The Visual Communication in Context 2 Unit was made up of 4 different but related projects, these projects allowed me to develop my design skills and knowledge whilst giving me a range of outcomes to create. These projects being Why, Collection = Interpretation, Intervention + Interpretation and 15-Minute City offered very different outcomes thus allowing me to grow as a designer by looking into the different aspects of design. The first project ‘Why’ had us thinking up a Why? Question which we then answered that question within an outcome of our choosing. The second ‘Collection = Interpretation’ was a group project that required us to go out and gather specific data of our choosing and display this data within a collection of posters. The third Intervention + Interpretation was to create letterforms for each of the letters in the word ‘adhesion’ and to use this to create assets for Instagram and a poster – along with this we were assigned a letter, mine being ‘Y’, to do for the 36 Days of Type design trend. The fourth and final project for this unit 15-Minute City we needed to create a visual identity for a brand or service that would be found within a 15-Minute City.

Why was the first project back in the second year of university, this worried me a little as the project was heavily focused on our individual creativity as be pretty much do whatever we can think of, I thought that I would really struggle with this due to just getting back into doing the work however I found this project to be really enjoyable. The time constraint of a week was very bearable, and it allowed me to work quick and get a strong outcome that I am very happy with. My why question was Why can’t I be Prime minister of the UK? I looked towards American political campaign websites for inspiration and using Adobe XD I created a wire frame of a website. This website was built like a campaigning website where I parodied different aspects that would be seen by politicians. Also, within this website I compared myself to three previous PMs Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and David Cameron pointing out bad things that they have done and saying how I could do better. Overall, I am happy with this one-week project I believe that I created very strong work despite having a limited time.

Collection = Interpretation is a project that I did not enjoy, I found the group aspect of the project to be okay and I think that my group and I worked well together. I don’t think that designing for data is really what I am interested in, I struggled to think of good ideas / layouts for the poster which dampened the entire project with me. In the end I really didn’t like the outcomes that we had created so a suggested changing it, this change was absolutely needed as it was lacking massively but even then, I wasn’t impressed with the design. After the project had finished, we came back to it whenever we had the free time to improve it which I think we did in the end. I really didn’t enjoy this project but going through it I was able to develop my skills and learn what designing for data really is.

Intervention + Interpretation was such a great project I enjoyed every aspect of it, even though I did find it tricky working with the Glyphs software as it was the first time I had created with it going through that to have my own typeface is very rewarding. Most of my time I had put into Glyphs as I tried to create my letter forms within Adobe Illustrator first but that was very frustrating, I struggled with the thinner parts of my letter form. For the project I decided on creating a serif typeface as I thought it would be interesting to work on the serifs themselves, this made it a little trickier however I am very happy with the outcome and I would love to do something within this nature again.

The Last project for the Unit 15-Minute City was at first a really exciting project as I am very interested in branding and the creation of visual identity, however right at the beginning of the project I got really sick this lasted up until the end of it, which really gave me a very short amount of time to get the project done, this also messed with my motivation for the unit as I was really disappointed with what I had created for the project, even now after implementing the changes to the design I found that since I was unable to put the time in at the beginning of the project it was hard to develop it. This is absolutely the most disappointed I have been with myself within a project. I really did like my idea it’s that I found it hard to get the design correct.

Daisy Maass has done superb work in this course and has enjoyed the course as well. Daisy regularly came to class and always seemed attentive and engaged. She has demonstrated through her written work that she has gained a sound understanding of the subject matter discussed in the class, and she can apply it in broader context. What stands out about Daisy is her good problem-solving ability. She gave uniformly high-quality performances on weekly problem sets, with only a few flaws. Daisy’s work demonstrated she has a comfortable working understanding of thermodynamics, chemical equilibria, and electrochemistry. She did excellent work on her final review problem set, while her first review problem set was good except for a few shortcomings. Daisy enthusiastically participated in lab work and field work, and her laboratory skills, techniques, and report writing skills improved wonderfully during the semester. Her project lab report on the investigation of radon levels in campus buildings was a very good piece of work; it was well written and rich in introductory content, analysis and analytical viewpoint. Her final project lab report, on the investigation of deicing inputs in a stream near a local dairy farm, was a great product and demonstrated she had sound understanding of the project and major outcomes of the investigation.  Daisy showed her ability to analyze results and provided a cogent discussion. This was a wonderful report and it demonstrated her strong growth in writing comprehensive chemistry project reports. In summary, Daisy is one of the brighter students in the class, with a knack for chemistry and a mature approach to her studies. She was a joy to work with. Fabulous job, Daisy!

