This week, I attempt to translate ‘The Queen Bee’ into a 14-frame visual narrative.

This week we were asked to translate a fairytale from The Brother’s Grimm into a visual narrative. I went through several before finally settling on The Queen Bee.

It tells the story of three brothers, two very destructive ones, and a kind-hearted younger one who happen upon a castle turned to stone and have to complete three tasks to break the curse.

Storyboarding and Layout

To begin designing this narrative I made a series of storyboards roughly sketching out my idea. …

What happens when I attempt to analyze what I like and what I find appealing?

The hardest thing to ask yourself is why.

That’s what I am attempting to unpack with my design manifesto.

For my first visual design assignment, I have started to think about the arenas I’ve inhabited as a designer. My background allowed me to gain exposure to designing for print and digital spaces, but I never really fed myself in a way that allowed me to creatively problem solve in these roles.

This is going to involve a bit of an archeological survey and reflection on…

When I thought about physical interfaces for this project, I wanted to think about something that had a tactility that would be missing in the digital space. My midterm project, the Samhain Tarot Reading felt like the perfect opportunity to add a bit of the physical into the digital world.

I copied the sketch in the p5.js editor on the off chance nothing worked before I began and set up a simple button switch for my interface.

I attempted to set this switch up using some example code from class to make sure my Arduino and components were working properly…

I like the holidays, but if I’m being honest, the last couple of years feel like the years have gone out playing a proverbial game of “hold my beer.”

After creating a Samhain alter for my midterm, I decided that for my final, it would be appropriate to not only celebrate Yule, when the light starts to return on the wheel of the year but to add a German mythological figure named Krampus.

Why Knitting?

I’ll be honest and say that I was determined to knit something for my final project, but when I proposed it, I had forgotten the connection I…

Following up on our primary research and ideation of possible interventions my partner Soham and I decided to move forward with building a game that we have tentatively called Disaster.

Our intervention took an unexpected turn though when we shifted from a mobile game to a card game.

Given the ubiquity of technology, it seemed like a natural choice to develop a mobile game. That platform would have allowed people to connect from afar and even develop online communities to share resources.

However, there was something about the idea of a card game that seemed to maximize chance and allow…

This week we continued our work with climate change and flooding the help of a survey. Soham and I immediately put out a survey on Tuesday and began pushing it to communities we were a part of.

We had 30 responses by Tuesday and then I started messaging friends and family to take the 9-question survey.

Or perhaps, more aptly, an 8-Bit Christmas hat.

I’ve been knitting for the last twenty years and I love the holidays. After designing a Samhain altar for Halloween as my midterm, it seemed like a natural progression to follow it up by engaging in the ugly sweater motif.

Design the Hat

I was trying to think of ideas or a hat and I decided to look at Pinterest for some festive fair isle. I compiled this mood board using Pinterest which set the tone for my project and prototype.

I remember learning about modes of storytelling and the theme of human vs. nature coming up. The motif seems to always be the human chasing a part of nature, or nature presenting an obstacle that keeps the human from achieving their goal, but the narrative never seems to be about when nature fights back.

It seems fitting that to start our final project, we’d interrogate the topic of climate change. …