From the class Integrative Seminar 1 · Learning Portfolio post, December 13, 2019

First-Semester Reflection

Bio

My name is Kasper Baltazar Bielecki. At the time of writing this, I am 18 years old. I am one day away from completing my first semester at Parsons School of Design where I am studying Product Design. My favorite hobbies are 3D printing, teaching myself new skills such as 3D modeling or visual effects, skateboarding and diving into anything comic related, but not all at the same time.

What themes and working methods emerge in several courses?

My favorite colors teal, and tangerine.
I have not used anywhere near as many machine tools as I thought I would but instead, I gained a new appreciation for hand tools.
I definitely to pump things out in one shot instead of spreading work out. If I start something I like to finish it. If I don’t finish it immediately I often lose motivation and don’t go back to it.

What skills did you learn in one course that you utilized in another?

In drawing class, I learned to care less while drawing and not expect myself to be perfect. This helped me loosen up and especially benefited me in Space/Materiality with my ideation sketching. I was able to draw more and draw quicker, visually developing my ideas further.

What connections do you see between your academic studies and studio making?

Personally I don’t really see a difference between my studio and academic work because to me they’re the same thing.

What made some projects/ papers more exciting? What did you enjoy most about these?

All of my favorite projects were in studio class and they were my favorite because they didn’t have arbitrary constraints such as not being allowed to use glue or the color black. Studio class was very open-ended and I was free to do as I liked. I understand the constraints are meant to teach me new avenues of thought but also they really sometimes felt like rules just to have rules.

When could further research have helped? What about making/writing?

Further research would have been helpful on most of my projects as I tend to not to do any. I like to just jump into a project and often not even think much about it. I work through iteration and do research on my own in that way.

2 Highlights

My first highlight of this semester would be reading Shop Class As Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work by Matthew Crawford. This book was a text companion for my space and materiality class. I listened to it in one shot on an audiobook and it was great. It taught me many things such as the fact that hand-done work is dying and needs to be preserved and the fact that more and more so people rely on technology that they do not understand. Everything is invisible until it stops working in which the illusion of technology is broken and a knowledgable person must step in and fix it. Reading this book made me focus more on hand tools this semester and to move away from machines. The machines at parsons are however the main reason I chose to come here so eventually I will work my way back to them.

The second highlight of this year seems very minute but is HUGE for me and I think about it every day. I took an Intro to Model Making workshop that completely blew me away. I learned so many tips and tricks that now seem obvious but I never would have thought of otherwise. The one trick that is so simple yet completely blew my mind was a trick on how to divide something that doesn’t break down into whole inches into any amount of segments without doing any math. Pretty much all there is to it is to slant your ruler. Say you have a 4-inch square piece of paper that you want to split into 7 segments. All you have to do is slant the ruler until the 0 is on one edge and the 7 is on the other edge, then simply draw a mark at each inch and finally draw the straight lines you want from those segments. I think about this trick every day it honestly shook me to my core. It was the only thing this year that I learned that I feel I learned completely from scratch. It did not build on any past knowledge or increment but simply swept me off my feet.

I am excited for the next semester but even more so for the next year. The main class that I am excited about next semester is defining place as it is out of my comfort zone. I chose it because I really enjoyed professor Chris Nguyen’s workshops and wanted to take the chance to explore a bit before taking my product design courses. I am however so much more excited to take these product design courses the next 3 years and finally jump into learning about what I applied for! I also really want to start looking for an internship in the field and develop my skills more through practical experience not just school work.

Originally posted on my Parsons Learning Portfolio.