Process: Unseen / Seen by maggiechuang

Unseen/Seen

FORM & FUNCTION Project 4 1

Fall 2018 Maggie Chuang In Situ

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Unseen/Seen: The Nutshell Studies This project is a translation of the episode “The Nutshell Studies” from the podcast 99% Invisible. The book created follows the story of Frances Glessner Lee, who innovated forensic investigation in the 1940s by create doll house dioramas of murders to teach detectives how to investigate a crime scene. Lee’s work is highly intricate, and captures the details of a real home as well as the tiny pieces of evidence for detectives to find. My aim with this project is to highlight the unsettling pairing of beautiful, handcrafted, delicate craft with the content of grisly murder and crime.

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Research What did you turn to for reference, inspiration, and understanding for your project? How did it influenceâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; directly or indirectlyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;what you made?

Discovery What was your process for generating possible ideas for the project? How wide and deep did you explore before coming to a final idea? Did your discovery process generate outcomes that were successful?

Refinement How did you refine your work? How did you make decisions as you refined your idea? What criteria did you use for evaluation? Did you find your final refined idea to be the final iteration of your idea?

Criticism What criticism did you receive from your peers and faculty about your project? Did you agree or disagree with it? What did you learn from criticism? 5

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Research

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What did you turn to for reference, inspiration, and understanding for your project? How did it influenceâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;directly or indirectlyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; what you made? Part of my goal with this book was to set up an unsettling pair between vintage craft and crime scenes; I felt that setting the right atmosphere and tone would be critical for whether that goal came across successfully. I looked at references in graphic design/movie/TV, and began gravitating toward true crime documentaries and the way they contextualized their stories. Especially with shows like Mindhunter and True Detective, I looked at the way color and image juxtaposition was used to set up an uneasy mood; layering, whether physical or digital, was also used too. These styles translated well for my project, which had a rich collection of photographs to use and manipulate; I responded to the literal representations of these dioramas, and wanted to present the opportunity to sift through them and dive into the details. In contrast to the narrative, photographic style, the podcast also has a stricter and calmer tone that I wanted to capture. Since much of the information was based on police and medical training, I considered using the language of reports and official documents to tell the story. At the time, I had also listened to a 99% Invisible episode about movie props, and the process of making them look as authentic as possible for the time period. This jumpstarted me to look at early 1900s documents, and consider ways to use the style in a contemporary way.

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Adapting the Text The story told by 99% Invisible was holistic and exceptionally interesting, but was divided into several different topics. There are sections where the focus completely on the Nutshell Studies; in others, they outline the differences between coroners and medical examiners, with no reference to the Nutshells at all. Although I originally wanted to include everything, it became clear that the story would become too convoluted if I was to accommodate every single tangent. I chose to edit the text down to parts that only covered the Nutshell Studies, in order to draw attention to a specific storyline that I could pull apart and visualize.

The podcast also had around six narrators total, and constantly jumped between them in a round-table style. While making the content interesting to listen to, on paper the transcript felt very casual and jumpy, which didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t fit the style I was going for. For the adaptation, I chose to consolidate the text into the two most prominent narrators, Roman Mars and Katie Mingle

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Moodboards of visual inspiration Left page: Narrative/image style Right page: Report/documentation style In Situ

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Discovery

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What was your process for generating possible ideas for the project? How wide and deep did you explore before coming to a final idea? Did your discovery process generate outcomes that were successful? In this stage I oscillated constantly between single-spread sketches and full book maps; I could simultaneously work with the overall pacing and figure out the translation of that pacing on a smaller scale. As I was determining the layout, I also focused heavily on finding image treatments that would suit the story. I started with a few early directions that I wanted to explore: should it be collages? A vintage scrapbook? A contemporary archive? While I wanted to use the photos, I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want to use them as found, leading me to consider several image treatments: duotone, halftone print, black and white, warm/ cool colors, complete recoloring. Furthermore, I had to consider how integrated the report/documentation style would be with the images. Are they a part of the same layouts, or a complete shift in tone? Given the (generally) linear narration of the podcast, the classical vintage feeling of the dioramas, and my hope to experiment broadly with style/image treatment, I felt that a hardcover book would be the appropriate format for this project.

