Introducing myself through information design
This project was created for Graduate Studio 1 at Carnegie Mellon University. It is information design, and it is also a self-portrait that describes an aspect of who I am. My classmates and I began by creating lists of facts about our lives, based on Richard Saul Wurman's "5 Hatracks;" or principles of organization. We used these lists of data as the basis for our self-portraits.
After creating lists and sketching ideas, I decided to focus on my relationships and how they have changed throughout my life. I color-coded the relationships based on which type of category they fit into (e.g. friends, family, husband, etc). As a final step, I added bands in the background which show where I was living during each period of time. Thus, I used 4 out of 5 of Wurman's hatracks: time, hierarchy, category, and location (the fourth is "alphabet").
Click here to download my process book (1 MB), which explains my creative process in detail. Selected sketches from my process are shown below.
Final design, 24 x 36 in. Click here to view as a PDF (160 KB)
Process
Step 1: lists of data about myself. Until the data is given context and meaning, it is not considered information.
Step 2: sketches for self-portrait. My first idea was to contrast relationships and achievements throughout time.
Step 3: first concept on computer: relationships vs. achievements. Interesting, but seemed disconnected. I chose to focus solely on the relationships aspect.
