everything i made this year by Gloria Z. '26
(mostly)
Wow I haven’t blogged in one million years! I feel like I’ve written many stubs and snippets over the past few months, but I haven’t been able to push any of them over the finish line, mostly due to lack of time and mental space. In an effort to record at least some of what happened this year, I’m writing this blog, which includes…
First, the things I made this year, including but not limited to textiles, paintings, and posters. As we round out 2024, I wanted to audit my creative output this year, in order to 1) see what actually happened and 2) figure out what I want to focus on making next year. To summarize my thoughts in a sentence, I would say that this was a year of trying new mediums and materials, sometimes at the cost of letting old skills atrophy.
The second part of this blog is about, more abstractly, the decisions I made this year. I feel like many parts of my life began to shift and settle into place, if only on the surface, and I’ve been thinking a lot about my career, work-life balance, creativity, and how different it is to work than to be a student. More on these things further down the blog, though, and we can start first with:
a] the things
1 – a book about conversations and norms
I made this book, “Conversations for Beginners,” for 4.s0001 Bad Translation: Expanded Typography and Publication , a design class I took in the spring about translated typography. Modeled after language-learning pamphlets such as “101 Spanish Conversations for Beginners,” it attempts to parody, pick apart, and find comfort in the patterns of everyday conversation. The book includes a set of ten “translated” conversations whose rules, contents, and usage are laid out visually and instructionally; it was assembled from laser-cut and spray-painted chipboard and is meant to be taken apart, overlaid on top of itself, and reassembled by the user.
2 – various quilted items
What the title says! Over IAP, I participated in a blanket quilting workshop02 organized by MAD, the Morningside Academy for Design , and now I teach weekly quilting workshops in Metropolis03 an on-campus makerspace .
Over the summer, I also decided to join a local weaving circle back home in California, to learn a new skill and keep myself occupied through the long summer days. What I didn’t expect was that the group was populated entirely by retired grandmothers (though in hindsight… maybe not that surprising). One of the women hosted the circle in her sun-drenched Berkeley backyard, and it was so lovely to soak in the weather, thread bits of yarn through warp and weft, and listen to them catch everyone up each week about their grandchildren, travel plans, and latest weaving projects. I feel like I rarely interact with people in that stage of life, and it was strangely comforting to hear about the mundanities and excitements of their daily lives (and to tell them about mine!).
3 – with my friend Lee, a drawing machine
I meant to blog about this project right after we “finished” it at the end of January, but then the rush of the semester started and it was just kind of over (plus we didn’t get around to taking nice pictures of it until literally May). Nevertheless, here it is in all its glory – a pen plotter, drawing machine, robot, whatever you want to call it, with 5 degrees of freedom (aka it can move the brush pen it’s holding in the x, y, z, pitch, and yaw axes).
We made this over IAP with the help of a independent project grant! The idea was to make a machine that could replicate and draw calligraphic strokes. However, speedrunning this project in one month04 the grant showcase was at the end of January while we both had other things like UROPs going on was not the most realistic idea, and Lee and I were only able to finish the mechatronic parts of the project by the end of IAP. Here’s a timelapse of it running some hardcoded paths–it’s kind of hard to see, but the carriage is moving up and down to vary the stroke width of the brush pen, moving multiple axes at the same time, etc. In particular, the variable width ovals require simultaneous movements in x, y, z, and yaw.
We also realized that generating/extracting a five-dimension calligraphy stroke path is, like, a whole other project in and of itself. All things considered, I’m really proud of what we grinded out, especially with basically no electronics experience going in (which you can probably tell from the massive electronics board that should have just been a pcb). It was a great learning experience, fueled by many late nights in the Metropolis electronics mezzanine and Hershey’s dark chocolates.
4 – paintings and drawings
Painting and drawing are my bread and butter mediums, so I ended up with a good amount of sketchbook pages over the course of 2024. However, in the middle of the spring semester, my iPad decided to randomly turn off and never turn on again, and I lost over four years of Procreate files (the digital drawing app I use). I had fortunately exported and saved most of the completed paintings I liked, but it still sucked a lot to lose what was essentially my sketchbook since high school.