Daisy Maass had an excellent semester in Biochemistry. Students were evaluated on eleven problem sets based off of textbook readings, a textbook chapter class presentation, laboratory work, three primary research article problem sets, class participation, a research proposal, and final presentation.

All of Daisy’s problem sets were completed at a very high level.  It was always clear that she completed the text readings and put thought into her responses with few mistakes.  She completed many of the more technical chemistry questions the best in the class. Problem sets related to primary literature showed that she got the major points of all papers and was able to interpret data well. She did very well in both the quantitative and qualitative content of the course.

Daisy completed all required laboratory work successfully. She showed competency in every laboratory task assigned this semester.

Daisy’s chapter presentation was phenomenal. She exhibited excellent preparation and presented smoothly with a logical progression.  She thoroughly addressed all of the important information from the chapter.

Daisy’s final was excellent.  She chose an interesting topic investigating whether tetracycline and its derivatives could influence mammalian cell viability.  She incorporated a remarkable amount of data from many sources of primary literature and explained all of them very well.  It was the most thorough final of the class!

Overall, Daisy performed strong work across all aspects of this course!

Daisy, a talented and hard working artist had a great semester in Illustration Projects. Her illustrations demonstrated a confident artistic vision expressed through a unique drawing style and a wonderful sense of humor. Daisy’s contributions to class conversations and critiques were always thoughtful, supportive, and sensitive. Daisy’s Police Blotter assignment of a series of three narrative illustrations was rendered in a fresh, alternative or indie comix style in delicate yet confident black and white line work drawn with a pen and complemented by small, strategically placed wisps of color in multi-colored pencils. Daisy clearly demonstrated her understanding of what working in a series means, how to connect the three pieces visually while still allowing for individual variation and surprise in each of the three illustrations. Daisy incorporated her own texts into the images often rendered in very expressive ways, so they become visual elements in their own right, which add another layer of humor to the compositions. The actual text of the police blotter that corresponds to each image has not been incorporated into the work. I’d like to encourage Daisy to follow the assignment descriptions closely as this is important in the field of illustration. Daisy’s op-ed illustration on the corona virus was also very strong. The visual metaphor she chose was flawless, the black and white line-drawing execution whimsical and attention-grabbing. Daisy’s twelve illustrations based on three African folk tales went above and beyond the expectations for this assignment. They were small, iconic, highly energetic and delightfully colorful compositions on the fronts and backs of large, round and triangular earrings, made from paper by Daisy. They are accomplished little illustrations that work very well indeed for the stories they accompany, setting the tone, building a rich and bold visual world around the folk tales. Texts written in cursive hand-writing were incorporated into the compositions. Each one of Daisy’s projects was highly original and potently expressed her point of view. Way to go Daisy!

As a teaching assistant, Daisy Maass was to attend all class sessions, hold two hours of office hours per week, assist with setup and cleanup of equipment for hands-on activities, assist students during problem-solving sessions, and grade homework and other assignments. Overall, Daisy was a reliable teaching assistant who completed her responsibilities as expected. Since she never submitted a self-evaluation, I cannot assess how much she grew as an educator. Based on my in-class observations, Daisy worked well and with patience with all students, regardless of their abilities, motivation, and anxieties, and she always approached them in a way that was suitable to the situation. Even in emotionally charged situations, she worked to diffuse the tension and turn the students' attention away from their emotions and toward the task at hand. One area of improvement would be developing a better awareness of what is happening in all corners of the classroom and taking the initiative to engage students in conversation when they may be reluctant to ask for help.

