Author: Rachel

Today I finished my first melancholy object – a style guide!

I’ve mocked it up and included the pages below.

It took me about 3 hours total to complete this piece.

Listening to: Loro by Pinback & Gymnopedie no. 1

Experts, Committee Members:

• Do you still have the same group, why or why not?
  • I do have the same group: Jesse Weser, Tamara LaValla, and Casey Cothran. I don’t yet have a fourth one, I’ll be reaching out to others as I move forward with my work and see what I need help with.

Spring Timeline:

I didn’t make a timeline for Spring last semester, so here’s my timeline. I have decided on the mediums I want to explore melancholy through and have planned out when I plan on completing each task.

This will be a fast paced project – I don’t want to let myself think TOO hard about each piece since it’s emotion based and I want that to guide what I produce.

Since I don’t think I want to bring it all to the show but I do want to showcase it, I’ll be making sure I complete everything ahead of time so that I can layout and print a book to show everything.

Batcho, Krystine I. “Why We Love Sad Songs.” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers, 5 Jan. 2015, http://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/longing-nostalgia/201501/why-we-love-sad-songs.

Coffta, Michael. “Literature Review.” What Is a Literature Review? – Literature Review – LibGuides at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania Library, Bloomsburg University, 9 Oct. 2019, guides.library.bloomu.edu/litreview.

Desamba, Yesta. “15 Elegant Booklet Designs You Can’t Miss.” Jayce-O-Yesta, 31 Oct. 2012, jayce-o.blogspot.com/2012/10/15-elegant-booklet-designs-you-cant-miss.html.

Dickinson, Emily. “I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain, (340).” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45706/i-felt-a-funeral-in-my-brain-340.

Edelkoort, Lidewij. “Embrace Melancholy.” Trend Tablet, http://www.trendtablet.com/40699-embrace-melancholy/.

Fawcett-Tang, Roger. Experimental Formats. 2: Books, Brochures, Catalogs. Vol. 2, Rotovision, 2008.

Hanington, Bruce, and Bella Martin. Universal Methods of Design : 100 Ways to Explore Complex Problems, Develop Innovative Strategies, and Deliver Effective Design So, Quarto Publishing Group USA, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/winthrop/detail.action?docID=3399583.

Hostetler, Lisa. “Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) and American Photography.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/stgp/hd_stgp.htm (October 2004)

Jones, Jonathan. “Dürer’s Melencolia I – A Masterpiece, and a Diagnosis.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 18 Mar. 2011, http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2011/mar/18/albrecht-durer-melencolia-masterpiece-diagnosis.

Keats, John. “Ode on Melancholy by John Keats.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44478/ode-on-melancholy.

Kuekes, Lydia. “Hybrid Type.” LYDIA KUEKES, 2016, lydiakuekes.com/hybrid-type.

Lidwell, William, et al. Universal Principles of Design, Revised and Updated : 125 Ways to Enhance Usability, Influence Perception, Increase Appeal, Make Better Design Decisions, and Teach through Design, Quarto Publishing Group USA, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/winthrop/detail.action?docID=3399678.

McCrum, Robert. “The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton (1621).” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 18 Dec. 2017, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/dec/18/anatomy-melancholy-robert-burton-100-best-nonfiction-books.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “Introduction.” Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, http://www.eapoe.org/works/mabbott/tom1p043.htm.

Pogosyan, Marianna. “How Culture Shapes Emotions.” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers, 30 Mar. 2018, http://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/between-cultures/201803/how-culture-shapes-emotions.

Pound, Ezra. “And The Days Are Not Full Enough.” All Poetry, allpoetry.com/And-The-Days-Are-Not-Full-Enough.

Raven & Wood Agency. “Mirror Mirror on the Wall.” RWII by Raven & Wood Agency, Medium, 4 Mar. 2019, medium.com/ravenandwood/mirror-mirror-on-the-wall-f5551b89e5f.

The School of Life, director. On Feeling Melancholy. YouTube, YouTube, 26 Aug. 2015, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaZ1EmPOE_k.

