IMQ: Reflecting

As my thesis begins to draw to a close, I am reflecting on the progress I have made on the project to which I devoted my final undergraduate year. While not strictly a requirement for the class, I want to check in with myself and the Identity Multimedia Quilt, and to look towards the future.

About 6 months ago, I realized that I was trying to reinvent a (pretty cool) wheel with my first project idea (see “Draw Back-stitch” sketch), so I scrapped it. I was stuck for another idea until I worked through the “Wayfinding” exercise in Designing Your Life.

If you haven’t heard of Designing Your Life, it’s a fantastic book by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans about taking design-thinking and applying it to your “life design” in order to “build a well-lived, joyful life” (as the tagline goes).

The authors co-founded the Stanford Life Design Lab, but if you can’t go to Stanford to take one of their courses, you best buy the book. I recommended it to my school’s career center and now I recommend it to anyone reading this.

The book walks you right from where you are starting to finding where you want to go and how to get there. Along this journey, you do a “good time journal” to catch yourself in the act of having a good time, and rate how your energy and engagement vary in each of these acts.

I discovered (among many things!) that I love learning, teaching, sharing, and storytelling — and, of course, I am passionate about queer issues. I got unstuck with the idea of curating a multimedia community-storytelling project by LGBTQIA+ people that is freely available online for anyone who wants to learn more about the nuances of queer experiences.

And so, the Identity Multimedia Quilt/IMQ/“the Quilt” was born.

Right now, I’m assessing where the Quilt has come to and where it may go in the future.

Given the scope of the school year, I ended up reigning in my initial idea from building an app in Unity. Instead, I am publishing a series of web pages on my portfolio site.

To me, the important part of the Quilt is less the exact format and more the content provided by LGBTQIA+ creators, so the switch to a more static presentation didn’t feel like a major compromise.

I have 8 contributors for the launch of the Quilt, 5 of whom have already signed the licensing agreement I sent out two nights ago. (I ended up writing my own version, without a clause about commercial use of material.)

I’m still debating whether to include the IMQ as a subdomain of my website or to keep it as a parent page on the main site. If using a separate styling sheet is the only difference, my site is already configured to allow that…

For the Honors Project enhancement, I am writing a reflective paper to showcase my overall findings from this project.

I had people creating multimedia or writing to the questions of personal nuances of their story and/or that which is not talked about enough in mainstream queer narratives. But there were also research questions I posed to myself privately.

• Is there a queer experience (and if so, what is it)?
• Does that ‘common’ experience extend to those who dis-identify with a queer community? If not, does anything tie these people to each other beyond their identities?
• What is the relationship between marginalized identities and community (and is that universal within identity groups)?

I will post a link to the reflection next week.

In the immediate future, the IMQ site goes live to a limited audience this Friday, May 1st. This was the original date of the senior showcase, so it seems fitting.

A full public release will occur on May 18th, the new date of the (now virtual) senior showcase. Link coming in the next week or two for the senior showcase website!

Beyond the showcase? This project will continue. I’ll write more to it next week.

Thank you for all your support.