Chile: A Semester Abroad by carolined

Chile

a semester abroad 1

Table of Contents 5 6 8 22 30

41 42 43 44 45 46

Introducción / Introduction La Universidad Católica de Chile Diseño de información / Information design Diseño y nuevos medios / Design and new media Nuevas tendencias en el diseño de carteles / Poster design

Programa/ Program Evelyn Mi familia / My family Las chicas / The girls Viajes / Trips Duración / Duration

48 50

Chile Mi experiencia/ My experience

54 60

Proyectos / Projects Lo que cambiaría / What I would change

62 64

Recomendaciónes/ Recommendations Conclusión / Conclusion

Introdu 4

ucción On January 3, 2016, I rolled off the plane at Arturo Merino Benítez International Airport with my three huge suitcases and backpack to start my semester in Santiago, Chile. The first half of my year, from January 3 until July 15, was spent studying abroad in Santiago, but simply saying that I spent a few months in Chile does not begin to describe my experience. The Chilean university where I took classes, the WashU program that I participated in, the traveling I did, and the friends I made were essential to my learning and change abroad, and I’m so proud of everything I accomplished and excited to share. I learned so much, in the classroom but also by simply participating in day-to-day life in a different country. I ended up in Chile due to a confluence of different factors: primarily, my interest in studying in a Spanish-speaking country, which had been a dream of mine since high school; secondarily the requirement that I be able to study design alongside Spanish wherever I chose to go; and thirdly, the presence of a study abroad option in Chile through WashU’s Overseas Programs department that sends students to a top university with a strong design curriculum. Spending 6 months in Santiago was a happy coincidence of these three facts. The following pages will explain and examine the academic classes I took in the design department at the Universidad Católica de Chile, the projects I created in and out of class, the WashU Overseas program in Santiago, the ways in which the environment and culture of Santiago shaped my life abroad, and my own thoughts and reflection on how my experience as a whole fits into my WashU education.

la CatĂłlica Undergrad students: 23,613 Grad students: 4,075 International students: 1,509 Website: www.uc.cl Upper left: Campus Lo Contador Upper middle: Campus San JoaquĂn Upper right: Campus Oriente

a For the majority of my semester, I took classes at La Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, often referred to as La Católica or PUC, which is one of the two best universities in Chile. Its different areas of study are spread out between four campuses in Santiago, of which I attended classes at three on a weekly basis. I spent most of my time at Campus Lo Contador, the design and architecture campus, where I learned a lot about the design program at La Católica. It’s set up similarly to WashU in that students take two years of general core studios, followed by three years of more specialized studio courses when they can focus on the type of design that they prefer. However, design is taught on a completely separate campus from fine arts, so there isn’t that relationship between the two that is present in Sam Fox. Also, the definition of “Design major” at PUC is a bit different, combining graphic design with fashion design and industrial design, and offering very few illustration courses, unlike our Communication Design major. Some of the students I met were very interested in illustration and incorporated it into projects for their classes, but the semester I was in Santiago there were no illustration-specific courses offered. While attending La Católica I had the option to take one major studio + one elective studio, or three elective studios for the same total of class hours per week. Since the major studios that were offered during the fall semester focused on industrial design and fashion design, I opted for three elective studio classes in the realm of graphic design. They were all very distinct from each other as well as from any class I’ve taken at WashU, and in this section I’ll describe each course in detail along with each of the projects I made.

Inform diseño

This course, Information Design, isn’t really an elective since all design students at La Católica are required to take it, but it also wasn’t a full-fledged major studio since we only met once a week for three hours. Taught by Ricardo Vega, it was mainly structured as a lecture class with 5 group projects assigned throughout the semester, and as the semester progressed we spent more of class time doing individual progress critiques with the professor and less time on wholeclass lectures.

The group projects were one of the most challenging and most rewarding aspects of the class overall. On the one hand, working in a group is always difficult because the team members have to put in a lot of effort to communicate, create a fair division of tasks, and a produce a cohesive final product. It was even more difficult for me to navigate this in another language and a culture I was not completely familiar with. However, my groupmates were friendly and supportive of me throughout the semester, and they also acted as something like a safety net if I didn’t fully understand what the professor was asking for or what the typical expectations for each assignment might be. I learned a lot from my classmates, not just the ones in my group, because for initial proposals and finished projects we had to present each of our assignments throughout the semester to the class using a well-designed slideshow and clear explanation of our ideas and process. What I’m used to at WashU is pretty informal critiques where we discuss with our professor and classmates how a project is going or how it turned out, which happened sometimes in this class, but the formal presentation aspect was new for me. There was definitely more pressure, and I got pretty nervous trying to give my part of the presentation in Spanish without completely embarrassing myself. But seeing the other groups show off what

mación de

they’d done and how they’d done it was always informative, especially since the class was too big to see everyone’s process during the project and because we generally spent more class time on lectures than on crits.

Additional info:

The course itself did a good job of exploring the full range of what information design can be, from historical examples to modern technology, and from global projects to local Chilean designers. The professor kept us centered throughout the semester on the exciting things happening in Santiago and other parts of the country, which made our designs feel relevant. Although it was a three-hour lecture class for most of the semester, I found the distinct change from my typical design classes to be really interesting. At WashU, while we often discussed aspects of design or mention design history during studio classes in sophomore and junior year, we rarely sat down and got presentations on it. I can’t say that one method is better than the other, but part of what I enjoyed about the class was that it was different from the teaching I would normally get, and I learned a ton about the concepts and possibilities of information design.

Professor’s website: www.ricardov.cl

Syllabus available on request

Slide shows from initial classes available on request

As we moved through the various topics encompassed by information design, we worked with our groups on projects relating to and informed by what we learned in class. The biggest things that the course focused on were historical instances of information design; the use of pictorial representation to communicate ideas, including drawings, letters, symbols, icons, pictograms, and isotypes; data analysis and visualization, especially through the use of technology; and the overarching theme of problem solving via information design. For each of the projects, I’ll go in depth about the assignment we were given, some of the things we learned and steps we took to get to the final product, and our final solution.