An unexpected yet welcome consequence of this, though, was that I began to fall back in love with physical mediums over the summer. This was also because I was back at home in my childhood room, where I had left allll my art supplies back in 2022, from old dried up acrylic paints to wads of felt to, for some reason, a bag of 20+ oil pastel sticks all in the same color. It was a fun time :)
As the fall semester came into view, I traded in my iPad carcass for a smaller, more lightweight version (12.9”->11”), redownloaded Procreate, and started painting digitally again. I’m especially proud of these ones:
I feel like I stepped away from painting and drawing in the past year, as newer, more exciting mediums took the spotlight, but I really want to return to them in the upcoming year. I don’t think I’ve necessarily gotten worse, but I have felt a lot of my core rendering and composition skills start to dissipate. Basically.. I need to get back on the grind 🏃
5 – a ceramic fountain that melted in the kiln
So I actually started this back in fall/winter of 2023, but I’m listing it here because I “finished” it in 2024. And by finished I mean I forgot what cone05 cone = firing temp of clay I used for it – evidently, a lower one than 6, because when we tried glaze firing the piece at cone 6, it promptly melted into a puddle of burnt clay. I’m glad I got these nice pictures of it before that, though, and at least now I don’t have to figure out where to store it :’).
before the glaze firing
It’s a fountain, and the shards of stained glass in the base and breasts were supposed to anneal in the kiln to resemble water. The piece is about how we idolize and worship the bodies of women, but in doing so, trap them in place and hollow them out.
6 – printed matter for infinite magazine and mit gala
I make graphics for Infinite Magazine06 our undergrad fashion mag and MIT Gala07 our undergrad fashion show ! This year, I’m really happy that I got the chance to work on more experimental graphic design, like these laser-cut tickets and programs for the gala back in May. I love a good poster, but it’s cool to make graphics for more unique form factors.
laser-cut tickets:
programs:
plus, various flyers:
I feel like I didn’t grow that much as a graphic designer this year, since I’m no longer consistently making posters for LSC. Instead, when Infinite or Gala needed graphics made, I kind of just scrambled to put something together in Illustrator. I’m still happy with what I made, but next year, I want to work on more large-scale (personal!) design projects, such as zines, prints, and maybe (!) designing and illustrating a calendar08 i've developed an unhealthy fixation on calendars and have already purchased five 2025 ones from artists i follow online .
7 – iceland.mp4
We went to Iceland!!!! A separate blog on this from Teresa and me is coming So Soon. I brought my old canon powershot with me, which I’ve had since like middle school, and took a bunch of footage to assemble into a vlog. I won’t link it here since it’ll be in our joint blog, but it was fun to mix and layer the clips and audio together to make a little memory capsule of the trip.
a screencap
8 – metal clothing
Last year, for Infinite Magazine Issue 12, I led a spread entitled 606109 see <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6061_aluminium_alloy">aluminum 6061</a> , and I was blessed with an amazing team:
fabrication: teresa, lee, lindsay, nando; photo: michelle; styling: joanna; modeling: sabine, bukunmi; writing: sabine
We worked with laser-cut sheet metal to make the garments, sliced and bent and fastened into natural forms that molded to our models’ bodies. You can see the full spread (and issue) here, but I’ll include the two pieces that I specifically made: a face-head-mask-headset thing and a corset-chestplate thing (really great names I know).
headpiece:
bodypiece:
I also assembled much of the final eight-page layout of the spread, though it was really a huge group effort—shoutout to everyone who stayed for the final all-nighter push. As an example, the layout below showcased the bodypiece:
with poetry by sabine!
Much like the plotter project, I also meant to write an entire blog about 6061, but then too much time passed and I have the memory of a goldfish. However, I will say that it was so cool to work with a group of people on a project with so many moving pieces (literally!), and I’m really grateful to Infinite for enabling me to meet so many other creative people.
9 – a kinetic lamp
During IAP, Nervous System, a design studio founded by two MIT alum, hosted a workshop centered around their computational technique of creating 3D surfaces using flat laser-cut metal/paper shapes. Using their tech, I wanted to make a lamp because I thought the porous light would create a nice effect paired with some overlapping movement.
