montserrat design
design senior projects, ca 1998-2020

2014  <   2015   >   2016 course blogs : fall 14, spring 15

			Mayuka Fujii Alexander Iverson Deborah Manchester
			Sarah Middleton Alyssa Pettit Shelby Rivers
			Brenda Roswess (Book Arts)

 

• Mayuka Fujii
  Illustrated Art School Discipline character design

  personification of academic concentrations (majors) at Montserrat College of Art.
  shown in thumbnail image, “graphic design.”

• Alexander Iverson
  memories, Frankenstein

  memories — data collection, documentation of 306 cigarette butts encountered during walk from the Hardie building at 23 Essex Street to 197 Cabot Street; development of visualizations.
  Frankenstein — collection and analysis of used copies of a single edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and visualizations and derivations from those.

• Deborah Manchester
  normal | normality

  My thesis explores how people perceive and interact with the concept of normality on a societal and personal level, and the complex issues raised by having an idea of “normal.”

  formats —
  experimental books, post-its, other investigations

• Sarah Middleton
  Dream Threads (originally : Bookmarks, placemarks, indexing)

  Surveying and mapping different types of spaces such as physical space (Billerica, Beverly) and mental space (my dreams). Both of these physical and mental spaces have emotional dimensions to me (personal history, relationships, memories, etc.). Between these spaces I will seek to identify linkages by means of tagging and classification... These tags, along with graphic and diagrammatic devices will provide means to connect and discover connections between these diverse realms.

  formats —
  two- and three-dimensional diagrams to give visuals of the information gathered from these physical and mental spaces, and the threads that connect them.

• Alyssa Pettit
  Rox Flux : A Geologic Illumination

  This project centered around the collection of specific rocks. Each rock was obtained in sync with particular life events, and provided information relating to them. This thesis generalizes the correlation of life in real time with inanimate stones and the general study of information design. Each rock provided data such as date, time, location, color and shape. The organization of this data illustrates the meaning of age and time.

  formats —
  collage, digital illustration, and photography

• Shelby Rivers
  from quilling, to generative design, to observations of other cars on commute to school... to

  ... to dead end, to getting lost, to stuff in cars in a junk yark (“I was feeling ambitious this week”), to an inventory and careful sketches of all the stuff in Shelby’s car.
  thumbnail view, above : camera in back seat, passenger’s side.

• Brenda Roswess (Book Arts)
  Softcore Books / State of the Codex

  Softcore Books explores contemporary relationships to the codes in the digital age, through performance, videos and books. The work exists at the intersection of two elements:
  1. The responses to ebooks in 2010, arguably the most charged moment for books post-internet.
  2. How the network engages with the codex, through the scope of porn (i.e., Food Porn, Closet Porn, Shelf Porn, Library Porn, Book Porn.

  Softcore Books wishes to fetishize the book, to be intimate with it, to show it with all the soft-focus, dust and water damage possible in hopes of beginning to understand what we want from the codex.

  thumbnail image —
  detail from Saddle Gals, at youtube
  see also Civilization and Its Discontents : Pages i-xxvii at vimeo