Daisy Maass performed well in this laboratory-based independent study. Daisy worked with another student pursing a laboratory project related to her advisor’s research interests. Specifically, Daisy was attempting to determine the role that the secretory protein CHMP6 plays in determining the levels of the cancer-related protein CD147.  

Daisy did not have much time to put into this project this semester, but she was very effective with the time that was able to dedicate and became more independent at western blotting. Even though the research duo ran into some major problems this semester that were beyond their control, the students showed great persistence. They put in solid effort at the end of the semester in order to complete the project and attain usable results. They learned how much time often needs to be put in in order to perform a project. Their effort paid off, and they put their results together into a poster that they presented at the 2019 American Society for Cell Biology / European Molecular Biology Organization annual meeting. Their poster was very high quality and is indicative of the effort that Daisy is capable of putting into her work. Daisy represented herself and Hampshire College exceptionally well on an international stage.

As a participant in the Fall 19 Dance Repertory Ensemble course, Daisy Maass was a vital contributor to the group’s collaborative process. She engaged deeply and conscientiously with assigned texts, group discussions, movement explorations, and choreographic process. Early on, Daisy emerged as a vocal presence in ways that reflected her time spent with the texts, and her evolving understanding of how those texts related to the dynamics of the group and the work as it unfolded. As a mover in the process, Daisy developed phrase work that epitomized her balance between bold and inside-out gestures that stir visually and viscerally.

Along the way, our work together as a group proved to be far larger in scale than one semester could hold. Each member of the group was challenged to move through and with big questions about personal identities, while giving balanced attention to conceptual frameworks, social dynamics, aesthetic considerations, and skillful command of emerging movement language(s). As the group has prepared to bring the work to performance, Daisy, too, has had to grapple with this collision between the varying positions, perspectives, and experiences among the ensemble, particularly as they relate to the ways different bodies might be read on stage. Not all of those dynamics were evident to her throughout the semester, but as the group continues to work through the piece and its implications, Daisy has emerged as a conscientious ally of her POC collaborators by giving voice to the ways privilege contributes to the dynamics at play within the group and the piece itself, and illuminating blind spots around those privileges when necessary. While each member of the group would have benefited from earlier and more frequent written reflection, the final writing assignment of the semester provided an important space for this level of processing, and Daisy made good use of that tool. Her reflection astutely traced compositional choices to their implications for the culminating work. As she asks in her reflection, “How can we use the piece to really put into practice the breaking down of invisible boundaries as we philosophize?” It is clear that the process as a whole catalyzed powerful learning that can be best understood through the embodied repetition performance contexts uniquely provide. As we move into and beyond the Winter Dance Concert (February 2020), Daisy is already demonstrating tremendous growth as a conveyor of meaning, togetherness and criticality through performance. It is my hope that she is able to leverage the lessons gleaned from this experience through her own choreographic experiments, and in her performance, art-making and community-building efforts more broadly.

Throughout this course, Daisy Maass demonstrated a strong capacity for engaging with critical theory texts through both analytical and creative methods. She consistently brought a high level of insight and analysis to group conversations and to her written work—asking tough questions about agency and performance, race and privilege, language and power (to name a few examples). While Daisy has much to say, she is also a skilled listener and responder. This combination meant that Daisy regularly deepened the conversation for the whole class. In our in-class movement practices, Daisy also demonstrated a powerful capacity for creative and intellectual engagement. She is an energetic mover who fully embodies a willingness to take risks and find new ways into the material or questions at hand.

For her final project, Daisy undertook a choreographic project that reflected on the gendered messaging of ballet training. Daisy’s accompanying artist statement adeptly connected her project to some of the core questions that she had been pursuing throughout the semester, “I questioned the use of human material in dance-making and unknowingly prepared myself to wonder at how being human material has shaped my own self-image, esteem, and dancing.”  Her final performance was inventive, personal, multidisciplinary, and powerful. Through inventive use of mirrors, Daisy set up an opportunity for the audience to enter her own process of “reflection.” While not explicitly a choreography course, Daisy’s final work yielded advanced choreographic research that I hope she will choose to pursue independently in the future.