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Small scale studies for visual language. I considered illustrating the objects or patterns in the Nutshells at first, but eventually felt that it didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t capture my intention of highlighting the intricacies that were already in the dioramas. However, this experimentation later informed the handwritten elements that found their way into the final product.

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Top: Typographic tests for the title page (eventually, these were scrapped for the typewriter style)

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Bottom: early layouts for the police report format. There were early struggles with how modern and how aged to make it feel. 16

Categorizing my image archive into textiles/patterns/details of craft versus evidence/details of the crime

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The Nutshell Studies of Frances Glessner Lee

There are eighteen different scenes, and each one has different tiny features—tiny furniture, tiny windows and doors and lamps.

a log cabin,

There are eighteen different scenes, and each one has different tiny features—tiny furniture, tiny windows and doors and lamps.

a bathroom.

a barn, There also tiny people, dolls, in each scene.

Frances Glessner Lee would have loved the opportunity to study medicine and go onto college, but her parents were not supportive of that. This was around 1900; women weren’t really going to medical school. Her brother got to go though, and he brought a friend home once by the name of George McGrath, a pioneering medical examiner. McGrath and Lee became great friends, and when he’d come to visit he’d tell her stories about cases he was working on. Lee was just absolutely fascinated. She loved it.

Lee came from a wealthy Chicago family and she was supposed to be a proper society lady with lady hobbies, like needlework. Her interest in death wasn’t really encouraged by her family, which meant for years she quietly studied it. She was a voracious reader, talking to experts, getting firsthand experience by going to crime scenes.

Most nutshells are just one room and about the size of a shoebox. One is a little bigger, with three rooms plus a porch. It’s in a glass case so you can look down and see the interior of the house from above.

Was it a suicide?

The scene is of a lovely, well-kept suburban home.

She then came to realize that people were getting away with murder. Literally.

There are lace doilies on the tables, flower print linoleum in the kitchen, Police would routinely botch investigations; they would contaminate crime scenes, move bodies, do things today that would be obviously wrong, but at the time they didn’t know any better. Beyond that, the police just didn’t know how to get information from these scenes. They might not realize the significance of a pile of cigarettes or the positioning of a firearm.

A homicide?

When you look at a Nutshell diorama, you’re looking for clues about how the person or persons died.

Autopsies also either weren’t being done at all, or were being done by doctors with no specific training in forensics. An accidental death?

Frances Glessner Lee spared no expense on her dioramas. She lavished love onto these brutal crime scenes. Each diorama took about six months and around $6,000 to build—about the same amount of time and money it would have cost to build a real house in the 1940s. Lee felt like if the policemen looked at them and saw any fault or didn’t take them seriously, they wouldn’t learn from them. She wanted everything to be perfect.

At the end of the Frances Glessner Lee Seminar in Homicide Investigation, the attendees present their theories about what happened in each of their Nutshell studies.

Of course, Frances Glessner Lee was always trying to be taken seriously in the all-male world she had entered. She was ultimately both respected and adored by the police that she worked with. The week-long seminars she led were thought to be the best training that homicide detectives could receive. And they’re still thought of that way today. They came to think of her not only as an expert in the field, but also as a mother figure. After Frances Glessner Lee died in 1962, the programs she funded at Harvard (including the weeklong seminars) were ended, and the Nutshells were put in storage, possibly headed for the trash. And then, Russell Fisher, the medical examiner in Baltimore and a former student of Lee’s programs at Harvard, stepped in and said “We’ll do it, we’ll do the seminar. We’ll just pick it up here in Maryland.” And they brought the nutshells, which have been used in Baltimore since 1968.

What was it a homicide, staged to look like a suicide? Or a suicide, staged to look at a homicide? Or something else entirely?

Or something else entirely?

