FAUX-BEAU » senior thesis

I graduated.

Kathryn Proulx — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 12:45:33 +0000

A little over a month ago I graduated from Parsons. My senior thesis project, as it stood in the thesis show, was kind of a failure. I built the staging for it, and thought I had everything covered, but I left too many things up in the air for it to work properly at the show. However, in terms of learning and progressing and pushing myself—it was a complete success. I’m viewing it as version 1.0, and have plans to make it better… maybe I’ll post about it sometime?

Now I’m interning full time at HUGE in Dumbo—I love it.

Where has the time gone?

Kathryn Proulx — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 19:14:25 +0000

You didn’t think I’d let October go by without posting, did you? I never imagined a semester full of liberal arts requirements would be so time-consuming. Written assignments instead of designed assignments has been a weird change that is proving hard for me to adjust to.

I haven’t made much progress on my thesis yet, either. We spent the first half of the semester doing semi-unrelated assignments like visualizing a book, designing a personal timeline, and bringing in our favorite piece of work we’ve created. To say the least, it wasn’t inspiring. I kept producing info graphics for any assignment that called for a designed solution, and I got reprimanded for stealing typefaces from an old internship and using them on a personal project for school (that was also one of my favorite pieces that I planned on bringing into class.) Word of advice: even though everyone else does it, that doesn’t mean it’s OK to steal typefaces from your internship… even if you’re a poor student and are using them for school projects only.

At first I thought I wanted to make a mash-up of fffound, flickr, and delicious where you could upload inspirational images and tag them. If you found an image you liked on the site it would automatically download it to your ‘inspiration folder.’ Then I realized how boring and uncreative that idea was, and that even though I’d learn a lot by building it, it is just too big of a project to take on and build in 4-6 months. Then, in an effort to scale down, I thought I could tag all the images I had saved on my computer and create a data visualization of what inspires me. Then I realized that nobody cares as much about me as I do. And so… I moved on.

I read Dear Diary by Lesley Arfin for fun—and it reminded me of my experiences in middle school/high school (I think honestly every girl could relate to it.) Then I found Culture Jam by Kalle Lasn at my local library and started reading it (I think everyone should read this book, I wish I had read it sooner.) This was around the same time we started talking about media and body image in my Psychology of Eating Disorders class, the Situationists in my Urban Branding class, and cultivating identity in my Uniform Fashion class. All of a sudden it was like I finally felt that fire again—like I had discovered something to care about enough to make/design/build something around it. I’m not really sure how this will tie together in the end… but stay tuned.

Back to School / Senior Thesis

Kathryn Proulx — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 16:48:44 +0000

It’s back to Parsons on Thursday. Kind of unreal to think that this will be my last year! I’m mostly fufilling my liberal arts requirements (French, Urban Branding, Psychology of Eating Disorders?) but my biggest class is Thesis. I’m not sure of the parameters yet but I do know that our first semester hinges upon research, and our second semester is when we build, fabricate, code, and/or design our project. I know that I want to do something involving technology; web design (including interface and back-end), an app/widget, or something of the sort. I really want to use this as an opportunity to teach myself skills that I haven’t had a chance to learn in school; designing databases or programs for example. I have just one idea so far that involves gamers (so far from my interests/personality!) and I’m hoping to brainstorm more ideas. I know ideas are money but if you have an awesome idea for a website, widget, app, light computer program, or anything of the sort—let me know! I’ll probably be posting more about my progress as school starts so watch this space.