Walking as Creative Practice
Julia Sachs
This thesis explores walking as a creative practice that offers alternatives to the automatic ways we move through the urban environment. Amidst the fast-paced chaos of city life, is there room for the designer-as-walker to pause, notice, and intentionally slow down as an everyday act that accentuates the importance of the quotidian life? By embracing interruption and inconvenience, walking can become more than just a mode of transport, but as an act of resistance that prompts us to see the world anew and ask questions rather than arrive at concrete solutions. With this in mind, my research and making aims to build and navigate forward momentum that challenges the dominant experience of life through the senses. How might walking be a form of pausing? And as designers, how can this kind of walking methodology create opportunity to see, reflect, collect, and critique in order to inform our creative outputs?
Walking as Creative Practice
This book is the culmination of my design thesis on Walking as a Creative Practice. Holding traces of the happenings, writings, and design responses that make up my thesis exploration, it asks readers to engage with a methodology of walking that requires pause, reflection, and interruption within the usual operations of city life. Through evidence of labor and care, this work encourages readers spend time to reflect on the detail of craft. Red thread acts as a literal through line sewn on every other spread. It references a winding path that never quite ends or begins but rather rests and picks up again, mimicking the act of reading itself.
Aspiration: A Workbook For Drawing
This workbook consists of eight prompts that reference specific grid artworks by the painter, Agnes Martin. An introduction of simple directions breaks down a set of provided tools that suggest how to go about responding to the prompts on the drawing surface within each frame. In the back of the book is a set of rulers, each one coded with a unique visual unit based on a corresponding artwork. With the tools and directions provided, the user makes their way through the exercises creating their own replicas of the artworks. Through the process of interpretation, the book becomes a layered record of logic while conveying a message about drawing that is aligned with the philosophy of Agnes’s life and work.
Sonic Resistance in Carceral Space
This four-page newspaper contains an interview, articles, and song lyrics that explore music as a form of resistance in carceral spaces. By interpreting visual themes of imprisonment and freedom, the design works to evoke Brutalist architecture while shifting in sale to communicate a change in volume.