Diseño de información Prof. Ricardo Vega, sección 1 | semestre I 2016

Gerardus Mercator Antecedentes históricos del Diseño de Información

Integrantes: Francisca Behm Caroline Dierksheide Stephania Pavez Claudia Zavala

Opposite top: Mercator’s map Opposite bottom left: Cover of our report Opposite bottom right: Slides from our presentation

Investigación: Antecedentes históricos Our first assignment was a one-week research project on an early information designer chosen from a list that the professor provided. My group, hastily formed at the end of class with three girls sitting near me, chose Gerardus Mercator, the cartographer made famous by the style of map projection named after him. Though widely considered misleading now due to its depictions of the relative sizes of landmasses, Mercator’s method of projecting a three-dimensional Earth onto a two-dimensional surface was revolutionary at the time because it made navigation much easier for sailors. The project required us to research the life and times of Mercator, as well as his design’s influence and current relevance, and write an eight-page paper and four-minute presentation for the class about it. Since it was already due the second week of class we didn’t get feedback from the professor during the process, but the assignment was really more focused on the research than the design. This first project did bring up a bit of a conflict in the group since there wasn’t enough communication between the group members focusing on designing the slides and the ones laying out the essay, and as a result the design styles turned out pretty differently, but in future projects we worked to coordinate more. The other groups in the class presented on a variety of other early designers, including Harry Beck, René Descartes, John Snow, Otto Neurath, and Florence Nightingale, thus setting the stage for the rest of the class, when we would look at both historical and current information designers.

Available on request: Assignment sheet Final report Presentation

Opposite: Our final poster/flyer design

Instrucciones: Secuencias de procedimiento The second assignment was to develop instructions describing how to do something using a combination of imagery and text. We were given a list of ideas to choose from, such as how to use a washing machine or how to take care of a pet, but we were also free to pick an activity not on the suggested list. Some of the other groups did pretty creative things with this assignment, including instructions on how to summon a genie, how to complete an assignment without dying in the attempt, and how to climb a staircase (using text from the Julio Cortรกzar story of the same name). Our group chose to create an illustrated guide to DIY dip dye hair. This was an instance of one of the girls in my group, Clau, pushing for this project to be more illustration-based since she was interested in that despite the lack of illustration-specific courses offered at PUC. So we chose a tone and design for the image that we all agreed would work well for our audience of mostly young women and girls who want to get the ombre hair color effect, and then Clau created the illustration while the rest of us worked on the text, colors, arrangement of elements, and physical object. We had to research exactly how to dye hair and then create a concise set of instructions, balancing clarity of comprehension with simplification, as well as represent that visually in a format that would be useful to our intended audience. The final product reflects the process of dyeing hair by working around the head in small chunks of hair at a time, consolidating a series of steps into a single image. We laminated the poster and attached a small suction cup to the back so that it can be hung up in the bathroom in clear view of the user as they dye their hair, and easily cleaned off for multiple uses even if some hair dye were to get onto the instructions.

Available on request: Assignment sheet Presentation

3 Opposite: Slides from our presentation

Análisis: Autores contemporáneos

For the third assignment we delved into data visualization and contemporary design with another research project. Leading up to this project, we took a field trip to see the traveling exhibition Big Bang Data, which was in downtown Santiago during the semester. The exhibition showcased pieces created by modern and historical designers, including some that classmates had researched for our first assignment. Each treading the line between fine art and design, the works all somehow dealt with data, the major currency in our age of technology. Out of a list the professor gave us, our assignment was to select one designer or studio that we were interested in, and then pick one of their projects and compare and contrast it with either a) a design project with a Chilean context, or b) a piece we’d seen at the Big Bang Data exhibition. My group and I opted for Accurat, an information design studio based in New York and Milan, and chose to analyze their project NextAtlas, a digital tool intended to help companies view and predict global trends, tapping into the concept of coolhunting. We compared this tool to Santiago de Chile Beats, a piece by Outliers Collective that was part of the Big Bang Data exhibition, which displays a contstantly-updating map of the city overlaid by colored dots representing photos being posted to instagram, tweets, and air pollution levels. The concentration of dots showed where there was more social media activity at any given time, while the air pollution was only measured at the sensors located at specific spots in the city. The assignment was to write a 10-page report and present our findings to the class. Our classmates presented on projects or books by designers like Stephanie Posavec, Jorge Frascara, David McCandless, and la Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente.

Available on request: Assignment sheet Presentation Final Report

Opposite: Our website mockup

Visualizaciรณn: Datos de Providencia The goal of this assignment was to practice visualizing and communicating data by using publicly available information about bicycle paths and traffic in the municipality of Providencia, the area of Santiago where our campus was located. We had to choose a dataset that created some opportunity for extracting new knowledge and employing it to improve an aspect of bicycle use in the community. Datasets available included volume of cyclists at different points in the area throughout the day, locations of bike sharing stations, prevalence of bike lanes, etc. We could also complement the given datasets with other data that we found and researched ourselves if it was pertinent to our project. The goal was to identify a problem demonstrated by the data that we could solve using design. Other groups created projects both practical and aesthetic, including maps for bike routes between tourist sites, an app showing the location of trees in the neighborhood and collected memories associated with those trees, and a visual analysis of bicycle traffic at 3am in the city.

Top: Safe Ride logo Bottom: Warning sign design

After playing around with some ideas like trying to increasing helmet use or mapping the places where your bike was most likely to be stolen, my group settled on the concept of creating a website that identified the most dangerous intersections in the neighborhood using data we found on where car accidents occurred, and created safer bike routes by avoiding those spots. To accompany the site we also formed a plan to put up signage in those areas to warn drivers to pay extra attention to cyclists in order to reduce accidents. As a final product, we created a mockup of a website design that would display accident locations and safe bike lanes on a map as well as infographics displaying the data we found.