Schorske, Carina del Valle. “Melancholy.” The Point Magazine, The Point Magazine, 2 May 2019, thepointmag.com/examined-life/melancholy/.

Smith, Tina. “Sunday Scaries.” Dribbble, 24 July 2018, dribbble.com/shots/4866761-Sunday-Scaries.

Stephens, Courtney, director. A Brief History of Melancholy. TED, TED-Ed, ed.ted.com/lessons/a-brief-history-of-melancholy-courtney-stephens.

Stewart, Jessica. “Memento Mori: Life and Death in Western Art from Skulls to Still Life.” My Modern Met, 20 June 2019, mymodernmet.com/memento-mori-art/.

Stover, Laren. “The Case for Melancholy.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 7 Nov. 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/08/style/the-case-for-melancholy.html.

Wordsworth, William. “Tintern Abbey.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, 13 July 1798, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45527/lines-composed-a-few-miles-above-tintern-abbey-on-revisiting-the-banks-of-the-wye-during-a-tour-july-13-1798.

“’Western Melancholy‘ / How to Imagine Different Futures in the ’Real World‘?” Interakcije, Interakcije, 27 Aug. 2018, interakcije.net/en/2018/08/27/western-melancholy-how-to-imagine-different-futures-in-the-real-world/.

This morning, I delivered my second informal presentation of the semester. This is my first one after switching my thesis idea over to an experimental exploration of melancholy. I mainly went over my research methods, but also showed a few visuals I have collected and gave a brief summary of what I hope to accomplish.

Thesis Explanation

I switched from branding a city because that didn’t feel exciting or worthwhile. It felt like working with a client, which is something I already have to do and will have to do all the time when I graduate. I’ve never worked on a project in the way that I plan to. I’ve never let the research and concept guide me to the end product. Usually, as a designer and as a student, I allow the final product to be the guide. I think that the process I am experimenting with here will produce something completely different than what I am used to. I’m glad I have this chance to explore and I am thankful to have people supporting this way of going about a senior thesis even though it’s difficult to explain and hard to fit into the thesis class prompts.

Now, I am conducting an exploration of the emotion melancholy as a “subgenre” of sadness – sadness’ reflective, gentle, ephemeral, wistful sister. I find melancholy to be a really beautiful thing, and something worth pursuing on occasion. I think it is different than sadness – melancholy, to me, is an acceptance of our smallness – an acceptance of the bigness of everything else.

The experience of melancholy creates a sort of quasi-religious introspection that, I think, is a wonderful part of being a human and can help us understand more about ourselves and where we fit into the universe.

Research Method 1 – Sadness Survey

I recently released a survey asking people about their experiences with sadness. This survey is what helped me to nail down which kind of sadness to focus on. The survey closes on December 1st so that I can continue to get responses throughout the semester. I asked participants the following questions:

• Define sadness in your own terms.
• Are you comfortable with being sad?
• Talk about a time you were sad.
• Do you think sadness is part of what makes us human?
• If you could take away all of the sadness in the world, would you?
• What’s your favorite sad song?
• What does sadness smell like?
• What does sadness taste like?
• What does sadness sound like?
• What color is sadness?
• Is clinical depression a type of sadness?
• Is there a problem with the way sadness is treated in America?
• How did your upbringing deal with sadness/showing emotion?

The survey helped me gather up lots of imagery, especially from the more sensory questions I asked (song, taste, sound, color). It was these responses in particular that stirred empathy and feelings in my own head and brought me to melancholy.

This research method focused on others rather than myself.

Research Method 2 – Mind Map

This method of research helped me get out all of my visual and conceptual ideas about melancholy onto one page. This was a great way of giving me some more possibly visuals to work with in the future.

This research method focused on myself rather than others.

Research Method 3 – Lit Review

It was hard for me to define a literature review myself, so here’s the definition from Bloomsburg University:

A literature review is a comprehensive summary of previous research on a topic. The literature review surveys scholarly articles, books, and other sources relevant to a particular area of research. The review should enumerate, describe, summarize, objectively evaluate and clarify this previous research.  It should give a theoretical base for the research and help you (the author) determine the nature of your research. The literature review acknowledges the work of previous researchers, and in so doing, assures the reader that your work has been well conceived. It is assumed that by mentioning a previous work in the field of study, that the author has read, evaluated, and assimilated that work into the work at hand.

