#mythesisismybestfriend vol.2

Chapter 1.

I can’t say that I know a lot, but I certainly know more than I did three years ago when I wrote my first thesis.

And so it begins:

I know I’m in the middle of a beautiful mess.

From July onward.

Update, update, update!

It’s been 5 months (Already?) since I graduated from the London College of Communication. It was hella of a ride – my 3 past years with the BA (Hons) Design Management and Cultures folks. I’m glad we all manage to put whatever we’ve picked up from the course to use in our daily life – at least that’s what I heard from the last time I catched up with my course-mates. Some get on to be designer managers, some work in marketing, communications or arts; while other take a step further in their education.

As for me…

Well, I find it relatively hard to describe this transition phase – Moving back to Hanoi, adapting to a new timezone, driving in the crazy traffic and coping with the absence of parks and woodlands – all are difficult. Were. Because I’m probably used to it by now. God I hope so. I don’t want to live in denial. Been up and down – post grad crisis, pretty average, but I guess it’s fair to say I’m doing pretty okay now. In fact, I’m quiet excited and thrilled thinking about the next chapter of my life. Hints: there will be a lot more thinking and making involved in the process!

What I’d be without you all.

Thesis InForm Symposium 2017

Thesis InForm

The Thesis InForm Symposium invites students who have excelled in their thesis to present their ideas to a broader audience.

This stimulating day takes place on Thursday 22 June, in Lecture Theatre B at LCC.

Hosted by Ferdinand Lu, Graphic and Media Design student

Programme

10am Welcome from Dr Nicky Ryan, Dean of Design School

10.05am Introduction by Dr Ian Horton, Programme Director, CTS

10.10am Keynote by Dr Peter Hall: ‘Generative Design Criticism’

10.40am – 11.30am SESSION 1: Identities, Pleasure and Danger

• Viviana Conti (Illustration and Visual Media)
  According to Tumblr: Are queer readings in the BBC Sherlock fandom fetishising homosexuality, or expressing the need for fairer representation in the media?
  

• Sydney Fortune (Interactive Design Arts)
  The New Top Model: RuPaul’s Drag Race serving you transformative realness
  

• Max Hill (Graphic and Media Design)
  How does the design of a gay nightclub alter the user’s identity?
  

• Mala Mutinta (Illustration and…

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Crucial to Design Cultures and Histories

1. Being curious.
2. Noticing design in the everyday environment.
3. Wanting to explore.
4. Realising that learning happens in unexpected places in informal ways.
5. Going beyond initial appearances of preoccupations.
6. Asking questions.

Professional Practice Updates

One of the reasons why I find Profession Practice the most awkward and frustrating unit is because, to simply put, it is ALL ABOUT MYSELF.

The name says it all, Professional Practice outcome requires one to develop a portfolio that reflects one’s process of learning and growing, both personally and professionally. It involves all sort of things, from self-assessment tests to reflective journal extracts and a 3-year goal.

I mean, I have no problem with documenting or actually making progress in what I consider as beneficial to my personal development. However, the fact that I have to present them in written format is actually what catches me off guard. Reflecting has always been helpful. It is one important task in the process of attaining emotional intelligence, but it also makes me feel like I am forced to tear down my shield and turn off its invisible mode. It’s me driving on a self-esteem roller coaster all over again.

This is not how I am supposed to feel, is it? I mean, it’s supposed to help me prepare for my future career and all. I am learning great things and I am grateful for that every day. I know I’ve changed into a better one than I was yesterday, but how is it that whenever I look the vacancies on the-dots.com, Linkedin or Jobsite or any other online job market, I feel wrong. After days and nights of reading job descriptions of all kind, in various locations from Vietnam to Japan, Singapore or the UK, there was still no ‘Yes, this is exactly what I’ve been looking for’, no excitement, no eagerness. Hmmmmm…something must be wrong. But I haven’t been able to figure out what it was yet.

“Are you happy?”

“What makes you happy?”

“Will this matters one year from now?”

I find myself keep coming back to these questions. I am confident that I can be honest with myself, that I know the answers to them, and I am well aware of the fact that they aren’t leading me back to the core discipline of what I’ve been taught at school. But it doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t. What matters is how I can make the best out of it.