Available on request: Assignment sheet Presentation

Un cuento sobre la donaciรณn de รณrganos

Opposite: Book cover

Desarollo: Estrategia para diseño de información The final assignment was pretty open-ended, and intended as a synthesis of everything we had learned during the semester. We had to choose some topic of importance that involved a problem that we could solve with design. The professor focused heavily on the process with this assignment, pushing us to really delve into and analyze the situation we chose and figure out what would be the ideal way to communicate the problem and bring about a solution using the skills we’d developed in previous projects. We had to consider every aspect of the design, from audience to cost of production to how we would measure the effectiveness of the solution we proposed. Since this assignment was so broad, it took a little longer to settle on a topic that everyone in our group was interested in, but in the end we chose the issue of organ donation. In our research we found that organ donations were severely lacking in Chile in comparison to other countries, though the demand for organs wasn’t any lower, especially for children. As we narrowed in on the problem, we determined that the root of the issue was that there wasn’t a general knowledge about the facts of donation or any value placed on donating organs societally. Given this basis, we chose to create an educational product aimed at children that would also be accessible to their parents, thus inserting a cultural understanding of the importance of organ donation at the level of the family, which is the basic building block of society. Inspired by the Japanese company Second Life Toys, which gives stuffed animals limb transplants to raise awareness about and normalize organ transplants, we wanted to create a product that would be interactive and engaging for the child user, while also being informational for both child and parent. Ultimately we settled on writing a children’s book that told the story of an organ donation through the eyes of “León el Corazón,” a heart who is transplanted when (continued on next page)

the body he lives in gets sick. The characters would appeal to children, the story would be understandable by both younger and older audiences, and at the end of the book would be more straightforward data about organ donation intended for the parents. The book would theoretically be distributed for free both digitally and in print by the Chilean Department of Public Health in order to increase organ donations in the country and help save lives.

Opposite top: Data for parents Opposite bottom: Spread from the book

The process of pinning down and refining what exactly we would create and then figuring out how to tell the story in a way that wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t morbid took us the majority of our time, so the final product of the book layout and illustrations ended up being a bit rushed. However, our extended process allowed us to really dig into the issue that we chose to tackle and end up with a successful concept.

Available on request: Assignment sheet Problem analysis Book Presentation

Top left and right:Slides from our presentation Bottom left and right: Character spreads from the book

TRANSPLANTES POR ÓRGANOS en el año 2015 Riñón

Hígado

Corazón

TASA DE DONACIÓN EFECTIVA EN EL MUNDO por millón de habitantes

Pulmón

Páncreas 40 35

35,1

28 25,9

209

24,9

18,3

13,5

ESTADÍSTICAS DEL AÑO 2015

4,3

Croacia Portugal Estados Unidos

Francia

Reino Unido

Uruguay Argentina Brasul Colombia Chile

Ecuador

321

353

306

330

333

Negativa Familiar

PERSONAS EN LISTA DE ESPERA POR UN ÓRGANO

120

123

103

149

113

252 92

111

116

299

308 134

152

129

318

327

379

Donantes

0 España

Transplantes

13,2

Pulmón 2005

2006

2007

2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

39%

41%

33%

37%

50%

48%

50,3%

52%

53%

Páncreas

1 DONANTE

105

Corazón

Hígado

1.825

En total

1.635 Riñón

Puede salvar a más de 8 personas

Nuevos diseño y

As the other half of my major elective credits I took this course, Design and New Media, which is offered as an elective class for PUC design students who want to focus on web design. I took it in the interest of expanding on what I had learned the previous semester in Interaction Design I, which I had enjoyed a lot. Design and New Media met once a week for three hours in a computer lab on campus, and was taught by Felipe Cortez Orellana. We spent the first several weeks learning HTML and CSS, which was mostly a review for me, but it helped me to get used to talking about coding in Spanish. The following weeks were introductions to jQuery, Bootstrap 3, PHP, and Wordpress via in-class exercises. In general I felt like we moved from topic to topic very quickly after only a brief coverage of each, so I spent a fair amount of time during the semester trying to figure things out on my own with the help of the internet. In the end I managed to learn a decent amount between the lectures, work in class, and individual research, but on the whole I wasn’t a big fan of the professor’s

Medios teaching style. He usually had us edit existing sample sites instead of building from scratch, and if I hadn’t had a solid HTML/CSS background from the previous semester I would have been very lost in the course. The professor also didn’t give very much individual feedback on projects, and overall there was less focus on designing for the medium of web and more on just learning the technical aspects.

Additional info: Syllabus available on request Professor’s website: www.faco.cl

In addition to in-class exercises, there were four main assessments during the semester, one of which was a midterm project and the other three were a plan for the final project, a first draft of the final project, and then the finished final website. The midterm project focused on comparing the different capabilities of jQuery, Bootstrap, and PHP in creating a responsive site. The final project was more focused on the planning and designing stages of building out a website. I found the projects to be interesting, but with the lack of critique from professor or classmates I’m not sure how much it helped improve my design skills.

Proyecto 1: Modificación For the midterm assignment, we were to use what we’d learned about HTML, CSS, and jQuery to modify a template website, keeping the basic structure the same but customizing the other design elements, such as color, type, and image. The setup was meant for a series of projects or a portfolio, so I decided to create a project to make my website (and got a little carried away with it—more about that later). After turning in the first iteration for a grade, the next few weeks of class were dedicated to reconstructing our midterm site in different ways—first using Bootstrap 3 after learning a bit about how that works, and then using PHP to show our understanding of that.

Available on request: Evaluation rubric Template site 3 versions of my website Live site: www.presta.do/dno037/dierksheide

Above: Screenshot showing the responsive qualities of the site Opposite: Screenshot of the midterm website

Opposite: Screenshot of the home page

Proyecto final: DiseĂąo de un sitio web The final project was to build a responsive website for anything we chose, which was a pretty broad prompt. I decided to revisit the blog I made about my Harry Potter summer camp and transform it into a more user-friendly website as an archive of information for me after I stop running the camp and as a resource for anyone looking to create a similar experience. With this project there was an emphasis on front-end planning, especially since this was the first site that we were building from scratch in the class. We received a project grade for developing a moodboard of visual inspiration and similar websites, creating a set of personas who would hypothetically access our site to get us thinking about the user experience, and building a prototype of our site using Marvel to get a feel for how it would work. The next part of the project was building out the site, and during the last few weeks of class we got some in-class time to work on it, as well as a short intro to Wordpress as an option for our sites. We turned in an in-progress site for a midway grade, and at this point had to buy a domain name and hosting for our site. Although we didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t get any critique on our website at the midway point, for the final exam we had to finish the website and send our professor the link.

