Month: October 2021

Reflective journal – My mindset

A logical diagram of my journey so far

Looking back at my decisions in the project so far, I find that my way of thinking is one-dimensional instead of thinking from a more diversified perspective.

I began with the problematic employment of art graduates, and I analysed the reasons for it. Then I found that it’s a complicated problem that contains many different reasons, from policy, personality, education to society etc. But for a one year MA project, I cannot solve all of these problems, and I have to start at one point.

Then the process becomes to:

  1. One of the reasons is the lack of professional understanding when choosing a major, so I want to create a platform to help art students better understand their major before choosing their major.
  2. It is difficult for art graduates to sell their paintings on the Internet because they cannot run commercial accounts. Therefore, I want to make a booklet to help them run commercial accounts on social platforms.
  3. They couldn’t sell the paintings because the audience didn’t resonate, so I tried to strengthen the audience’s resonance through multi-sensory.

I find my way of thinking is very direct, point-to-point problem-solving. For example, I only consider art students changed careers because of employment difficulties, but I didn’t think that at least they found a job. Should we do what we love or love what we do? I only consider how to help the audience understand the works of art students, but do they care whether the audience can appreciate their works?

I think I lack the ability to think comprehensively and critically. At the same time, the background research is not enough. In the future, I will ask myself more ‘why’ when making decisions and thinking about problems.

Reflective Journal – first failure intervention

In my first intervention, I try to create a brochure about how to create a business account by interviewing successful people. I successfully interviewed three people (my previous classmates who did very well), while other famous artists who didn’t know me didn’t reply to my email.

Then I realised that it was a failed intervention. Because I didn’t change anything and successful people won’t tell you their secret.
From this experience, I learned that what is real intervention. Interviewing could be background research or secondary research because it only knows something from others rather than your own experience.
Why it happened? firstly, I think I didn’t understand the meaning of intervention. But it was a good failure, at least I learned what intervention is. Secondly, I think I lack some life or work experiences. I even didn’t notice that successful people won’t share their secrets. I need to be more thoughtful and have more logical thinking. Next time, if I want to know some ‘secrets’ from others, think about why they would like to tell me, what I can offer them, and what profit they can acquire from me.