Through out my honours term, my thesis has evolved into forms of perceiving comfort, specifically in reflection of how I conform my definition of comfort. I produced two publication in total. These are How to Achieve Comfort and Collecting Comfort: Introspection through Instruction.

How to Achieve, 2020

How to Achieve Comfort initially was an attempt in trying to answer the question "why do I do the things I do" through data collection and surveillance.

In the span of 3 months I collected and documented data gathered from mundane everyday acts. These ranged from media I consumed, calorie intake, steps, time stamps of daily routine such as waking up and going to bed etc., in building up a body of source material to cultivate and manifest a conclusion. What happened instead was me losing grip with my self-worth and coming face-to-face with my complacency and how I have been labeling it as comfort. The revelation from seeing the patterns and repetition in my routine was pretty jarring to say the least making me question my self-worth both in my public and personal space, and the frustration with how nothing was falling into place made it worst. This booklet is a product of the amalgamation of coming to terms with my failure as a data designer, my self-worth, the trauma of having to perceived my existence and being convinced of how mundane it is, and my lack of confidence in my sincerity.

How To Achieve Comfort is a failure. Not in the vein of being self diminishing but as for its purpose. An attempt in being retrospective that turned into self indulges.

COLLECTING COMFORT: INTROSPECTION THROUGH INSTRUCTIONS, 2021

A continuation and the evolution of the How to Achieve Comfort project from my Fall term of my Honours Senior Years. COLLECTING COMFORT: INTROSPECTION THROUGH INSTRUCTIONS is what has become of the retrospect of the methodology and development of the attempted data collecting and visualization that I have been exploring through out my honours thesis.

COLLECTING COMFORT: INTROSPECTION THROUGH INSTRUCTIONS was initially my attempt to “prove” and measure the notion of comfort through the arbitrariness of habit and patterns. At the core of the project is my personal introspection of comfort that I find in following instructions and knowing the conclusion. I wanted to reflect this idea of comfort and explore the arbitrariness of meticulous instructions.

Its genesis stems from the desire and curiosity of how of-being and comfort appears in recurrence. I was curious if I can prove that this was true outside my perception, or at least, able to do the same for others. I created set list of instructions that were distributed to people close to me.

There was an initial attitude of treating the data in a much more analytical and “scientific” approach and treated Comfort as if it is a tangible unit of measurement, similar how there is a scale of unit for pain, heat, luminosity, etc. the data collected were generative and behavioural in nature, often reflecting or describing a fragment of a space or place. the notion of allowing for comfort to be generated was creating temporary space of comfort itself through the process of doing the set list instructions.

The circles were inspired by some of the generated visual data from an early set list and iteration of what this publication was trying to be.

The circles are means to convey comfort in the vain of trying to translate and manifest it into something physical and palpable but it is less of treating it as a number but more of fragments that can be pieced together and assembled in a rhizomatic fashion.

This publication is an attempt to compress and to visually translate this collection of self-generated, self-containing data of comfort.

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