Available on request: Personas Moodboard Prototype Live site: www.harrypottercampelmhurst.com

Proyecto final cont.

Frase típica “¡Cinco minutos más, mamá!” Pain Points Piensa que muchos sitios se ven muy fomes No le gusta leer bloques grandes de texto Objetivos

Isidora Salamanca Estudiante

Visceral

Conductual

Reflexivo

Quiere estar emocionada e inspirada, y entender todo facilmente

Quiere obtener los recurzos e ideas para hacer el mejor fiesta de cumpleaños

Quiere impresionar a sus amigos

Edad: 13 años Situación sentimental: soltera Hogar: Miami, con sus padres y hermanas menores Dispositivo: computadora de la familia

Isidora es gran fanático de Harry Potter y para su cumpleaños de 14 años quiere tener la mejor fiesta de Harry Potter. Ella está buscando ideas pero le cuesta leer articulos largos y aprende visualmente. Tambien tiene poco tiempo para gastar en linea porque comparte la computadora con su familia.

Opposite: a section from my moodboard Right: One of the personas I created Below: Screenshot of a page on the site

nuevas tendencias en el

Diseño de I took New Tendencies in Poster Design for Sam Fox commons elective credits. It’s a printmaking and poster design course at La Católica taught by Javier Cancino Díaz and a popular elective amongst the design students, so I almost didn’t get into the very full class. The class met 3 hours once a week in the small on-campus printmaking studio called The Factory Press, which also hosted visiting artists and workshops outside of class hours. I wasn’t completely sure what to expect, but the course ended up being focused on experimenting with letterpress to create typographic posters. Since I previously took Printmaking: Material and Culture in my sophomore year at WashU I was excited to have an opportunity to use a press again, though the studio was very tiny and the process used in the class was very specific. For each project we had to create a design digitally in Illustrator or InDesign, cut it out of MDF with the laser cutter on campus, and use the laser-cut letters as our printing matrix. Trying to schedule in a time to use the laser cutter before all the time slots were filled up was always a struggle that had me running between campuses a lot. Between that and needing to venture to a new part of the city to buy the specific paper that the professor wanted, this class a lot of work for me.

At the beginning of the semester my classmates and I would bring various options for our posters to class and the professor would review the designs before we

e Carteles committed to laser cutting them, but later in the semester this midway crit was cut out in order to leave time to make more posters total. In general, weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d receive an assignment, have a week or two to come up with a design and create our matrix, and then at the next class everyone would come in shifts to print their posters. The following week after everyoneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s assignments were dry we would hang up all the posters outside or in the classroom and have a full class critique. The crits in this class were much closer to what I was used to from WashU project critiques , so it was nice to have that in one of the classes I took in Chile.

Additional info: Syllabus available on request

Another aspect of the class was that our professor created a Facebook group to update everyone about assignments and any schedule changes, and he regularly posted images of prints and posters for us to look at as inspiration for what it is possible to do with letterpress printing. It was also a good access point for students who had questions about assignments, or for us to organize who would bring shared supplies for printing and snacks for critiques. We ended up with 5 total posters at the end of the semester. Each assignment had very strict requirements, which meant that we had to figure out how to be expressive within the constraints, though we got more freedom as the semester progressed. Each of those projects is explained on the following pages.

Pictured above: Our classroom on critique day

Póster 1 The first assignment was to design a vertical, A3-sized poster that said “Piensa en grande” (“Think big”) using only letters from the typeface Franchise in blue ink. Working within those limitations was pretty tricky, but the range of compositions that the class came up with was cool to see during the crit. I chose to experiment with different ways of applying the ink to create tones and textures within the letters.

PĂłster 2 The next assignment had similar restrictions, being a horizontal A3-sized poster bearing the word â&#x20AC;&#x153;Error!â&#x20AC;? in Franchise with red ink. With this one I tried putting things on the matrix to create patterns, such as the latex gloves we were using in the studio, which turned out interestingly but not quite in line with the message the words were communicating.

Pรณster 3 For the third assignment we had to use numbers 1-9 in that same Franchise typeface to create a vertical A3-sized composition, this time with green ink.

Póster 4 On this assignment we were finally able to use typefaces besides Franchise to create a vertical, A3-sized poster printed in gold ink. The required phrase was “Comer chocolate encoge la ropa” (“Eating chocolate shrinks your clothes”), and for this project we were able to use different colored paper or even non-paper surfaces for the final poster. I printed my design on a few different colors of paper and picked the best variation for the final crit.

Póster 5 The final assignment was to imitate a poster by Spanish designer Quim Marin that our professor gave us as an example. The new technique we were trying was two-color printing by first printing a portrait of ourselves in blue ink and then a number and our names in red ink on top of that. The typeface was open to our choice, and we could exercise some creativity within the restraints of the blue photo + red number requirement. I went with the number 8 to play with the idea of symmetry and reflection. This last poster wasn’t my favorite though because I felt it strayed away from the typography focus that we’d had for the rest of the semester.

Progrr 40

rama While I really enjoyed and learned a lot from my academic courses at the university, the other major aspect of my semester was being a part of the WashU in Chile program. The program shaped my entire abroad experience in the best way possible and helped me to really take advantage of and learn during my six months in Santiago. Being a member of this was not only a built-in support system when I was far from homeâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;thanks to the efforts of the wonderful program director, my host family, and fellow studentsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;, it also provided me with opportunities I wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have otherwise had via trips, required classes, and length of the semester.

