In the investigation phase of Visual Sensemaking I’ve been doing a bunch of sketches of the process. These are visual representations or symbols of key moments and influences in my life.
In this investigation, I redrew what we had covered in class and filled in a lot of things that I had left out the first time around. First, the influence that competitive riding had on me in my early life. Then I remembered how much the study of film and acting changed me (I will discuss more in the next post).
This is an awesome illustration by Stephanie Cooper, who I worked with during class to create our visual story. It was interesting that I discovered two key mentor figures in my life besides my parents – both teachers but in completely different fields. The first was my environmentalist teacher from Boulder, Colorado who is definitely the reason I only buy organic food and was awakened to many social and environmental causes. The second teacher is Rebecca Morton from NYU, who took me under her wing when I transferred and began my political science studies. She encouraged me to enter the honors courses and to apply for a grant for my thesis, which I received in the Fall of 2003. The topic was on the correlation between polluting corporations and environmental legislation. It required a lot of numbers crunching using Stata, and seems like another lifetime compared to what I’m doing now!