The Capstone is a culminating project presented to the public in an end-of-semester exhibition. It is anticipated (but not required) that students will use the Capstone project as an opportunity to iterate or revise a previous project from the semester.
Your Capstone project is due in the following stages:
- Thursday, 27 April 2017: In-class “round-robin” pod critiques
- Tuesday, 2 May, 4pm: Image, title and caption due, for our printed catalog
- Thursday, 4 May, 5-7pm: Public exhibition, in the STUDIO.
- Wednesday, 10 May, Noon: All documentation due.
Before proceeding to the details of the deliverables, please note the following two key points:
- Your Capstone has two components: an exhibited media object, and its documentation. For the exhibition at 5pm on May 4th, you will present a “media object” such as a video, animated GIF, printed flipbook, 3D printed sculpture, etc. etc. Be sure to speak with the professor about what sort of equipment you’ll need (such as a monitor, etc.)
- For the documentation, which is due no later than noon Wednesday May 10, please include all requested deliverables in your blog post. Please do this even if this means repeating information you’ve provided previously.
Deliverables:
Catalog Materials
We will be printing a small catalog documenting your projects, which will be distributed at the exhibition. By Tuesday, May 2, at 4:00pm, please provide the professor with the following, in a blog post titled nickname-forcatalog, and categorized ForCatalog:
- The title of your capstone project
- A one-sentence description of your capstone project, ideally under 140 characters
- A high-resolution image of your capstone project (at least 1200 pixels wide), with a 2:1 (wide) aspect ratio
Blog Documentation
As usual, you are asked to document your project in a blog post. Your project itself (the “media object”) is due by no later than 4pm on Thursday May 4th, in time for our 5pm exhibition. The blog documentation described below is due no later than noon Wednesday May 10th, though you may submit it earlier if you wish.
- Create a blog post, titled nickname-final and categorized Final.
- At the top of your blog post, place the title of your project, the one-sentence description, and the high-resolution catalog image.
- Write about 200 words on the following:
- What IS your project? (Depending on your project, it may be helpful to discuss the following things separately: the subject you wanted to capture; the system you created to capture it; and the nature of the media object you created in order to present the results of your capture process.)
- Why is your project interesting? (Depending on your project, it may be helpful to discuss: Why were you interested in capturing your particular subject? In what way is your capture system or media object novel? What motivated or inspired you to conduct this investigation?) Note that you may need to educate your reader somewhat about your subject, tools, or techniques.
- Contextualize your work. Include an image of prior or related work by others. Briefly discuss how your work continues (whether technically, or in terms of content) where previous work leaves off.
- Evaluate your work. Where did you succeed, what could be better, what opportunities remain?
- Embed your media object. This is the thing itself, in the best quality you can. If your media object cannot be embedded in a web page (e.g. if it’s an executable application, or a 3D-printed object), please make an embeddable media object to document it, such as a screen-grabbed video recording or an animated GIF.
- After embedding the media object, narrate the process of creating your project. Here’s the place for your “making-of” section. Include the following supporting materials:
- Write text about how you made/captured the thing
- Include process images: sketches from your notebook, photos of you working on your project, screenshots at intermediate stages, alternate versions of your final object, dead ends you pursued.
- Please include redundant documentation in the form of animated GIFs, which are very durable.