michmcknight

[michmcknight]

If You Build It

The learning opportunity presented to the kids in this video was astounding.  I truly believe that most every school system needs to implement this type of program because there will always be kids that learn better with their hands. It is incredibly disappointing that they weren’t being paid to teach. The environment they provided those kids, I would bet, taught them more valuable things in that year than they ever did in the basic, traditional setting. Not everyone can be a doctor. Not everyone can be a millionaire. Some people are better suited, and are much happier working in the way these kids were able to. Seeing their designs come to life must have been such a groundbreaking moment for them. Learning the skills to think of an idea, draw it out, communicate it clearly, prototype it, and actually build it, are skills that they are going to use for the rest of their lives. Many students who attend school in a traditional setting don’t even know how to communicate an idea clearly! It is a shame that the program couldn’t continue and that the board of education was refusing to pay these people to teach. They impacted that community more than they will ever know, but if the community could have kept them, so much more could have been done.

[michmcknight]

Week 15

Pinkston talks about how designers can stay relevant and be mindful about their work to ensure that they aren’t causing harm to others. This is a really interesting idea and something that I feel like I constantly think about with my own art. In all of my illustrations, I love to try to represent all different types of people, but I also don’t want to misrepresent or offend the people that I am drawing. I never want to stereotype people with the characters that I create but I think that it’s important to draw and showcase something that’s different from the white, Eurocentric, and westernized art that Pinkston talks about. I think that, like he says, it is so important to be mindful of the moral implications of our interventions with different cultures as we create and design and we need to be mindful of what consequences our art might have when we share it. If I illustrate a children's book, more than just white, male, heterosexual, neurotypical, able bodied people will see the book. It is very important for all children, and even adults, to see characters that look like them, so it is the illustrator’s job to include all different kinds of people - and to illustrate them mindfully, in a way that accurately represents the community. His comparison of designers and anthropologists makes a lot of sense - anthropologists and the field in itself had to reinvent their practices and recognize where they were being ethnocentric and learn how to avoid doing this to reduce the harm to the communities they were working in. Designers definitely need to consider this and ensure that they’re not doing the same thing. Designers have to be able and willing to accept when they’ve done something wrong and make the adjustments when people call for change or point out a flawed design. Being able to understand the consumer or the people who interact with your art and understand how art can hurt someone is a crucial part of the job.

[michmcknight]

Connecting with Context pt.1

This Is Us, Season 5, Episode 1 was a roller coaster of emotions (and definitely made me cry a little). For this show, that is far from unusual, but the topics they presented in this particular episode were much different than any in the previous seasons (that I can remember... its probably been a year since I watched it). They touched on the general tension with the US election, but the main focus was Randall and his family’s reaction to the murder of George Floyd. 

Empathy was one of the biggest issues/themes that I recognized in this episode. Randall, a black person who was adopted by a white family, struggles and feels uncomfortable communicating with his siblings about racial issues because he knows that they are unable to relate to him in any way. Growing up, their parents never talked about racial tension or black people being killed and he had to learn about it and emotionally deal with it alone. Now, he has a wife who is also black and children who he is able to relate to. Because of this, he decides to spend his(and his sibling’s) birthday(they’re triplets/were all born the same day) with his wife and children instead of joining his siblings and mother to celebrate. 

The most interesting conversation in this episode, I find, was between Randall and Kate(his sister). Kate expresses that she wishes to empathize with him, she knows that it must be an incredibly difficult time for him and his family. His response was that, while the death of George Floyd is heartbreaking, it is far from unusual. That this has been happening since they were kids and she has just been ignorant to it until now. 

This conversation was hard for me. It felt to me, while watching it, that Randall was being really harsh. He had an accusatory tone toward Kate, when she had nothing but good intentions. Nothing he said was wrong, and he it totally justified for feeling the way he did. But I personally think there was a better way for him to respond. Being her brother, he could have given examples of ways for her to further educate herself on the matter and figure out what exactly it is that she can do. But maybe the only reason I think that is because of how I view family, or maybe it’s because of my white privilege.

It was a whole whirl wind of empathy/lack there of and ignorance/realizations. Very emotional. And I very much relate to Randall who, at the end of the episode, said to his wife that all of what was happening made him feel just...sad.

[michmcknight]

Reflecting on 2020

First and foremost, if I were to describe 2020 in one word it would be... “Ew”. 