Bloomsburg University

I feel this research method will particularly help me work through and understand all of the literature and poems I’ve gotten from the English department. I also have gathered together lots of articles on melancholy. I’m unsure of how well this will work for organizing any artwork I collect.

This research method uses resources from others rather than myself.

Research Method 4 – Desirability Testing

I’ve never tried this method before. This will probably be something I conduct in the spring. Basically, desirability testing shows multiple designs to an audience to see which one they prefer or connect with the most.

Since I want to make people feel something with this project, I think understanding which designs they connect with the most will be helpful.

I feel like this is something I should somehow conduct digitally because an in-person presentation may cause the participants to be biased.

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Notes/Feedback from Audience

• Project seems similar to something in the social sciences
• Think about collections vs. singles
  • Organize your imagery. Should all images be together to evoke a whole picture or should images showing sadness’ taste be separate from the ones showing sadness’ smell?
• Think about writing haiku or small poems when creating the visuals or thinking about visuals taken from the survey responses. Could help add another layer of emotion to an already emotional project as well as help to bring some clarity after trying to explain these images in words.
• The concept of branding sadness was brought up again. Would definitely at least make me stand out to employers
• Style guide for sadness brought up again
  • Picking sad fonts, colors, tone of voice, etc.
  • Could also add a layer of critique to the way style guides are created
• A book broken into sections
  • The smells of melancholy
  • The Sounds
  • The Tastes
  • The whole

• Research and Development I Will Have to Undertake

I will need to take all of the things I have “collected” so far (literature, sound effects, images, survey responses, etc.) and organize them. I will also collect some artwork (baroque, impressionist, and contemporary). I will do some of this organizing by conducting a lit review. I will be combing through the Methods textbook throughout the organization process and looking for more methods of doing this, especially for items that may not fit as well into a formal lit review.

At this point, I have enough content to be able to start creating things, but I will probably keep gathering inspiration and ideas throughout the whole year. As I keep collecting, I will have to decide whether or not the things I have collected are worthwhile to keep or if I should scrap them.

• Items I Will Make this Term

By the end of the fall term, I plan to have defined at least three elements or mediums I know I want to work with for my final product. I plan on deciding these within the next two weeks and researching them further. Currently I am interested in photography, typography, and sculpture. I will define these more specifically after looking into them more. After defining this, I will begin sketching compositions and looking back through my resources to see which concepts will fit best with what mediums.

I will create two moodboards/concept boards for each medium exploration that I plan to do as I decide which ones to explore. For example, if I want to look at baroque paintings relationship with melancholy in a photographic format, I will make either two moodboards showing different visual concepts (lighting, color palette, etc) or one with baroque elements and one with my preferred photographic style. This will happen throughout the year but I hope to have at least 2 by the end of the fall.

• Things I Have to Learn in the Spring Semester

I have to learn how to take an abstract idea/project/emotion and transform it into something sensual and visually accessible to the public. I have to learn how to make sense of my work and show that I’ve made sense of it and how.

• Supplies, tools, and/or facilities that I will need

Since I am not defining my project by the final visual outcome, I do not have a list of supplies/resources I will need. This will be updated in future writings as I narrow down creative processes.

• Resources I will have to consult

I will consult the various romantic and early 20th century books and poems I have collected from my thesis advisor and others in the English department to learn more about melancholy and how it was treated/approached in the past. I will continue to consult my mentors – so far, they have been some of my greatest assets.

Next, I plan to do research on purely medium rather than concept to get a good bearing on what different things are out there and what is feasible. I will do this using the internet and going to the various libraries I have access to.

• What thing or things will I deliver?

I will deliver a complete and comprehensive collection of research and personal reflections on the emotion of melancholy. My deliverable(s) will express the reflective, ephemeral, unsure, creative, and gentle nature of the emotion. I will show both personal attitudes towards melancholy, as well as showcasing others experiences taken from my survey responses in order to connect with and affect others and show how diverse the emotion is. My deliverable(s) will accurately and completely showcase my creative process.