She wanted everything to be perfect.

My first digital map of the book

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All day long, police are coming in and out, people are calling about their deceased loved ones, and the press is calling with inquiries. But there’s one room on the fourth floor that sits apart from the buzz of normal activity in the building.

It houses the “Nutshell Studies”, which are miniature dollhouse-like dioramas, each one a different scene.

This room feels a bit like an art gallery.

There’s a kitchen, The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Baltimore, Maryland is a busy place. Anyone who dies unexpectedly in the state of Maryland will end up there for an autopsy. On an average day, they might perform twelve autopsies; on more hectic days, they might do more than twenty. The building is six stories tall, and around 80 people are employed there.

There are eighteen different scenes, and each one has different tiny features—tiny furniture, tiny windows and doors and lamps.

Her name was

Frances Glessner Lee, and her work in the field of forensics has shaped just about everything that happens inside the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Baltimore, Maryland.

There also tiny people, dolls, in each scene. There also tiny people, dolls, in each scene.

They’re all dead.

And all of the tiny people in these scenes have one thing in common.

and blood.

In the bedroom, a husband and wife are dead from gunshot wounds. In another room, a baby has been shot dead in her crib. Blood is splattered all over the pink wallpaper. It’s a gruesome scene.

Everywhere.

Sometimes the police will come up with their own solutions, and Baltimore medical examiners will just say “that’s not how Frances saw it.” After they present, they get to find out the actual solutions.

There also tiny people, dolls, in each scene. And all of the tiny people in these scenes have one thing in common.

Blood is splattered all over the pink wallpaper.

Eventually, Lee’s parents and her brother passed away. Lee was in her fifties, and finally had access to the family money and agency to do what she wanted. In 1936, she gave a bunch of money to Harvard University to establish the first program of legal medicine. The program trained doctors to become medical examiners. In 1945, Lee starts and presides over week-long training seminars for police—the ones that are still going on today. She wanted to teach police, among other things, how to gather clues from a crime scene. Of course, in terms of legalities and time constraints, it was impossible to visit real crime scenes during the training seminars, so Lee decides she would build miniature death scenes for the police to study. Each one would be based on a real death. She called them the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death.

The detail in the Nutshells is bordering on obsessive. In one, an ashtray overflows with tiny cigarettes made with real tobacco, hand rolled by Lee herself, each one burned and then stubbed out.

There’s a coffee pot, with a strainer inside and real coffee grounds in it. They’re full of extraneous information, cause that’s the way real life is.You go into somebody’s home, they could have a bag of drugs and a weapon over here and have had a heart attack.

She would come up with the concept and the design, and her carpenter would drop the blueprints at a scale of an inch to a foot. Lee’s carpenter built the structures and framed the rooms exactly as you would a real-life sized room. Real studs, real doors with real locks that worked. Lee handled all the figures and textiles, the rugs and drapes and tiny clothes on the tiny figures—finally, those society lady skills were being put to use. She would knit the stockings with needles the size of straight pins using a magnifying glass; she could only work for like a few seconds before her eyes would fatigue. The figures in the nutshell also sometimes show rigor mortis (which is a post-mort stiffness of the body) and lividity (which is the way the blood pools or settles in the body after death). Both provide clues as to how and when a person died.

It may or may not mean anything.

But Baltimore guards the Nutshell secrets like the recipe for Coke, or the code for the Google search algorithm, because they are still valuable secrets. As long as the solutions aren’t easily searchable, the Nutshells are still great tools for teaching homicide investigation.

Maggie Chuang

And that isAnd something that is something that the Medical that theExaminer’s Medical Examiner’s office in Baltimore, office in Baltimore, Maryland Maryland takes very,takes very seriously. very, very seriously.

