My First Blog Post

category:: [[Autobiographical Token]] Date: 01-26-25

The first project of the spring semester.

To celebrate your life and your achievements in this new year, design a token that chronicles the essence of you.

Okay, sure.

To be frank, my initial reaction to this project was not incredibly positive: the open-endedness of the project had me stumped, so I began by sifting through the [[Brief— Autobiographical Token#Starting refs|provided references]].

From them, I found the most inspiration from Giorgia Lupi’s My 2020 in Data. Outside of the provided links, I’ve also been enjoying reading from Buster Benson’s blog, particularly his Life in Weeks where he visualizes his entire life in the form of small blocks, highlighting the most significant parts of it (it was also him who inspired me to start this blog in a new form).

The main thing that stuck with me from reading Lupi’s and Benson’s publications was how open they were. Lupi’s 2020 visualization, in which she visualizes everything from work to relationships, was published in the New York Times. Benson’s blog isn’t as widely read but he shares an admirable amount of openness and vulnerability anyone who might read it.

As a result, I decided that I wanted to use this project to tell my story on how I became a designer, or at least the parts of it I’m comfortable with. The full narrative is [[Narrative1|here]], but this story in particular isn’t one I’ve told much. My experience in the field of design, or in creativity in general, is a relatively recent development, starting when I chose to do a bootcamp in User Experience in Summer 2023.

The main two ideas I am currently sitting on for a narrative is (1, left) an object that is both physical and digital to represent my past experience and the field that I’m currently studying or (2, right) a timeline that captures my growth as a person and dive into design.