April 20, 2008
Final Project
Disclaimer: I had quite a bit of difficulty resizing the pictures to make them viewable in my blog, while still maintaining the quality of the pictures. To view the pictures, right click and download them to the desktop so you can then view the pictures in full size.
My idea
My project started around my continued struggle with finding some place to start projects. What I lacked was the correct frame of reference for my project on framing. The idea then came to me, after much deliberation, to adjust the project so that the approach I took was from something I understood. The idea for my project came to me to use a Process Flow Diagram or PFD. These diagrams are ways of expressing the layout of a process in Chemical Engineering. Since over the past semester I've been exposed to these a lot, I thought using a PFD somehow would be a great way of finding a place to start. As I continued to explore this idea, I was able to take it a little further and strip down a PFD, and came up with the idea of using it as a template for writing a poem. Then came the task of figuring out what it was that I wanted to write about. After some thought, it finally came to me, why not write about flow, which really had been the inspiration for the project.
I really felt that flow was one of the best manifestations to explain everything and in writing about it, the poam would become more flexible to describe and define anything. In doing this, I thought it was appropriate that my presentation of the project be two sided, and that the one side include an actual PFD and a description of all the the stages of it, to gain a better understanding of what a PFD was. These are shown in the following pictures.
Then, to compliment this and incorporate the poam into this, the opposite side was of the PFDs built around containing the written words. The words of the poem were written on the lines that indicated flow, serving to both show the flow, and give it some direction. Different lines converge and diverge to show that different beginnings can come together and also one line can split apart.
The words of the poam are shown below.
The aspect of framing that was most amazing to me was how something with one purpose (a PFD) can reassert itself in a totally unexpected way to become something different. The fact that this diagram could on one hand show a complete chemical process; things coming in, coming out, changing form (reacting) and some things staying the same. Or on the other hand, could be a literal representation of FLOW, with the corresponding definition of flow, was amazing to me. The thought of reconfiguration and re-expression was something that I found to be unique to framing. What can't framing explain? What can't it put into context? I learned a lot through this project, but one of the main points I took away was the ability of manifestation in different forms is something that a frame is capable of.
Posted by ndjames at April 20, 2008 09:11 PM