Evelyn It would be impossible to describe the WashU in Chile program without starting with our Program Director. Evelyn Vitagliano runs everything on the Chile side of things, from selecting our host families to helping us students get our visas to organizing educational trips for us. Her talent for ensuring smooth communication between different groups of people and making sure everything is going according to plan has been phenomenal for the many years that she has run this program, and it would be hard to imagine it existing in the same capacity without her. But to describe just her organizational skills or merely call her the director would be to seriously downplay her role in the program. Evelynâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s dedication, immense compassion, and genuine love for everyone involved in the WashU program, students and their families included, made her really more like a second host mom that we didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t live with, or as many past participants in the program call her, an angel watching over us. From day one she did everything in her power to make the transition to living abroad smooth, help us with any request no matter how small, support us academically and emotionally, make us welcome in her home, and ensure that we, the students who would only be in the country for six and a half short months, had the most fulfilling experience possible. Every aspect of the program she built worked in tandem to form a piece of a beautiful whole puzzle, giving us the support but also freedom that we needed. Sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s an extraordinary woman and became not only family to me and the other students in my program, but also a role model.

Mi familia One of the most important aspects of how much I learned in Chile was living with my host family. Students were meticulously selected and matched with a family by Evelyn (whose ability to place us before we even met her was uncanny), and I’m so grateful for the lifelong relationship that I’ll have with my host parents. For the whole time I was in Chile I stayed with Mary Díaz and Juan Carlos Diez in their apartment on the northeast side of the city, which was as rewarding as it was challenging. It was difficult to adjust to living in someone else’s home after two and a half years of living on my own in college, and I had to catch on to cultural changes very quickly—within hours of my arrival to the country on an overnight flight from Miami, I was meeting and sitting down to family lunch with my host parents, brothers, cousin, and their significant others, trying to figure out what to do and say. But I also felt like the luckiest girl in the world because my host family was so welcoming and understanding, even from that first lunch together when they made a special empanada for me without onions because Evelyn had told them ahead of time that I didn’t eat them. Although I perhaps didn’t get the most “authentic” of Chilean experiences with my host parents, given that Mary’s family all live in the U.S. and Canada and she was so understanding of and accommodating to my American habits and choices, I also know that living with them was a main source of my exposure to the language and culture of the country. After all, culture isn’t just different food and traditions and holidays—it’s also about manners and mannerisms, what time things are done and how you’re expected to spend that time, how relationships with family and friends are navigated, and societally held morals and beliefs. I learned a lot about Chile and a lot about myself by living with my host parents for a semester.

Las chicas Though it might seem the most accidental or least Chile-specific, the other students on the program with me were among the most important parts of my semester. There were 9 of us, all women, 8 from WashU and 1 from Colby College who joined in on the WashU program. I don’t think anyone could have hand-picked a more amazing group of people to go abroad with, and despite the fact that only a couple of us knew each other at all before arriving in Chile, we bonded immediately and became each other’s strongest support system. Though we also all built important relationships with Evelyn and our host families (and even each other’s host families), having each other as people in the same position and sharing almost identical study abroad experiences was another level of mutual understanding. There was very little in Chile that I did without them, and I cannot imagine how different my semester would have been with a different group of people. And though 8 of us were from WashU, the other girls were all ArtSci students who I probably never would have had the chance to become friends with otherwise—the range of majors and interests in the group, united under the common excitement about the Spanish language and the culture we were living in, created a great dynamic between the nine of us, and I learned so much from them as we navigated Santiago and beyond together. The opportunity to meet a new group of people was nice, but then we moved so far beyond just being in a program together to practically becoming sisters for six months. I’m so grateful for that and I know their friendship will continue to be important to me for the rest of my life.

Viajes During the semester, Evelyn organized one field trip per month for us as part of the program. These were mandatory and part of our overall education, so that we were able to really get to know the country and city we were living in. The first week, just days after we arrived in Santiago, we were already being flown to the south of Chile as part of a cultural introduction class for a weekend spent learning about the history of native Chileans, the Mapuche, who represent a significant portion of the country’s population. We had guest lectures from Mapuche historians, visited museums and markets, ate at traditional Mapuche homes, and toured the gorgeous rivers, lakes, mountains, and volcanoes of the Arucanía Region. That trip was the most education-focused because it was part of a class we were taking for WashU credit, but that’s not to say that we didn’t learn a lot from the other excursions. Later in the semester we drove to Valparaíso, Chile’s most important port city and full of unique cultural history; visited a vineyard near Santiago to learn about the processes behind one of the country’s biggest exports; flew north to San Pedro de Atacama for a weekend to see some of the amazing natural landmarks of the driest desert in the world; and spent a day visiting different locations in Santiago that were testaments to the history of Chile’s 16year dictatorship, led by an ex-political prisoner and survivor of torture under Augusto Pinochet’s rule. Through all of these trips we gained insight into the varied landscape of the large and unique country where we were living. I left feeling not like I merely spent a semester going to school in Santiago, but rather like I spent over half a year really getting to know and understand Chile.

Top: A Mapuche ranch outside of Villarica Middle: Piedras Rojas, near San Pedro de Atacama Bottom: Stairs up one of the 45 hills of Valparaíso

Duración The final key feature of the program is its length. While most of my friends finished up their study abroad semesters after 3-4 months, ours was six and a half months, going all the way into July. It was kind of hard in early May to see almost everyone I knew getting out of class while I still had over two months left before I finished school, but now I can’t imagine this program being any shorter because of how much I gained from the extra time abroad. Because of the opposite seasons in the southern hemisphere, the academic year in Chile starts in March rather than September. Other exchange students who we met in Santiago simply arrived in March because of this change, but the WashU in Chile program begins in early January, even before WashU starts classes, in order to fit in two courses: and introduction to Chilean contemporary culture and a Spanish language review class. After completing both of these, we had the entire month of February free to do as we liked with our summer break, including traveling, exploring the city, having our families or friends visit, and spending time getting to know our host families better before the semester really started. Those “extra” months for me were essential to my adjustment to the country, the relationships I built, and especially to my progress towards being able to speak and understand Spanish really well.