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Refinement

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How did you refine your work? How did you make decisions as you refined your idea? What criteria did you use for evaluation? Did you find your final refined idea to be the final iteration of your idea? Coming into the final stretch of the project, I had established a collage style as my main imagery. Originally, the collages were all done digitally, which was missing the feel of authenticity i was looking for. At this point, I decided to make all the collages by hand and scan them in, to get a higher level of depth and tactility. The torn edges were meant to reference the age of the story, and set up a worndown scene (almost as if pictures of a crime where being compared). There was also an issue of the images feeling to disparate, and unconsidered because of I was using the original colors; to solve this, I experimented with ways to color the photos, and landed on an aged, orange-purple realm. The most necessary point of refinement was in the transitions from collage to medical report. To better signal the contrast between these two styles, I created a different color palette for the medical report section, and better balanced text and image to keep readers interested. I wanted a palette that referenced the old report style, and chose a blue-purple to tone every image with.

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Section: A

No. 001

THE NUTSHELL STUDIES Chief Medical Examinerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Office of Baltimore, Maryland 14th

day of

July

1940

Name: Room:

The Kitchen

Number: #

The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Baltimore, Maryland is a busy place. Anyone who dies unexpectedly in the state of Maryland will end up there for an autopsy. On an average day, they might perform twelve autopsies; on more hectic days, they might do more than twenty. The building is six stories tall, and around 80 people are employed there.

Statement:

All day long, police are coming in and out, people are calling about their deceased loved ones, and the press is calling with inquiries. But thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s one room on the fourth floor that sits apart from the buzz of normal activity in the building. This room feels a bit like an art gallery.

Originally, I was using a very dulled blue for the medical report images (above). It looked too homely and removed a lot of the visual interest in the pattern Included are several color iterations to nail down the style in the final book. The purple image (right) was the one chosen. In Situ

has different tiny featuresâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;tiny furniture, tiny windows and doors and lamps.

There also tiny people, dolls, in each scene. And all of the tiny people in these scenes have one thing in common.

Changes between the original digital collages and the final handmade ones.

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Section: A

No. 001

THE NUTSHELL STUDIES Chief Medical Examiner’s Office of Baltimore, Maryland 14th

day of

July

1940

Name: Room:

The Kitchen

Number: #

Statement:

The final look for the report/documentation style. It was meant to reflect what would have been done with a document in Frances Glessner Lee’s time—documents would be printed in one typeface, then someone would fill it out using a typewriter and annotate by hand where necessary.

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14th

day of

July

The Kitchen

A late addition to the spreads were the signatures for the two main narrators of my podcast episode, Roman Mars and Katie Mingle. Originally all names had been taken out, but it made sense to include them as the ones â&#x20AC;&#x153;writing the reportsâ&#x20AC;? in the book. Adding the handwriting to the reports also created a stronger connection with the collages, without sacrificing the organized personality.

The Office of the C er in Baltimore, Maryland Anyone who dies unexpect of Maryland will end up t y. On an average day, they m autopsies; on more hecti do more than twenty. The ories tall, and around 80 ed there.

Throughout the text, their first initial is used to annotate where they trade off talking.

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Criticism In Situ

What criticism did you receive from your peers and faculty about your project? Did you agree or disagree with it? What did you learn from criticism? In the critique of this book, I was thrilled that the collage form was received positively, and drew clear connections with the concept and content of the podcast. People mentioned the patterns feeling like a “grandmother’s house”, and how the pacing “makes you curious, but uncomfortably curious.” The slowly paced sections were successful in having a visual payoff at the end, and for the most part the book achieved in communicating my goals for the project. Several points of critical feedback were also brought up, generally around the smaller elements that appeared unnecessary in the book. The blue text on the reports, for example, was sometimes confusing, and wasn’t interpreted as pull quotes. The digital white handwriting on the collages was also seen as out-of-place, because it removed the book from a completely handmade language. The parts that needed improvement were areas that I was already unsure about, so it was extremely valuable to hear that affirmative feedback. I had time to reflect and revise for the criticisms I received, and my final project reflected several changes that made the visual language more cohesive. I was satisfied with how this project went, and I’m eager to try something similar in the near future. While the hardcover book felt appropriate for this story, I would have also liked to try a more experimental book format.

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