(nervous system wrote the mesh generation software actually making this possible so i don’t really count this as my project tbh but i think it looks cool still)
10 – with teresa, three cyanotype cameras
This semester, Teresa and I were partners in 4.031 (Design: Objects and Interaction)! The prompt for the first project was to make an analog camera capable of producing long-exposure cyanotype images, and we made the following set of three cylindrical cameras:
We constructed these guys from 3D-printed resin parts and cardboard tubes we found in the scrap bin. Inspired by telescopes and camping equipment like thermoses, we wanted to create a camera that produced circular images, could point in any direction, and could be easily taken on the go.
11 – also with teresa, one digital camera
The prompt for the second 4.031 project was to make a digital camera. However, the definition of “camera” was used quite loosely in this class, and we were encouraged to think more broadly about technologies involving the use of image capture, environmental sensing, etc. Interested in the ideas of 1) producing physical media through digital methods and 2) gamification, Teresa and I made this! It’s kind of hard to explain, but basically it’s an instant camera that prints out your image on thermal paper, combined with a DDR-style light matching game; how well the user plays determines how denoised their output image is.
The printed images are pretty low-res, partly because the Arduino Mega doesn’t have enough memory to store the entire output of the camera module, partly because the thermal printer can only do either black or white output for each pixel. They look pretty cool printed out though, and are sometimes recognizable as real objects. Here are some examples:
And here’s a 2x video of it in action:
(the picture it took in the video was of the ceiling in the photobooth, where we were recording. i have no idea why the screen displayed gibberish for the first few rounds but it’s okay)
This project consumed our lives for the last two weeks of the semester10 not counting the 1.5 months of work we had put into it already , as we locked ourselves in Metropolis or N52 almost every day, manufacturing parts, soldering, and testing. It’s not perfect, but I’m really proud of what we were able to make. The body and handles of the camera are constructed from powder-coated bent sheet metal, with black resin parts on the top and bottom; the electronics components include a thermal printer, LCD screen, camera module, big arcade button + 8 small white buttons, and the 8 LEDs on top.
A big part of this class, beyond functionality, was the object’s design language and user experience, so we spent a lot of time polishing little details like making the handles nice and ergonomic and ensuring that the screen was angled to face the user.
ignore the watermark lmao
#us when we Design the Objects and Interact with them
12 – more graphic design
Not much to say about this… some other graphics. Some of these were on commission so I got paid for them :-D
13 – bowl
(that I gifted to a friend)
bowl
b] decisions
Besides actual physical things, I also made some decisions this year, some softer, some firmer.
From freshman year until sophomore spring, I was a proud course 2A-6, aka mechanical engineering with a focus on computing. Back in 2022, I had entered MIT as a wide-eyed freshman, freshly graduated from four years of high school robotics, so naturally, I picked the major that seemed best adapted to making robots: mechanical engineering! After taking and soundly enjoying 2.003 and 2.00411 Dynamics and Control I and II<br /> , I felt affirmed in my decision to be a roboticist, and went on to take 6.420012 Robotics: Science and Systems in the spring, a project-based class that simultaneously took years off my lifespan and instilled in me even more determination to pursue robotics.
However, over this past summer and fall semester, I felt my interest in robotics wane. This was partly due to my experience at my summer job, where I worked on path planning algorithms at an autonomous vehicle company (which are kind of just massive mobile robots). On paper, this sounds really cool, and I was super excited to get started, but I found that the work in practice was much less exciting than the work in theory. This is largely out of necessity – software that’s going to be deployed on real-life self-driving cars needs to undergo rigorous, lengthy testing, because the consequences could be dire (aka collisions). However, I found that the majority of my time was spent tweaking small variables, running tests, and generally feeling somewhat detached from the work I was doing. This might have just been how things work at this particular organization, and I’m sure things are different at other robotics-y companies, but the experience did help burst the robot-shaped bubble I had constructed around myself for the past two years.
[There were other reasons for this burst as well – first, that many (not all, but many) robotics and autonomy companies in the US work with the US military/DoD in some way, a cause that I’m not personally willing to work for; and second, that cutting-edge robotics research is increasingly focused on AI and learning-based methods, and I am unfortunately not very interested in AI.]