Chile The country I studied in also obviously had a major impact on my semester abroad, and while studying in any country would absolutely have given me the opportunity to learn about another culture, I am so consistently amazed by and grateful for the time I spent in Chile specifically, which I found to be a historically and culturally rich place to live. Learning about the history of Chile was a particularly rewarding experience for me. As a requirement of the program and as credits towards the Spanish major or minor, the other girls on the program and I had to take a class called Literature, Culture, and Politics of the Southern Cone, taught by Grinor Rojo, which was essentially a history course on Latin America and more specifically Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay through the lens of literature written over the past two centuries. While I am not usually the biggest fan of history classes, having suffered through countless semesters of world and U.S. history in middle school and high school, the past gained a very immediate relevancy as I tried to understand how and why the country I suddenly found myself in works the way it does. Tracing the influence of global politics on the different cultures of South America over the years was key in my understanding of how Chileans viewed the world. And learning about Chile while living in Chile was very different from the vague attempts to teach me about the different countries of Central and South America that I’d had in my years of introductory Spanish classes. Whereas before, I was learning about far-off places that I couldn’t really picture or care about, in Chile it was so important for me to have that knowledge that every Chilean learns in school the same way we learn about U.S. history. I can certainly say now that the only country in the world whose history I know as well as my own country’s is Chile.

It was also necessary to understand the role of the U.S. in Chile’s history and contemporary culture and how that shaped what others thought when they learned I’m American. The relationship between the U.S. and Chile has changed a lot across history, leading to different opinions about the U.S. from different people. In general I found that, given the major global role of our country today and its Westernizing influence, many Chileans are fascinated by the U.S. and American culture. Certainly there is a wide presence of Western culture in Chile,

from the Hard Rock Café in the mall that I visited with my host brothers (despite never having been to one in the U.S.) to the popular music and movies and even the news coverage. I never felt very out of touch with home, with my host parents often informing me of major U.S. news events before I even knew about them, or all sorts of people trying to practice their English with me or ask about Donald Trump. It was a weird and eye-opening experience to witness firsthand what a major role the U.S. really plays in the lives of people across the globe. Chilean news was following our presidential primaries, while most Americans could barely find Chile on a map, much less tell you the name of its president (it’s Michelle Bachelet). It was also an adjustment to get used to the people of Chile. There was a very particular balance in social interactions—while to us, the warmth and friendliness of the general population and the coinciding lack of personal space in comparison to the U.S. was something to get used to, Chile is typically regarded as the most reserved and conservative of Latin American countries, both culturally and politically. By those standards, the U.S. is a very cold and unfriendly place socially. One of the most awkward moments during my first days in the country was being told that I was supposed to kiss on the cheek and hug everyone I met upon greeting them and saying goodbye, but not until after I had screwed that up when meeting my host family for the first time. But despite how much I grew to appreciate this much more heartfelt-seeming social gesture, it didn’t necessarily mean that everyone I met was transformed into a close friend. As Evelyn explained to us at the beginning of the semester, it would be somewhat harder to make friends at school because the university was structured so that students take classes with the same people in their major for all five years of college, forming tight friend groups. Though almost everyone I met in Chile was happy to talk to me or help me out, it was definitely true that the university culture at La Católica made it difficult become good friends with classmates. On the whole though, the people I met and the things I learned during my semester just made me love Chile more and more, and it also made me think a lot about my own country and appreciate or question certain aspects of both cultures and what that meant for me personally.

Mi experie If it hasn’t been clear thus far, I gained a lot from my time abroad. The process of learning to navigate a new city, culture, and language simultaneously was really difficult—perhaps more difficult than I gave myself credit for while I was there. I spent a lot of time in Chile just sort of accepting my life in Santiago as the new normal and going along with whatever happened, which my host parents thought was pretty amazing. They would always ask me whether I missed my home and family, which I did, but not any more or less than when I was at college. I did face a lot of new challenges in Chile, and even if I tried my best to make everything seem normal, I certainly had my rough patches and issues that I had to overcome during the six months. There were times when I wanted nothing more than to go home. But by the end I had formed such a personal connection to the country, the city, and the people I met that it was really hard to leave. I went to Chile for the experience of living in a Spanish speaking country, and living in a country where my native language is not the one spoken by most people was a huge part of my experience. It was exactly what I thought it would be like but simultaneously very different. Culturally in the U.S. there’s a lot wrapped up in our feelings about language, and while Chileans were often quick to compliment my Spanish and seemed to have a genuine appreciation simply for my effort to speak their language, I very much felt held back by my own unconsciously held notions about people trying to speak non-native languages. It was hard to not be able to express myself and harder still to know that even when I thought I was expressing myself well, I was definitely still making grammar mistakes and pronouncing things terribly. Knowing that opening my mouth would immediately expose me as a gringa if it wasn’t already obvious from my clothing or mannerisms added an extra sense of apprehension to asking for directions if I was lost (I often was) or approaching new people. On the one hand, I had the excuse of being a foreigner; on the other, I was risking embarrassment by simply talking. Though I certainly wasn’t lacking

encia in sympathy for Americans who don’t speak perfect English before my trip, being able to empathize directly with that experience of not always being understood no matter how hard you try was new experience me. Upon coming back to the states, I’ve found that having overcome the challenges presented by having to speak a different language and live in a completely new place, I am more confident in myself. After Chile, coming back to a familiar place like St. Louis—where I can understand perfectly what people are saying to me and vice versa—daily life just seems easier. It’s not as much of a risk to introduce myself to someone new or say what I’m thinking, which is pretty amazing because I can easily become a very quiet and reserved person in new or uncomfortable situations. The big changes in my life in my life while I was in Chile also gave me appreciation for a lot of new things that I hadn’t done before. I really liked traveling around the country, which is something I’ve never done without my real family and sort of considered to be exclusive to the realm of family vacations or visiting relatives. Outside of the field trips we went on with the program, the other young women from WashU and I planned two trips in our February summer break: the first a week in the regions just north of Santiago to visit the beach town of La Serena and Valle Elqui, one of the best places to observe the stars in the world; and the second a backpacking trip in Las Torres National Park in Patagonia that I attended only semi-voluntarily. The former included an observatory tour where we were able to see the Milky Way with our naked eyes from the top of a mountain and was perhaps the most moving experience I’ve had in my life. The latter, having never been camping before outside of setting up a tent in my backyard, was probably the most intense and physically difficult thing I have ever done and hopefully will ever do again. My friends didn’t only push me to only explore the nature of Chile though; we also took advantage of living in a 6-million-person urban zone to see parks and landmarks, go to festivals and restaurants, dance

