After the first couple of days of making the scrapbook, one change I decided to make was the format. For my prototype, I had used an online platform to set up and design the pages, but after a couple of days having to rely on my extremely unreliable wi-fi to make the pages, email the pictures to myself, and upload the pictures to the platform to make the pages grew to be too much. It was extremely frustrating to be forced to rely so much on the wi-fi, and so I decided to switch to a more traditional platform: paper, markers, tape, and ribbon. I had originally avoided using these more hands-on materials due to the scarcity of them actually in my house. My family, though very artsy in terms of performance art, isn’t particularly crafty and I wasn’t sure how much I would be able to find. After scrounging up some old construction paper and glitter glue from lord-knows-when, I started to make my scrapbook again. The more I worked on it as a hands-on project versus online, the more that I found I was actually enjoying it a lot more. It gave me the ability to work in different areas of the house and explore with the texture of the materials as well as just the look to make the scrapbook something really special.
After switching over to a physical format, I realized how much easier making the scrapbook was since I didn’t have to be the sole contributor. I asked my sisters and my parents to each make a page and add it to the stack of pages I already had along with their name signed along the bottom. But I didn’t want this to be just about my own experience. I thought of this project as a form of documentation of the whole COVID-19 pandemic experience, not just my own. So, on Monday I decided to reach out to a very close family friend of ours who is a Kindergarten teacher in my hometown who had been talking about the fact that she was running out of assignments to give her students. I proposed the idea of asking each kid in her class to make a page for their own scrapbook. These pages could then be dropped off at her house when the parents were dropping off/picking up books for reading and she could piece it together and make copies for all the kids to have. She seemed really intrigued by the idea, and when we talked again yesterday she mentioned that she was in the process of coming up with a writing assignment around the scrapbook idea. For my own scrapbook, over the past week, I’ve begun contacting family and friends from all different places proposing the idea that they make a page, or do a write-up and send me a paragraph or two and some pictures, and putting together a book of all our experiences. My brother and his college friends, most of whom I’ve only met once, have taken to emailing me different poems, short stories, or essays that they’ve written as well as little anecdotes about the past few weeks. A couple of my friends still on campus sent me a video of themselves watching movies, doing work, and fooling around. I’m still working on developing the format since the more things I get the less practical the physical copy has become, but it’s obviously still a work in progress.
Overall, using the design process for this assignment has been interesting. It has certainly pushed the boundaries of what I thought was the “right” way of doing projects and making decisions, and in many ways has pushed me outside of my comfort zone as well as helping me to make new comfort zones. It’s definitely a process that I still feel I need to work on, it’s not a perfectly natural thing for me and it’s going to take a lot of practice, but I feel that it is something I can learn to do if I keep trying. I think some of the harder parts of the process came from having to translate thought into words or concepts since I am someone who is very comfortable working in abstractions and with theoretical thought, and sometimes switching to the concrete can be disconcerting since I tend to act in a “decision making” way and dismiss any of the weirder or crazy ideas as unrealistic right away. Training myself to not just think in terms of complete abstraction or complete realism was/is definitely the hardest part of the design process, but I also think it’s one of the more fun parts. I look forward to being able to continue working on the design process and changing my own habits in terms of thought and creation.
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