06 January 2020 — Day 1

In the morning we were introduced briefly the syllabus of the course — milestones, expectations, deliverables etc. Unfortunately both our professors were sick, therefore we executed the planned exercises without their presence.

Exercise 0 — One sentence

To make our substitute teacher, Martin Dusek familiar with our concepts we had to explain our projects in one sentence. What a challenge! Even though I tried to wrap my thoughts around the BA project, it was really hard to form a single sentence that expresses my research interest. But there it is:

My aim is to provide a possible interpretation of beauty by researching how one’s physical appearance and how altering one’s body leads to acceptance or denial in a group.

I would say it covers a big chunk of what I would like to express, still it is not a perfect motto for my project. Anyway, it served as a quick intro and wasn’t a bad way to put us into the working mode.

Exercise 1–20 ways of description

The exercise is about finding 20 ways to define our topic and cluster them into categories. Ideas could be written or sketched. After arranging them, two statements should be defined.

I had a slow start. Martin predicted that the exercise will be hard for those who are already quite narrow on their topics, and I think he was right. However my definition of “communities” is still broad, I feel that the core idea is quite demarcated.

To complete the task, I started going through my disposition and underlining the expressions and ideas that I found the essence of my concept. With this, I got covered a big portion and helped to find associated and related thoughts. I tried to force myself using sketches and not limit my ideas on the level of words as it can be misleading sometimes.

My final distribution looks like this.

1. line: the general definition of beauty
2. line: the physical self’s/reality’s relation to alternative and ideal selves/ virtual reality
3. line: one’s relation with a community
4. line: one’s attitude and possibilities in body alteration
5. line: dilemma of fabrication methods

I feel okay at the moment with what I see. What I miss of course is getting narrower on my definition on communities. Tomorrow we have independent study time so at this point I decided to stop and move on to the next exercise and with a somewhat fresher eye iterate on the cards. After I got to the (close to) final version, will be able to make the statements as well.

Exercise 2 — Topic space

This exercise was pretty similar to the related project map that we had to hand in along with our dispositions. The task was to create a matrix of existing ideas and projects that we find similar to ours and arrange them across qualities, parameters and values that are important for the topic.

In the related project map I tried to draw up something like this so I was in a blocked state for a while. It was very hard to look at the related projects with a fresh eye and a new way to arrange. What I did in the related project map is I defined a few aspects that I would like to bring into my bachelor project and looked for those aspects in each work.

Instead of thinking hard what and how should I do, I have rearranged this visualisation. I have revised and made a hierarchy of the related projects on the basis of how many their aspects match to my aspects.

This is far from a proper matrix, so my next step is to do a second round of research on related work. I try to find ones that match more with my desired qualities of my project. Also to look at possible ways to visualise clearly my standpoint within these ideas and projects. And again, this iteration will happen tomorrow with a fresh eye.

Misc activities

After sketching and writing on post-its, then arranging them I didn’t want to end the day so I took my list of reference and went on with reading and taking notes.

We were introduced our deliverables in the morning and I started to put down some notes for the 3-page project description. Though my first two exercises are still not finished, they helped to define a few qualities that I would like my project to have. Didn’t want to loose these thoughts.

to be continued…