A clearer thesis

My thesis project is about personal identity and its relationship with one's community. Community is important to me and provides purpose, belonging and connection in my life, which I believe are integral to my personal identity . My thesis statement is "because of its importance to me, community has a large influence on my personal identity" and in order to answer that, I also need to answer "what creates my sense of community?"

My theory is that community gives a sense of identity. The pieces of my life, be they through choice or circumstance, the places I choose to go and feel at home, and the people with whom I surround myself make up my world and part of who I am. Yes, past experiences and independent thoughts shape up but if you take a snapshot in time, this world in which I exist is me.

Community also provides these three things, purpose, belonging and connection. It helps answer my questions of why am I here and what direction am I moving in, both in terms of career and relationships. There's a feeling of being needed, that what I do matters on some small scale.

In that community is a system based on inclusiveness and exclusiveness, it also provides that feeling of belonging. There is a sense of ownership involved (my circle of friends, my bar, my barber...)

A thirdly, community creates the opportunity for connection, in terms of friendship, support and social bonds. These bonds increase the size of my community as I meet more people, people that could be valuable in many ways.

As for my outline...

Spreads:
1) Introduction, defining thesis, probably a fairly typographic page.

2) My community demographics. Age, sex, profession....

3) My community spatially, who is significant in my life and are they close to me proximaly?

4) Interest overlaps. Is my community shaped by our common interests? (one question I have is whether I need a control for this? Should I send my survey to people not in my community (ie, people I don't regularly interact with))

5) community as places. Community is not just people, it's also a place (with people in it) where one feels that sense of belonging or significance. So I'm doing 4 spotlights on places.

Lots of questions, some answers, but at least I clearly know why I'm doing this. More images to come soon.

I just discovered this "info graphic" drawn by Marian Bantjes and aside from being completely beautiful inspiration and similar in form to something I've been thinking about, it's all about community. Go figure. So I thought I'd just throw it up for people to see in case others are interested. As long as I keep the colors and curves similar to what I'm doing in other places, do you all think I can integrate this style of info graphic (ie, illustrated) with some of the other things going on?
I've also been thinking a lot about my topic and think I've focused it somewhat. (I think it's more about identity and social bonds than about getting to know your neighbors). I'm going to do some writing tomorrow and will provide a (concise) plan.

Start of Panoramas

So I've been thinking that community is not just a product of people but also of space. So here's the first of a series of panoramic photographs focusing both on places and the people that are significant in those spaces. It's still early (panoramas are thrown together quickly and it needs more information) but there could be potential.

Type Book

The rest I'll just bring to class...

The start of mapping

Just thought I'd throw this up for people to see. It's by no means done, both in terms of type and information/body copy but it shows on a rough geographic scale the significance of everyone in my community. More work to come.

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The survey

Here's the survey a designed and tried to give to everyone in my community (that I couldn't reach via surveymonkey). Initially a few people balked at it (one guy saying "I don't like to write essays") so for the surveymonkey one, I simplified things a bit and made it easier to fill out, hoping to generate a higher response rate.

Type thoughts

This certainly isn't done, but I thought I'd throw it up on the blog if anyone has any feedback. I thought I might try a clean look for the thesis project since I'm gravitating towards mapping, grids and statistical information. I think DIN is working at my body copy and Dispatch seems to complement is fairly well, or possibly Industria. I foresee having lots of small numbers so I thought United might work well for some of the smaller pieces. I've also been looking at old ways of visually representing information and kind of like the use of neat italic typefaces so I'm playing around a bit with Bickham script... Since I don't quite know what form this book is going to take, I'm not quite sure what all I'll need so if anyone has any thoughts, I'm all ears.

More thoughts....