More mapping.

–

With an entangled curiosity, here I am, walking into the woods.

 

 

All good things…

… come to an end

Yet before that:

+60 more pages to go

3 days till submission

Process book:

Website Development

Project Teaser Trailer

Mood:

Filming in the Old Quarter

It’s been almost 11 months since I first came up with the initial idea for my major project. Most of its contextualisation and drivers are findings from various research including cultural probes, interviews, casual conversations, ethnography, observations and other secondary sources. I was enjoy doing contextual research so much – to the point that I almost chose to procrastinate on the practical/designing part. However, I’ve managed to take advantage of the break and went back to Hanoi for 3 weeks in March to work on some prototypes (physical + digital ’emergence’) and of course more contextual research.

Before the filming week, I gave myself some more time to explore the Old Quarter through different approaches such as using the official city map, applying a set of dérive or following a predetermine route, et cetera. Luckily, the weather in Hanoi was pretty decent which helped prolong the trip – remember that time when I took a friend out on an experiential tour under the heat of nearly 40 Celcius degree in the summer…

Anyways,

Some of the specific elements that I’ve specifically looked out during my walk are tube houses, typography, houses of worship & traditional craft practices. With this list of these elements, it will be a lot easier to design prototyped map as well as to schedule the film shots.

Filming (& Interviewing)  in process

There are 3 people in my film crew: Nam (DOP), Duong (Camera Assistant) and myself (Director/Producer/Logistics and everything in between). Sometimes we would have an extra one or two people joining us, either giving a hand or just tagging along as they wanted to learn more about the project and the Old Quarter. One of them was ET, the Executive Marketing Manager in Asia of Blackmagic Design, who also generously sponsored the project with all the fancy filming equipment. Of course, I couldn’t express enough how grateful I was.

Nam & around 10kg of equipment (Mini Ursa 4.6K ft Alphatron EVF – or the language I am not capable of speaking) 

Our filming process took a total of 3 days, approximately 300GB footages & an uncountable amount of sweats and tears. Just kidding. Not about the sweats though. I am happy with the quality of the footages as much as I am worried about the post-production (editing/cutting) process. I know that I am not gonna use all of them for the final submission, but the thought of a rainbow wheel spinning on the screen while Premier is open just gives me a goosebump. I might probably need to take care of them with an iMac in the Digital Space.

https://giphy.com/gifs/tina-fey-web-design-development-yjsnLcbBdXQWc

Tiny Foy totally gets what I mean

More visuals:

In the Old Quarter, while the first floor is primarily used for business or commercial outlet, the back parts of the house and the second floor are where the family lives.

The Old Quarter has the original street layout and architecture of ancient Hanoi (dates back to Ly – Tran dynasty, XI – XIV). The long homes lining the streets are called ‘tube house’. Tube houses are so named because they are just that: a long, narrow tube of space subdivided into sections to serve the family’s every need.

Tube houses with original layout date back to almost 100 years ago.

Typography elements. Some of them dedicate the year a house was built.

In the photo above is a banyan tree I spotted on Hang Bo Street. Banyan tree is considered as one of the most sacred and traditional symbols of Vietnamese village culture. It is believed to be the reign of indigenous spirits and home of spirited souls. Hence, villagers often set up a worship table at the root of the banyan tree to pay homage to the God of the wild or pray for the lost spirited souls to rest in peace and protect people’s lives in the village from evil spirits. However, in a busy, urban setting like the Hanoi Old Quarter where the main activities are commerce and trade, it is often a successful business that most people seek for in their prayers.

—

So,

Only one mon…wait….2 weeks to go!

Stay tuned for updates, or not.

(If I don’t make it through the 11th of May, you’ll know)

Major Project update

Deadline vs Me part 2

#mythesisismybestfriend

 

  My friendship with thesis, by P 

  

So, I bid goodbye to my best friend today. She is size A0, folded 8 times into an A5 map. It is hard to describe my feeling after I dropped her off at D104-something. I just know that the past 7 months with her have been a great adventure. I have walked thousands of miles and have surely learnt a lot. Together, we’ve experienced all sort of feelings and emotions too. The road ahead is still long and full of challenges, but I’m glad at least it’s not covered in the midst of uncertainties and doubts anymore. I know where I am heading next and I am more excited than ever to start a new journey.

