[Studio] self-portrait as information design
14 October, 2009 – 1:40 am | Filed under Tags: design studio, information design, japan, latch, map, music, self portrait assignments, design, japan, personal | No Comments »
A preview…
A resized version of the original, to give you an idea:
The story behind the process is behind the jump.
The assignment was to use Richard Saul Wurman’s LATCH principles of information design to design a self-portrait.
The first week of class, we brought in sketches of various lists of information from our lives. As many things seem to these days, my lists started veering towards my two years in Japan, so I ended up drawing a map of Japan and pulling out info blurbs about my travels.
It was in the following week, though, that I realized that this is a self-portrait project, and I am not only defined by my two years in Japan. So I started over, and ended up settling on music. Since sheet music already provided a readymade structure to work with, that worked out nicely. I ended up deciding on excerpts from the Largo movement of Dvorak’s 9th symphony (the New World Symphony), just because it’s among my favorite pieces, and the simple note structure of the melody lent itself well to this project.
As you can see in the screenshot above, the staff lines are made out of text blurbs. Each bar/measure is a period of my life, with twelve in total. Some areas were more information-dense than others. The notes are made out of text describing significant, meaningful events within the time period of each measure. Through this structure, I employed the location, time, and hierarchy categories of LATCH (with the other two being alphabet and category).
(Apologies for it not being as clear as it could be, but I got a little more personal with some parts of it than I would feel comfortable posting online for the whole web to see. (Nothing really juicy or incriminating, I swear.))