But, now that I had taken a step back from idealizing robotics, I could turn and face an overarching feeling I’ve had during my time at MIT – a slow drifting away from science and engineering. To contextualize this, though, we’ve got to go back to 2021…
When I was applying to colleges in senior year of high school, I very seriously considered going to an art school for illustration or graphic design. I had split my time in high school half and half between engineering and the arts, and I felt very strongly about both–but after getting into MIT, there was almost no question that I would attend, for a few reasons. First, there’s no denying the prestige and stability that come with a degree from MIT, and although these things may not be as important in the long run, to a 17-year old, they were important – and even more so to my parents, who had, in large part, come to this country so that I could have them. Second, I did truly love STEM, a core part of my identity at that point; and third, I hadn’t gotten into those top art programs that I wanted, and it was, by all means, a blow to my creative confidence. So I bought a MIT crewneck off Ebay, signed my letter, and it was off to CPW.
I truly love MIT and, looking back, I feel like it was the right decision for me. I’ve learned so much, met so many amazing (amazing!!) people here, and got to try things and access resources I wouldn’t have been able to anywhere else. I’d never take my experiences here for granted. At the same time, many decisions can be “right,” just different, and often I find myself wondering how things would be if I had stepped in another direction. Although paths are never really set in stone, I know that my decision two years ago opened up many doors to me, while simultaneously closing and locking many others.
Now that I’m a junior, I feel a (perhaps unfounded) sense that more doors are closing; some of the figs are falling from the tree, and I need to start thinking about what I really want. This feeling intensified as I watched my peers (both my age and older) make life decisions™: one of my friends dropped out this year to pursue their startup; another went to Taiwan for grad school; yet another decided to accept a full-time job offer and graduate a year early. As for me, my indecision lies in what to study in grad school, if at all, and subsequently pursue as a career. I’ve dropped the idea of seeking robotics research roles, but I’m torn between pursuing something completely creative or something purely technical or something somewhere in between. I’ve heavily considered pivoting to architecture, or staying for my masters at MIT, or trying to become one of those people who makes huge suspended airport installations (??). This semester, I changed my major from 2A-6 to a double major in 6-4 (computer science) and 4-B (design); for now, I’m trying to keep as many doors open as possible.
Although I felt more lost than ever this semester, having let go of the robotic goal I’d bound myself to, I also felt a deep sense of clarity. I know a few things to be true – that I love art, that I love engineering for a purpose, that I love making things with others, and that, ultimately, you end up becoming yourself. And so based on these facts, I’ve made some of those decisions I mentioned earlier. First, in my final three semesters, the majority of the classes I’m taking are design and architecture studios and humanities classes, with the rest solely there to fulfill my graduation requirements. Second, that I’ll pursue grad school of some kind, both to deepen my skillset and to learn more about what’s even possible career-wise. And third, that I ultimately want to end up doing something arts-oriented and impactful on the world, but I’m okay with taking the long way around, maybe working in a more technical field first to build up savings, or working in an adjacent field to build up life and work experience.
And of course there are a lot of other things besides pure enjoyment that go into career decisions: financial viability (!), purported impact on the world, flexibility of work hours and location, and opportunities for growth and advancement. However, I’ve spent much of the last few years doing mental gymnastics to convince myself that I want to be a software or mechanical engineer, and it’s revelatory to hold the truth up in plain sight, that art is what makes me feel connected to myself, others, and the world in a way that few other things do. I don’t feel fear of failure and imposter syndrome in engineering in the same way I do when it comes to creative work, and I think that says something; I know that in the end, I’ll figure out a way to circle back into the arts, however that manifests, and that’s enough of a north star in the night sky for now. :)
- Bad Translation: Expanded Typography and Publication back to text ↑
- organized by MAD, the Morningside Academy for Design back to text ↑
- an on-campus makerspace back to text ↑
- the grant showcase was at the end of January back to text ↑
- cone = firing temp back to text ↑
- our undergrad fashion mag back to text ↑
- our undergrad fashion show back to text ↑
- i've developed an unhealthy fixation on calendars and have already purchased five 2025 ones from artists i follow online back to text ↑
- see aluminum 6061 back to text ↑
- not counting the 1.5 months of work we had put into it already back to text ↑
- Dynamics and Control I and II back to text ↑
- Robotics: Science and Systems back to text ↑