at nightclubs and befriend bartenders. And I could hardly have spent 6 months in Chile without spending some time as a soccer fan—there is no feeling in the world as amazing as watching your national team beat Argentina and Lionel Messi to win the Copa América for the second year in a row, and then watching the country celebrate for a week straight. Bringing it back to an academic focus, I think I learned a lot from spending a semester away from WashU. Though similar in its level of rigor and prestige on a global level, PUC was never going to be the same as the WashU experience, and I think that was important. I have a lot of love for so much about my education here and especially the art school, but when I left last semester it was at a point where I was really ready for a break from the routine. In my experience there is a way of living as a WashU student that everyone conforms to, of always doing everything academic and extracurricular and social at the same time, and it’s very fast-paced and intense and does start to wear on you. After five semesters of that, my study abroad really broke the mold of what I’d come to expect college education to feel like, and that experience was good for me. But I also missed certain aspects of my WashU life and the semester away has truly allowed me to come back ready to appreciate and suck the marrow out of every moment of my senior year. My Chilean life being different from my WashU life had a lot to do with time. Aside from the fact that life in Chile generally moves at a slower pace than in the U.S., I also had a much smaller workload and fewer responsibilities while abroad. Since I’d taken two classes in January already, I was only taking 5 courses during the semester at La Católica, which was the least amount I’d taken since first semester of my freshman year of college. My classes were also all only 3 hours a week for once (unlike WashU studios), and with only one exception they all met in 3-hour blocks once a week, which meant I didn’t need to be in a hurry to get homework done. I had a lot less responsibility because I also wasn’t involved in any clubs or organizations outside of the group for exchange students, I didn’t have to do much to do to take care of myself—my incredible host mom who spoiled me to death cooked, grocery shopped, cleaned, did laundry, and even re-made my bed if I had done an unacceptable job—, and I had very few social obligations owing to having less friends in the country than I could count on two hands. All this meant that I spent a lot of time sitting on my bed at home. I did learn that the smaller amount of homework actually made it harder for me to motivate myself to get it done, and that despite the inherent stress of being very busy I prefer to have a full schedule most of the time, as long as that schedule is filled with things I chose to be doing.

But I wasn’t sitting around in Chile bored, like some of my friends were. As someone whose head and notebooks are always filled with ideas and projects that I can’t find the time to do, this proved to be an ideal opportunity for artistic exploration, which I found to be one of the most personally fulfilling aspects of my semester. Through several personal projects that made it to various degrees of finished during my six and a half months in Chile, along with some smaller creations and things that were started before being abandoned in the end-ofsemester stress of trying to take advantage of every moment while also packing and attempting to not think about upcoming goodbyes, I took it upon myself to make some stuff that I wasn’t getting to make in my classes and that was a source of creative excitement for me, which I’ll show in the following pages.

Proyecto 1: Illustraciones de febrero After spending an exhausting January taking classes and adjusting to life in Chile, and a wild February of traveling, introducing my American parents to my host parents when they came to visit, and a short visit to the emergency room, I finally sat down to make some artwork. I had wanted to develop a project with very specific goals, for the month of February, and I did some thinking about the type of things I like to do, what I usually do, and what I wanted to try in order to develop an ideal project. What I came up with was creating illustrations of some of the places I traveled to in February based on memories and photos I took, with a focus on use of color. I wrote to John Hendrix about this for some feedback on the idea and got some good advice about tying a story into it to make it more engaging than just some pretty pictures, which Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll admit I tried quite hard to do and ultimately mostly failed at. That said, as a personal exercise I really pushed myself with these drawings and got something out of it that I was really happy with after working on it for a solid week of doing nothing but sitting in bed and painting with my tablet. I also played around a lot with trying to incorporate a typographic element in this project, and did a lot of sketches of hand-drawn type for some poetry I wrote about things I saw, but ultimately got frustrated with both my writing and type and that part never got finished. As a final product, I printed the illustrations as postcards of Chile.

SOLUTION CARD your character’s name

your real name

You are cordially invited to attend the Yule Ball, the traditional formal dance held in honor of the Triwizard Tournament.

Written and Designed by Caroline Dierksheide Game format based on “Murder at the Four Deuces” by Mary Lee Typeface used: Superclarendon

Other Murders – write the character murdered and the character you think committed the murder here:

SOLUTION CARD your character’s name

your real name

Other Murders – write the character murdered and the character you think committed the murder here:

Proyecto 2: Murder Mystery Kit This was maybe my favorite thing I did in Chile. It was born originally from a non-art related project that I wanted to do for my own benefit, which was re-writing the murder mystery party kit that I had created 3 years earlier for my little sister’s 13th birthday. I had always wanted to play it with my friends, but there were some issues that stopped me, like the fact that no one was able to solve the mystery the first time around, and there wasn’t enough drama between the characters because it was all very middle school appropriate, and on top of that there were lots of random spelling errors. So as I was reconstructing the story of the murder mystery (which involves everyone at the party playing a character and following prompts to interact with other invitees while trying to figure out which other character is the murderer), I was going back through the files and realizing how terribly designed it all was. I based the rules and gameplay very closely on another murder mystery kit I bought for my own birthday party in high school, and when I created this new story three years ago I had kept the design of all the character booklets, instructions, props, etc. more or less the same as that kit. But looking at it and thinking how hideous it was, and I realized it it would be a fun project to start from scratch and redesign all the different materials of the game, from the party invitations to the solution cards. And that’s what I did. Without easy access to a good printer in Chile, this project was sort of left in the not-quite-final-draft phase for several months, and I’m printing and finishing it now in St. Louis so that I can finally host the party.