I will be delivering a visual exploration of an emotion. This emotion will be created from multiple materials using multiple creative processes.

No matter what I end up creating, I would love to compile it all into a book at the end and have it printed or published. This may or may not be before the end of the school year and will not be my final deliverable.

As I’ve done more research and talked to more of my committee members about my thesis, I’ve altered the order and some of the topics of research. I’ve created an updated timeline to show these changes.

This timeline reflects the research I was actually doing in October. The order changed because of which mentors I was talking to and when. I have added in some time for me to research more mediums I haven’t had a chance to research yet, namely photography and sculpture.

This morning I met up with Tamara LaValla for the first time to talk about my thesis. We had a great conversation about all things sadness and I definitely came away with a lot of new ideas and concepts to think about. Here are some of my quick notes just so I have everything in the same place:

• Think about how other cultures view sadness
  • What colors do they associate with it? Some cultures apparently associate white with funerals
  • Think about different cultures’ words for sadness and the different connotations

• How do I make people want sadness? Could I sell it to people?
  • Variety packs of different kinds of sadness
    • Perfumes? Tea? Etc

• I want to make people feel something. What does “feel something” mean? Can I make people feel something more specific? Can I manipulate them and is manipulation bad?
  • How will people be changed after viewing this?
  • What do I mean by “comfortable”?

• Interior Design?
• Branding?
  • Style guide or something – how much space around sadness? What do the “submarks” look like?
• Something that’s usually happy
• Conceptual sadness kit – get through it

How is sadness different for different genders
Is sadness masculine or feminine? Is it both? What does it look like

• Toxic masculinity
• documentaries: Masc we live in, Miss-representation

• Rethink and deconstruct sadness
• What is natural? Is it natural to try and avoid sadness or is it natural to embrace it?
• What do we avoid about sadness and is that bad or good? Can I make people less afraid of sadness?

It’s easier to get what you want than to know what you want.

So, once I decide what I’m doing, it’ll be easy to come up with ideas for how to visually present it.

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Additional Resources from Elizabeth Dulemba:

Free online Harvard class on happiness? Good for juxtaposition

Myth and moor blog – terri windling
-She has leukemia, very reflective

Since I changed my thesis topic, I’m going to need to revise the older posts in order to keep my thesis structured and on the right path.

VCOM Faculty: Jesse Weser

I’ve got Jesse on my committee already. Jesse is a professor in the design department at Winthrop University, and someone who has helped me realize my love for design throughout my years here at WU by giving me space to do essentially what I think looks good as long as I can tell her why. She has a knack for pushing opportunities at me and tipping my ideas a little farther than I originally planned – something I’m grateful for, given my tendency to stay in the visual and conceptual places where I’m most comfortable.

Winthrop Faculty: Casey Cothran

I just emailed Professor Casey Cothran from the English department to get some insight on romantic and victorian literature. I know that time period had a lot to say about sadness and melancholy and I felt like the area of research I would need the most help in would be literature. She said she would help me and also suggested lots of resources for me to look througha as I figure out the best way to tackle sadness.

Regional Subject Matter Expert: Tamara LaValla

Tamara is my regional subject matter expert. I have my first meeting with her on Friday, October 25 but we’ve also been talking through email. She is a designer/artist/writer/creator with a knack for emotions and conceptual thinking so I think she will be a great asset to my team. I really look forward to sharing my ideas with her and picking her brain.

Tamara has started up multiple ventures in the past. I believe she currently is in business for herself at Batch Co, through which which she makes art and chocolate. Winning combo. She also helped to found the illustration department at Winthrop and Social Design House, where I currently work as an intern.

Subject Matter Expert Outside the Carolinas: ?

I haven’t nailed down my final fourth expert yet. I found a Belgian artist who is also a concept designer who created a series on melancholy that I thought about reaching out to but I’m not sure how much I would be able to use her skills since she works mostly in sculpture it seems. I may keep working through my thesis and see where I need help. That’s how I decided to reach out to an English professor.