What I most want out of this program is focus. While my combination of writing, design, and programming seemed, from the outside, like a narrow focus in and of itself, I’ve found that I exist less in a reductive intersection of those three than in a multidimensional space created by layering and projecting them through each other, leaving lots of room for exploration.
Of my various overlapping interests and identities, the only one which adequately encapsulates the others is that of storyteller. While I’ve recently heard and read lots of work considering stories as a kind of data, I think my natural inclination is to do the opposite: to see data as a subset of story, user experience as the creation of a particular kind of narrative, and design, while not synonymous with story, as an instrumental process and tool for communicating story to an audience.
I want this program to help me develop my voice and grounding as a storyteller, without giving up the other identities and skills I hold in more technical disciplines. I want it to set me on a path where I can continue to tell stories with and about data, ideally within the context of PhD research. And I want it to help me discover the stories which need to be told. As a fiction writer and artist, I could spend the rest of my life making just the things which interest me, but I’ve been rather convicted by current events to realize that, in general, it is not my story which needs to be told or my voice which needs to be amplified. Pervasive data and the economy surrounding it means that there are tons of stories being told about every one of us, often without our knowledge or consent, and I think an important part of my work will involve not only creating individual narratives of my own design but also developing experimental media and tools to empower others to tell their stories as well.