Proyecto 3: Moda del huerto This was the lengthiest of my personal projects and honestly got pretty out of hand. I created this with the intention of it being a small thing to have fun with fashion and pattern design and showcase on the midterm website I had to create for my Design and New Media class. Unfortunately I did not limit myself at all when I settled on creating a fashion collection inspired by vegetables, and ended up designing 16 ready-to-wear looks, 8 formalwear outfits, 4 bathing suits, and 13 distinct veggie patterns, each with at least one color variation. From there, even though my original intention was to showcase these on the little site I designed (all that did not get finished before the website was due for the record), I decided that print would be a better way to showcase the designs and made an attempt at creating a lookbook, which did not get finished. However, I did upload all my patterns to Spoonflower, a site that prints custom fabric designs, and get them test printed so that they would be available for sale through their site. When all was said and done this project dragged on for months, which was a lot longer than I ever intended, even though I do like the results.

Lo que cambiaría Despite all of the amazing parts, my semester wasn’t perfect all of the time and there are absolutely things that I would have changed about my experience. On a personal level, if I were to do it all over or go back in time and give myself advice, I would commit myself more to taking more risks and putting myself out there, especially with meeting new people and making friends. I would like to have been more dedicated to improving and practicing my Spanish in my personal time, when it was all too easy to fall back into watching movies or talking to my American friends in English. While it was out of my control, I had my fair share of health issues while in Chile (which worried both of my real mom and my host mom to no end). I was shipped off to Santiago with a lot of questions hanging over my head about how my Crohn’s Disease would fare so far from home, and although I have on the whole been well in the four years since my diagnosis, I had had issues on occasion in the past with flare-ups. I had to go to the emergency room out of the blue in February, but they didn’t find anything wrong so I continued on my way for quite a while unaffected. Towards the end of the semester I started having more problems again, and spent more time than I would’ve liked resting in bed. When I got back to the states and my regular doctor did some tests, we ended up deciding that I needed to have surgery. So if it was in my power to change that, I would go back and take away the stress that my health caused me while abroad.

From the side of classes, I’m not sure that the design classes I took were as strong as they could have been. I went in assuming that I’d be able to take some design and some illustration courses, which turned out to not be the case, and while I learned a lot from my design classes that I couldn’t have by staying in the U.S., I can’t say that they completely lived up to some of the better Sam Fox courses I’ve taken. But that may have also been the particular selection offered that semester and my choice of courses, since there wasn’t any precedent from a WashU design student and it was difficult for Evelyn or students at PUC to help me without a good understanding of what the Communication Design program is like here. So given the circumstances and the small amount of credits I’m bringing back for my major anyways, I think I made the most of the situation.

Recomend Given the fact that no one from Communication Design has studied abroad with the WashU in Chile program before and that Sam Fox students can typically only go to Florence for their abroad experience, I think it’s fair to say that this was not only an experiment for me personally but also for the design program. I’ve offered a lot of reflection above on what spending my semester in Chile meant to me personally and academically, and I hope I’ve made it clear that while I’ve analyzed both positives and negatives of my experience, I fully stand by my choice to petition to go to Chile. Although I can never really know what I missed in Florence or back in St. Louis during the spring 2016 semester, I do know that being able to pursue my studies in both Spanish and design in Chile has had a profound and unique impact on my life. That said, I can’t endorse the path that I chose for future students without some caveats. While everyone at WashU works hard, choosing to study abroad anywhere that there isn’t a program already laid out for you is going to be especially difficult, and I do feel that I’ve had to put in an exceptional amount of effort to make this work. As a student who enjoys putting my all into the things I’m passionate about, it has been a completely worthwhile effort for me. I’ve taken 18+ credits per

daciones semester since Spring 2014, am trying to complete two minors in ArtSci on top of my ComDes major and still graduate in four years, have had every required credit planned out since I was a freshman, and went through the petition process to study abroad in Chile over a year in advance of actually going abroad (and on top of that still had to apply to the actual program through Arts&Sciences). Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve also had to make sacrifices, from time with friends and family to cool elective courses to a summer internship after my junior year. While my whole heart wants to recommend the Chile program to every possible student, I would have to warn communication design students specifically that they really have to want it to be able to put in all the necessary effort and still feel like it was worth it in the end. My opinion is that future students should be able to study abroad outside of Florence if they choose, and be made aware that this is an option, but that the petition process should remain in place as the only way to really screen for those passionate enough to work for it. If a student is not able to plan ahead enough or put a lot of effort towards a different study abroad experience, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s going to be impossible to pull it off successfully.

n u Conclu 64

lusión usión

Despite the length of this book already and everything I’ve said about my time in Chile, there are still so many things that have gone unmentioned that contributed to the breadth of my experience. It would be impossible to describe everything that happened that I learned from, but this should serve as a basic guide to some of the most important parts of my six and a half months abroad. It was so much more than I ever could have imagined beforehand, as can be seen in this quote from my study abroad application about what I wanted to get out of going to Chile: “... I’m [...] sure that meeting and connecting with people who speak a language I’m not completely fluent in and are part of a culture I’m not completely familiar with will be a challenge at the beginning of the semester, but I hope that it will allow me to grow a lot from the experience.” It’s such an innocently vague and cliché statement, but I truly did learn an immense amount, thanks to everyone who was willing to support me in my endeavor. I’m so grateful for the opportunity that I had to study in Chile, and it’s something that will be important in my life for a long time.

This book was created by Caroline Dierksheide in the fall of 2016 at Washington University in St. Louis. Typefaces used are Hospital, designed by Gley Riquelme and SofĂa Savoy, and Chucara Text, designed by Juan Pablo de Gregorio. Photo on page 53 was taken by Fransisca Chou, photos on pages 4 and 43 were taken by Juan Carlos Diez, all other photography is by Caroline Dierksheide.