Preliminary Thesis Ideas
In today’s world, we are often overwhelmed by the quantity of information we encounter each day. The Internet and other computing technologies have made it increasingly simple for anyone anywhere to create content and share it with others. This has resulted in a proliferation of information, both digital and non-digital. I see this trend has having both positive and negative consequences; on the one hand, new technologies have democratized the production of content and made it easier for less powerful voices to be heard. On the other, however, I believe it has become increasingly difficult for people to organize and interpret the information that they are presented with, simply because there is so much of it and it often arrives in an unstructured, undesigned form.
For my senior fine arts thesis, I intend to explore the various ways in which designers can filter information to highlight what is meaningful and obscure what is less meaningful. I am very interested in the idea of curation as it relates to design. To what extent is it the responsibility of a designer to curate information in today’s world? Merriam Webster defines the word curator as “one who has the care and superintendence of something.” Traditionally, the word has often been used in the context of art museums and galleries; a curator is someone who selects and organizes certain works for display while (by necessity) ignoring others. My concept of designer-as-curator is very much aligned with this model, the major difference being the fact that the material for curation is more varied, less structured, and much greater in quantity.
Because the act of selecting something inherently implies the act of NOT selecting something else, any attempt to design information will inevitably produce some degree of bias or subjectivity. I seek not to eliminate or reduce this bias, but rather to embrace it, and in doing so explore the relationship between objective and subjective forms of information. How does the process of observing, collecting, and analyzing information change or transform its original meaning? How do designers contribute to this transformation? Can raw data serve as a source material for art?
An obvious place for me to start exploring these ideas is the field of information design and visualization; graphs, maps, and charts are clear examples of data that has been transformed, via design, into meaning. At the same time, however, I don’t want to limit myself to this specific genre. Photography, for example, represents another medium through which an objective reality is transformed into something different and (to varying degrees) more subjective. For my thesis, I want to focus on this moment of transformation and try to determine what exactly occurs at that point. What is the difference between unstructured and structured information? What are the advantages of structuring information and making sense out of raw data? What are some of the potential downsides? I hope that in the end, my thesis work will bridge the divide between science and art and reveal something new, or at least interesting, about that relationship.
