SAW: A Past Tense
My name is Thanh, and it is great to meet you.
If we meet in person, please know that remembering faces is a lot easier for me than names, and I apologize beforehand. Repetition repetition repetition is the best way for me to remember anything from using shortcuts for Adobe products, playing piano, or learning a new dance.
When you think about the word “saw,” do you relate that word to seeing? When I worked on this small project to create a design combining text and image, the most difficult part of the process was reflecting on the term to truly understand what it meant.
After a few days of writing and sketching, I came up with designs about our sense of sight and the word itself. However, none of the ideas worked, and I was stuck on the past tense of saw. I began to survey people I knew and didn’t to ask a question.
What did you see yesterday?
I asked people to write what they saw yesterday in a notebook to search for any patterns throughout the process. This only led to more questions, but one stood out that provided me the answer I was looking for and defines this project.
When I witnessed people writing in the notebook, I came to the conclusion that the word “saw” greatly depends on remembering. Our sense of sight through visuals such as eyes or glasses is a natural connection because of semiotics.
Did you “see” or “remember what you saw.”
Focusing on this perspective of “remembering what you saw” led to the bigger picture of what can be felt by reflecting on yesterday or the “days of future past.” In this specific case and design, I thought about the feelings that can come from memory loss and, on a deeper level, dementia—How frustrating it is to forget bits of information or how angry you can be to not remember what you saw. These emotions are reflected on the design through the use of fading and missing elements.