Speed tutorials w/Unit 3 students
The speed tutorials with the Unit 3 students was an interesting exercise. I started as an observer of a unit 3 student and unit 1 student describing their favourite objects to one another and the listener having to draw what the describer was describing to them. The first describer was the unit 3 student, I think possibly due to language barriers the students misunderstood what Oscar asked them to do. The brief was to describe the item using descriptive words to help the listener draw the item, however they did not do that throughout the first exercise. The describer started by explaining what the item looked like and the listener immediately started to try to envision something they had seen before. The describer then started to stray from the descriptive words and started to explain what the item was/helping the listener draw the item. After the time was up we had a group discussion about what everyone had learned from the exercise and with clarification the second round when the describer/listener switched roles, the exercise went much better.
What I specifically learned from this exercise was how important descriptive words are and to ask yourself why you specifically like an item. Is it the shape, the texture, the material, etc of the item? The overarching theme I’m noticing of this unit is to teach us how to break down an item into why you find it interesting and then use those themes in our own practise.
In the final exercise of the speed tutorials, I sat with Nol and we discussed his focus of research. He broke his research into two parts; one being how to create a sustainable ceramics business, both environmentally speaking and in business. He has been running his ceramics studio for almost 10 years now and wanted to focus on how he can build a studio/business that will last. His second part of research was based around food waste and integrating food waste materials into his clay. He made a composite clay with oyster shells and some other form of clay (I have never practised with ceramics so I did not fully understand the process). I asked him several questions regarding his research to get a basis of knowledge regarding what he was researching and then moved on to questions of how he got to the questions he was asking. His journey with ceramics and working with food waste seemed to come from a recycling concern he had and the necessity of awareness to show consumers what they eat has an impact. I was trying to gain perspective on how someone can get to a research question that invigorates them to dive deep into that topic.
We eventually moved on to what I was thinking for my research focus. I have to admit I’ve felt slow in deciphering what exactly what I want to do regarding my research. I guess that is just part of “being confident in the ambiguous”, however I’ve found it very hard to be confident in these feelings of uncertainty. Nol asked what I was thinking of researching and I had an overarching answer of focusing on music. How humans make music, how humans use music, how spaces interact with sounds/music. Nol said he felt that the topic was large and a little vague, which I was aware of and was trying to do more research to get to a more refined topic of research. He gave me a few suggestions of how to research and how to decipher my feelings of where I want to go with this course. Discussing these things with Nol made me realise the course is short and that my research will be evolving throughout. The more I research, the more refined the questions become, however the questions will always continue as long as I stick with the topic.
