Dreamspace Process
This project was a 3 month adventure with a wide array of research, mini projects, design ideas, and mediums.
As a virtual class, we learned how to improve together as well as individually. This project was my first that was entirely self-lead with small guidances of direction and critiques from my peers. Together, we went through several series of design sprints, research, and theories, to get our ideas flowing.
I documented all of my ideas, research, and design sprints throughout the semester via a blog site (click here) to look back at our progress.
In the beginning...
The first design sprint in relation to the thesis idea, happened way before we started researching for our thesis. It was a sprint to just help us know what we are inspired by, what we are thinking about, feeling, etc.
It was to let out our “inner weirdness”, which of course led me to think of a space themed design. The space aspect was more of a metaphor of my ambitions, dreams and desires. However, I changed it to a literal sense for my thesis later on.
After this exercise, I then started mapping out ideas of my thesis. The prompt was to write down 100 ideas that popped into my head at any given time. The broader, the better.
From here, I asked “How Might I ____” questions for my favorite prompts.
How might more people learn about outer space?
How might transporation be changed to become earth consious and clean?
How might traveling benefit younger generations?
How might therapy and mental health be normalized?
How might plants and gardens benefit urban societies?
And so on.
I finally decideed to continue with my outer space endeavor, because I knew it was something I was passionate to learn about.
The next design sprint, I made a posters that comically represented space. This sprint was only a 24 hour turn around. I wanted to keep it simple. This idea was based around the concept of conspiracy theories (I briefly wanted to make my thesis satirical, however I decided on a different direction.)
From another design sprint (unrelated to the thesis) I played with the risograph as a medium. I had to use the colors and techniques virtually as I did not have consistent access to the printer.
Below is the 3 day design sprint that inspired me to encorporate the RISO into my final thesis.
The next project in my thesis, was to create a zine that basically introduces the concept of your thesis.
My zine was inspired by Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot speech. I used photos from NASA, and wrote a short freestyle love poem to space. The idea was to make the zine a form of a love letter that you could give someone to share. This zine was also created for the Risograph.
(click here to see on issuu.com)
What I originally thought was going to be an educational space project, or a conspiracy project, then turned into this idea of love, and passions, and dreams. I was hooked on this idea of writing a love letter to space. So I expanded on this short letter (as seen above) to make my thesis entirely revolving around that idea.
So....here we go.
Since this is ~space~ themed, I thought I would mention that my zodiac sign is Virgo...and it really shows through my sketches...which are mostly lists and random strings of thought.
This explores the title, style and format, and my six word pitch of my thesis capstone project.
I started out by editing basic NASA photos in a bitmapped style, and some with just heavily vibrant “surreal” colors, with my simple typography.
It was fine....
not my favorite. I had no idea what I was doing.
Then I started to bitmap some more and ended up with these. Which were better, and aligned with the style and idea I had in my head. It kindof muddied the images, leaving lots of room to experiment with the riso colors from https://www.stencil.wiki/colors.
I wanted to have call-outs of my story like I used in the Mini-Zine design sprint, I also used the same font choices to have a similar vibe.
It was boring.
It wasn’t dreamlike enough. It lacked the romanticism I wanted to convey by simply opening and holding the book. Without reading the piece, I wanted it to be a statement. It was lacking in that department. It was like a simple textbook with funky colors.
Too blocky. Too simple. Too ehh.
After several experiments with digital mediums, I figured the best way to solve this problem is to physically fix it. I went back to researching.
I pulled out my old book of Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” and found a diagram of a vortex/black hole and how it warps time and space around it.
From that, I was inspired to print out every single element of my zine (besides the body text). I printed it out in black and white, and with my handy-dandy home scanner I scanned each one so that the quality would be even more hazy and dream like.
I wiggled, and warped, and moved the paper around on the scanner to mimick the diagram that I saw in Hawkings book. Well, I exaggerated it a bit. But I ended up with a super cool effect that got me my dreamlike, fantasy, trippy look that I was wanting.
It took hours to get the perfect scans.
Finally, with a few overlays and lots and lots of editing, I landed on the final design! And I finally found a name, Dreamspace.
I was inspired from the term “head-space” and changed it to Dream Space, to encapsulate the essence of having that longing feeling towards outerspace.