Over the semester, my project has made slow, but steady progress. Starting from just words on paper, my project has made progress through tangible checkpoints such as making a survey, receiving responses, and starting to illustrate these responses.
Going back to the beginning of the semester, I revised my project proposal by narrowing down the number of drawings I was aiming to complete to a range of 15-20. I finalized the media I am going to be using to oil pastel, which is a media I have wanted to improve my skill in. Additionally, I specified how big the drawings were going to be which ended up being 9 x 5.5 in. In terms of the content of the project itself, I decided to incorporate both positive and negative experiences in regards to the topic of mental health. Moreover, I thought more about what exactly I was looking for to include in these drawings based on responses to the survey I am sending out.
Moving on to the first iteration of the project, I made a sample drawing and created a first draft of the survey. Components that I decided to include in the survey include demographic based questions, perspective on mental health, and a personal narrative of a mental health experience. Within the survey, I included a background regarding the premise of my project and a few disclaimers regarding the survey itself and what the responses would be used for. For the second iteration, I drew on actual drawing paper that I would use for my final project and I made adjustments to some questions of the survey based on the feedback I received from the user testing and documentation check point.
As for the future and remainder of this project, I plan to gather more responses, as of now I have 10. In addition, I also plan to continue finishing more drawings and start printing out the captions for each of them. For the drawing portion, I bought a wider color range set of oil pastels, since I encountered some difficulty blending and creating custom colors for the pieces I have worked on so far. Currently, I am working on the second drawing and I hope to have them finished at a rate of around one per week starting after spring break. For the project display portion, I plan to buy the necessary materials such as the boards as well.
In regards to feedback from other people about my project either from the user feedback assignment or class discussions, people have provided several suggestions in improving my survey as well as the content of the drawings. One of the first suggestions people made in regards to adjusting the survey was incorporating definitions of key terms in the background to help people get familiarized with them. The two terms that people asked me to define clearly were Asian American and mental health. Another aspect of the survey people had several thoughts about was the question asking people to visually describe their mental health. Originally for the first draft of the survey I only provided the question which was in need of more clarification. Based on people’s advice, I defined mental health again and specified that the person should visual one experience of mental health that can either be positive or negative. Additionally, I provided examples of what a positive or negative experience could include to give the person taking the survey a better gauge of what I am looking for in terms of how the responses should be recorded.
One critique some people had was that I only asked about how being Asian American has affected one’s mental health without asking if the person thought mental health was important as a whole. As a result, I added a question asking whether the person taking the survey thought mental health was an important topic in general. Another portion of the user feedback that I got pertains to the effectiveness of the way I present my project’s content. For the layout of the presentation of the drawings, some people advised that I shouldn’t categorize them specifically while others suggested grouping the drawings together by topics such as color or positive vs negative experience. As for the effectiveness of the medium I am presenting the topic of Asian American mental health in, a majority of people agreed that art is a powerful media and is a good way of portraying a sensitive and emotionally driven topic.
In terms of the timeline I first created for my proposal, I am relatively on schedule. Presently, I am in the stage of gathering more responses and slowly working on the drawings for the responses I have gathered so far. As of this week, I have around one and a half months to finish up the drawings.
WhAAT's on your mind? 