ABSTRACT

There is a problem with understanding everyday life in our highly connected and socially mediated reality. That is, we either get bored of the ubiquitousness – lost in the landscape of mundane modernity; or we pick up on new trends such as a minimalist, decluttering lifestyle which has accidentally filtered out the many delightful myths and enigmatic details that everyday life has to offer.

In order to make sense of the everyday life and truly embrace the beauty of it, paying attention to the everyday life ‘itself’ is an important first step. There are two ways of doing it. The first one is to put everyday life under a microscope of theoretical articulation and discourse analysis. The second one, a much more ‘playful’ and heuristic approach, is to go out and walk in it.

Psychogeography is the study of the impact that geographical environment has on human’s mind and behaviour. This paper is a personal documentation of my psychogeographical action research journey over the course of seven months in three different urban settings: Hanoi, Paris and London. It aims to discover and ‘map’ the connection between tangible and intangible manifestations that figure everyday life as a grid of cabalistic entanglement. That includes interrogating everyday life in terms of its dynamic processes, its multi-faceted physical layers of architecture and design objects; its social and historical connection to different cultural groups; and last but not least, its relation to cultural theory and Psychogeography as a learning approach in Higher Education.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

To the lights that shine my path, thank you for your patience, your kindness and time:

Dr Mark Ingham, Dr Silke Lange, Tuan Nguyen, Duc Le, Asif Syed, Peter Phu, Chi Vu, Kan Thai, Xuan Phan, Quang-Anh Hoang, Austin Mitchell, Design Management & Cultures comrades and last but not least, my family.

How I go about my choice of thesis topic

Time flies.

I am writing the last assignment of Year 2. It is probably also the last paper I have to write for a taught class. As of tomorrow, there will be only seminars, our Thesis and Major project in Year 3.

I am taking my time to write my thesis proposal. I have my checklist for choosing a subject in front of me. There are about 14 things in the list. I am stuck at the second one: subject should be of use in future career path.

I have changed my mind for about 4 times. I could not settle down with one idea for too long. Sustainability, arts management, art history, folk arts, traditional arts, art education, self-sufficient lifestyle, social design; they all are interesting topics. But their sparks didn’t last long enough as my curiosity soon found the answer for each knot they had to offer. The more I read, the more I became uncertain about what I wanted to do.

I told myself to keep reading. I told myself not to wait for inspiration to arrive to start working. Motivation is overrated. I just need to keep going; even if it means I have to start over and all over again. I just need to keep searching until I find my sparkle.

And I did. I found my topic roughly 48 hours before the deadline. As I am procrastinating, typing this here, there are about 16 hours left. And I still haven’t got a word out.  I started collecting all the books available to read for 9 hours continuously yesterday. My mind literally exploded, though in a good way. The euphoria it brought me was overwhelming, so much my jaw ached. This is it, I thought, this the kind of sign I am looking for. This is what keeps my curiosity captivated. And though I am still confused and haven’t got my research questions articulated, I have my keywords and know where I am heading to.

Now my proposal will probably not be 2500 words as required. But as I continue to read, I know for sure that together we will go far.

Okay, maybe that was a little overconfident. Risky, and possibly way too ambitious. I am actually a bit paranoid. Sometimes I wonder why I always have a thing for abstraction. I wish Michael was here to give me a push, even if it was as brutal as he did when I was heading to a mist in quest of an answer for my entangled curiosity.

“This is tough! But go for it anyway!” – As he might have said.

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, now it’s time to take the first one.

“My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence.” (Doyle [1890] 1995: 89-90).

Me wandering in Arita, a little town in the middle of nowhere, an accidental stop during my journey around the Southern of Japan, 2013.

*October and November 2016 updates:

Okay, my topic has changed constantly in the course of time. It is changing as I am writing this sentence right at this very moment. The good thing is that it still keeps me up at nights thinking relentlessly in excitement for the unknowns that the journey I am about to embark on has to offer.