Create Something

In high school, you get taught this 'light house' writing approach, where you start very broad and through the course of your paper you come to point, an answer at this beacon of light.

One of the best teachers I ever had pointed out this method is actually quite wrong. Writers should come out and forcefully state their interest and intent at the beginning of their work, ideally within their thesis statement, then support it. He argued, it's painful for your reader to endure the entirety of a work without any understanding of intention. What if your conclusion is a disappointment after the reader has worked hard for four-hundred pages? It's why many great novels lack a very firm resolution.

Of course, he admitted there are exceptions, and you should not give everything away, but I've been thinking a great deal about these two approaches.

Artistically, I could create dozens of iterations of one project, and then vaguely arrive at a comfortable spot. It makes sense to me because I was there for the entirety of the creative process.

On the other hand, some of the more successful projects I've had, I went through the painful process of iteration and exploration. Yet, rather than using my final iteration as the project I hand in, I set what I did aside entirely visually, then re-create the project, bearing in mind what I've done.


The work I've done this way seems to produce a much stronger statement, that is intelligible free of the entire creative process around it.

I spoke with my cohort about our goal of creating 'something' for Tuesday, we defined my target as the organization of data around what interests me, chiefly urban areas and the city of Detroit. Initially, I thought I would create something like Nicholas Felton's creations, or maybe use his side project, DAYTUM, to track the information.


However, there's a real disparity between the information typically listed in his work and on DAYTUM (e.g., miles walked, eggs eaten, planes flown on) and the information I would convey (e.g., unemployment, average income).

Felton's work and any number of DAYTUM accounts are intriguing because of the information on display, not the manner in which it is presented. That is its statement. Don't mistake words, the design of both projects I think is beautiful, but there's nothing all together engaging about charts in graphs. It's the intrigue of, "Why does this person care to track how many miles they travelled with a moustache?"

The data I'm working with is not deeply interesting to others in the same way. The use of charts and graphs can be similarly beautiful, and create a basis of understanding, but unless I present the information in a unique way, people simply won't bother with it. It would be dull, report like.

The visual representation necessitates the interest.