output? (Probably want something in the middle of vague/tangible, rather than an extreme)
9. How sad would you be, if you never talked about this again?