During my junior year at CCS, the graphic design department approached a handful of students and asked us a question: How can we do a better job telling the story of what we do here? They sponsored a semester long project for two teams of four students to come up with a solution. My contribution to our team's effort was an improved system of showcasing student work, executed in the form of an interactive projection display that showcased various student projects within the graphic design space.
As the design practice continues to diversify, so does our department. Students are not only designing books and posters; they’re also animating, making films, photographing, creating identity systems, programming websites, designing typefaces, building installations, etc. Printed work was routinely put on display throughout the department space, but work of non-printed mediums was often never showcased because there was no efficient way of doing so. By using projection to fill up the walls, the department could not only display a much broader scope of student work, but could also rotate in new work more frequently with much less effort.
The goal of the installation was not just to show student work, but to tell the story of a student’s process from start to finish. The problem was that process documentation practices were relatively poor: the process books students were required to submit were often thrown together last minute, which usually meant they were long and too disorganized. Resolving this issue meant breaking a project down into its most simple components — the idea, the execution, and the result, which we categorized as Think, Play, and Create.
In order to boil down weeks worth of process into something you could comprehend quickly, we established a new practice for collecting process work: instead of uploading your process book, students were given creative freedom to tell the story of their project through a series of 3 to 5 images or videos of their choosing, allowing them to highlight what they considered to be the most pivotal moments of their project.
