- Week 7 -
Research in Art & Design
From Understanding Comics, what stayed with me was how McCloud frames comics as a system for thinking about time, space, and meaning, not just as a storytelling medium. The idea that time can be shaped spatially through panels, gaps, and rhythm resonated with how I think about designing experiences. Meaning doesn’t live in images or words alone, but in the relationship between them, and in what the user mentally fills in. This felt very relevant to interactive and immersive work, where what you don’t show or explicitly explain is often as important as what you do. It made me think about how much of good experience design relies on trusting the user to complete the interaction cognitively and emotionally.
In Iterate, I connected most with the framing of failure as something that only becomes useful when it’s examined carefully. Iteration isn’t just repetition; it’s a discipline of paying attention, redefining the problem, and adjusting direction based on what actually happened, not what we hoped would happen. This mirrors how I experience building systems or prototypes: the value isn’t in getting it right quickly, but in learning how and why something doesn’t work. What I keep wondering is how to protect that exploratory space in more rigid environments, where iteration risks becoming procedural rather than genuinely reflective.
Readings:
- Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics Ch 4 & 6
- Iterate: Ten Lessons in Design and Failure, Ch 3
Videos:
- Dividing Projects into Phases (NYU Stream, YouTube)
- How to conduct Literature Reviews, by our NYU Librarians (NYU Stream, Zoom Recording)