The toilet paper frenzy was maddening. It showed just how selfish people can really be. At first, the pictures were funny... but then it became a reality. It wasn’t just a couple people buying up all of the “essential” paper products like I initially thought. Every local grocery store was out of toilet paper, paper towels, disinfectant wipes, and anything of the like. It felt to me like no one had any empathy for anyone else. This feeling continued through 2020 and has made its way into this year. 

As for all of the atrocious injustices that have occurred, they feel unreal. They happened in a separate world than the one I live in. But then I remember, people are selfish enough to buy all of the toilet paper up and leave nothing for others who need it just as much as they do. By doing that, they are saying that they matter more than everyone else. They deserve those products more than everyone else. People, time and time again, have proved that they care only about themselves, especially people in “power” or who are privileged. So why do these injustices feel like they could never happen in my world? How can I expect anything else? It sounds so pessimistic and sad. I wish it were different, but humans have never been any different. Someone is always at war with another, a person in power is always taking advantage of their position, and the rich are never going to happily share with the poor. How can I expect people to act differently than they always have? This is the way we are. But that surely doesn’t mean that is how we should be.

I disengaged. I felt, and I still feel, quite helpless in this matter. I believe that everyone should be treated equally and I don’t, for the life of me, understand how it’s so hard for that to be a reality. Why is it so hard to reeducate the police and the “system” in general? 

Being a privileged white person, it is not my place to speak for the black community. I will never understand what it is like to be them, to be discriminated against for the color of my skin, and I will not pretend that I know how they feel. I know what it is like to be a white female who grew up in a middle class family. What I can do, though, is support those around me. I can properly educate myself on what is happening in both the world at large and here at home. I can treat everyone equally, as they should be, and be respectful and empathetic with everyone I meet. But I will never act like I know what it is like to be in anyone’s shoes but my own.

[michmcknight]

Responding to Think Wrong, the video/article about Wicked Problems, and the clip from FRINGE22

All throughout my career as a student, I was never part of the “in” crowd. The status quo was an extremely important to my peers, and I did try to fit in when I could, but I couldn’t ever get it right. It isn’t that I wanted to fit in... I just wanted to fit in a little more. My efforts were usually minimal, but they were the best I could do. I was a chunky kid, so the crop tops and skin tight clothes that the other girls wore didn’t look good on me, and I knew it. The other girls wanted to talk about boys and their crushes, but I wanted to talk about more meaningful things like the why’s and how's of society. It didn’t make me happy when other kids gave me nasty looks in the school hallway or when I didn’t get invited to whoever’s birthday party - but pretending to be someone else and to forcing myself to abide by the status quo made me even less happy. I found myself sitting somewhere in the middle between fitting in and not. 

This is what drove me for a long time. It was a huge part of why I made art. By the end of high school I finally gave up trying to be something I wasn’t. I let go. Once I stopped caring, my art completely changed. I let myself ask “why” things were the way they were and “how” they got to be that way. I felt more comfortable with myself and my art than I ever had before. 

I thought college would be different... it’s not. And as Think Wrong says, neither is the work place. But, unlike elementary through high school, being different is the status quo for the art community. Your artwork has to be unique; it must be different than everyone else’s if you want someone to notice and hire you. If you want to be a successful artist, thinking wrong is mandatory - but there are limits. Illustration requires a balance. You have to think outside of the box when creating your art, but it can’t be too crazy, otherwise it is unrelatable or unrealistic or distracting or just straight up wrong. Any work you make has to be “just different enough” to stand out from the crowd as to not overwhelm the target audience. I think most artists deal with this by separating their art into two categories: art they do for work/to make money and art they do for themselves/keep at home. Even Dr.Seuss’ art got weirder than what’s in his books. His children’s books were just weird enough... or should I say, just normal enough, to be accepted and loved by the masses. Meanwhile, the artwork he kept at home was far from normal enough. 

In all, my takeaway from these readings and videos was the realization that, while thinking wrong is incredibly important to society at large since it is how we develop and better ourselves, there still must be a balance in order for any new idea to be accepted into society. No one will accept some insane idea that no one has ever thought of, even if it is the perfect solution that could save our planet from dying, especially if there isn’t proof that it works/will work/is true/etc. But, if you mix this insane idea with a little bit of tradition, reality, nostalgia, comfort, or what is already accepted by society, it is then that the idea will sprout and reach the maximum amount of listeners. For example, while banning all single use plastics would make an incredible impact and benefit out planet a whole lot, the people refuse to act on it. They are much more likely to get behind using reusable straws and water bottles than they are to support banning single use plastics.