Tim Wise

Having Tim Wise was so cool. Mostly my research for project #3 consisted of reading the packet of his articles and taking notes and attending his lecture. My notes were very informal; I really just wrote down anything that struck me, paying special attention to ideas that threaded themselves through more than a couple of his articles. Then I took those notes and the key ideas that stood out to me the most were the ones that I brought to m sketchbook.

Some of the ideas I worked with were the ideas of colorblindness, the danger of not addressing racism, and privilege. I played with the idea of visually representing racism as a cancer that grows quietly and silently, so one of my sketches involved a person, or at least the outline of a person, in black and white, with the word racism in a mass in color, with circles of color going out from the word to try and express the spreading and growing of racism within people. I wasn't sure that the message would really get across with this design, though, so I continued sketching.

My next sketch dealt with Tim Wise's assertion that racism physically wears on the bodies of people of color. However, I was worried that working with this concept would easily become victimizing of people of color. I wanted to be respectful and try to find the balance between recognizing the suffering that racism causes and yet also not speak for people of color or victimize them. I didn't see myself finding that balance in this sketch so I went back to square one in the sketchbook.

The next concept that I worked with was the idea that the lenses of privilege that we all have affect us, and the way that we view the world, ourselves, and others. And often they affect us without us ever realizing that they are affecting us. With this idea of lenses, the image of glasses came into my head. Specifically, I thought about a hodge-podge of unique, vintage-feeing glasses and sunglasses. So I had this idea of glasses. I matched it with the idea of selling a product, and needing a disclaimer, so I developed the disclaimer at the bottom about the way that these lenses may affect our ability to change, have compassion, view reality, etc.

From there, it was a matter of putting it all together in a way that was visually pleasing, which took a lot more time messing around with different glasses, colors, angles, and styles, than I had expected. Eventually I had to pair down on the number of glasses that I had selected, which made it a lot cleaner and simpler.