This week has been all about drawings, research methods and setting up things for growing mushrooms in the studio.
Recently I have been in awe of the plants and nature at Kew Gardens and have been spending time drawing with friends in outdoor spaces. I am considering how I can set up an outdoor workshop to engage with underground/unseen fungal networks.
We had an academic support session by Gem Smith on independent work and staying motivated. We thought about practical ways to break up our time for the final major project and discussed what motivates us, and what we need to be motivated/have positive experiences during the project.
I am planning to grow pink oyster mushrooms in the studio, as a way to grow and study mycelium (which should appear before the mushrooms). In my tutorial this week, we discussed collecting sound data from the mycelium and ways of potentially hearing the ‘growth movement’ of the mycelium. I have not tried this kind of experiment before, but am interested in testing, to see what kind of data I might find.
In preparation for our WIP (work-in-progress) show I have started working with drawing bots generated from random voltage. I am considering what ‘non-human’ drawings might mean, and how I can explore this in collaborative network drawings for the show.
In the background, I am prototyping for data Earrings. At this stage, I am using the real data, but making considerations of scale, wearability and how the elements of data can fit into each other (literally!).
In our workshop session this week, we practised pilot interviews for our final major project research. The interview followed an unstructured format, allowing for a more conversational style, that led to new ideas of exploration in my research.
We all took part in a large-scale data visualisation participatory method. In our studio groups we discussed ideas of ethics, and decisions we may face during our research, we then mapped them to a Likert scale.
This week we also had two Alumni talks. One from Sam Shannon who discussed her journey on how she became a data journalist at Beyond Words studio. And another by Syennie Valeria about her career and Data Dance Moment project. Both Shan and Syennie were so generous in sharing advice, and insights about their data visualisation careers.
At the end of the week, I attended the RCA degree show for MA Information Experience Design. I found it super inspiring and interesting to see so many experimental ways of visualising data, randomness and networks.
