Self-Reflection

Throughout this course, I have faced creative challenges many times over and learned valuable lessons from completing them.

I found each of the five weeks of RCMPs to be quite challenging. Though the RCMPs were intended to be rapid prototypes, I found it difficult to create projects which had a small enough scale to make for a reasonable workload but which were still meaningful and of a satisfying quality. I also struggled to decide on ideas each week, at times because the open prompts felt too broad, and at other times because I didn’t want to be constrained to the themes of previous RCMPs. However, the RCMPs were rewarding in giving me opportunities to explore creative forms outside of my comfort zone and skill set, such as illustration and animation. My thesis is back in my familiar territory of computation, but I am keeping an open mind to incorporating illustration and animation in some way, down the line.

I have really appreciated the opportunities given in this course for me to reflect on myself and to hear about the journeys that my classmates are going on as well. I have definitely learned valuable lessons about myself, my interests, and my goals. For example, I have come to find the phrase “poetic tools” as an apt one to describe the bulk of my creative work. An interest that I find myself repeatedly iterating on is the elegance of tying function to meaning, crafting both sides to evoke the same satisfaction of a powerful metaphor in language. Furthermore, I find most interest in works that are interactive: I can begin the process by creating a tool, but it really takes on life when other people use it to their own purposes, especially if I can’t anticipate how they respond to it.

Though the theoretical concepts of Creswell and Poth (2018) and Leavy (2015) felt like superfluous jargon at times, I have gained from them valuable skills and strategies for conducting research. By understanding specific frameworks that I can situate my work in, I now know how to model my research after established principles and examples of qualitative inquiry and arts-based research, which has been crucial in the process of completing this prospectus.

As for my thesis, I am thrilled with how it turned out. Initially, when writing my potential abstracts, my other idea was much more fleshed out, as I had been thinking about it for a while, and this was just a wild and vague jumble of ideas I could dream up. As it turned out, though I still like the idea and think that it’s important, it felt too burdensome and I ultimately felt much more passionately about this idea. I’m glad I took a chance on this much less defined idea, as I found myself diving head-first into it, with much anticipation for the rest of the journey.

Ultimately, I’m grateful for the opportunities to learn, practice, and grow throughout this course, and I’m very excited to continue developing my thesis project in the fall.