Two videos I made

Around this time last year, I created these two videos for student projects.

Urban Street Patterns from Elizabeth Kuehnen on Vimeo.

I became fascinated with the correlation between the growth of streets patterns and the veins in a leaf, and created this short animation to illustrate the academic paper that proves the theory. This was for Visual Language with Professor Alex Liebergesell, completed in November 2010. I used Flash, a painstakingly tedious program, to create the animation.




This project uses my photography and video clips of New York City to tell the story (to extraterrestrial life forms) of our struggle here on earth to maintain fragile beauty in an increasingly man-made world. For Design Technology with Professor Mark Sanders in October 2010. Side note: I taught myself After Effects in one weekend in order to complete the video. Thank you Lynda.com!

Re-Imagining the city

Here it is - all one hundred + pages of my thesis book. I still have yet to get three more signatures in order to offically submit the two printed copies to the department, but I'm almost there! The printed book has front and back cover flaps, and on the inside covers/flaps are the dot screen images that you see in the beginning and end of the document.

My thesis topic is about the transformation of place when you learn about the environment around you. It's about making the invisible visible, and telling the untold stories of the city. I'm posting this on the same day that I read this article about legendary designer Dieter Rams, which I found interesting considering his desire to use ordinary form and materials to make functional and beautiful products. Rams writes, "Not the spectacular things are the important things — the unspectacular things are the important things, especially in the future.”

Open publication - Free publishing - More design

His words relate to a movement towards the ordinary and "unfinished", the handmade DIY ethos of recent years. My thesis falls into this category of understanding that our everyday environment - on the way to work, walking the dog, getting a cup of coffee - is enough. It can even be an fascinating adventure when we let our curiosity take over. My thesis is also a methodology for exploring the city, and an investigation into how a designer can approach the complexities and multiple narratives of the built environment.