This week I haven't done much to show visually, but I've made the beginning preparations of my slides for the workshop and the beginning of my written portion of the thesis.
On the workshop side of things: For the slides I'm just using the same template I made at the beginning of the semester, and will use up until the oral defense, since I already have it and for the sake of time and consistency I'll just keep using it; no sense in making more work for myself than necessary at this point. In planning I've gone back to the outlined structure and will be mostly sticking to it with some minor edits: starting with an overview of AI and how its impacting the world and the field, showing some creative examples from this thesis, then getting into the setup of the LoRa and integrating it with TouchDesigner, then allowing for creative freedom and exploration, coming back at the end for reflection and presentation of each others work. From the committee meeting feedback and thinking on the workshop itself a little more, I think the importance here is to educate and demonstrate on methods for being creative and designing with AI.
It's important for a lot of reasons: not limited to, but a highlight being the ramifications it has on the field, and from my own experiences working with clients in this new age of AI, it's important for designers to be knowledgeable of its strengths and limits, and how to work with it better and more intentionally than non-designers prompting and pressing buttons. Especially for undergrads looking for jobs, the workshop can serve as a means to democratize AI tools to them, and to give them the ability to make it more of their own thing as opposed to, again, what a client or firm can expect or execute from standard and widespread models, which is where the LoRa's and TouchDesigner come into play.
On the side of the written portion, I've got an outline of it, and this week so far I've been gathering the papers for the literature review and references sections, and I've been reviewing the guidelines for formatting, and looking at last years graphic design graduate papers (such as Ernests and Ugos) for reference since (shocker!) I find it more helpful to see visual examples, and with the updated guidelines into 2024-25 and ISU's websites less than helpful descriptions of them, it can be kind of confusing without looking at exactly what's kind of expected. Not that formatting will be a huge lift but I'd rather know before I get into the grind of actually writing it.
What I’ll be Doing Over Winter Break
This won't be any new news from the final class presentations and my committee meeting, but during winter break, my focus is on laying the groundwork that everything else will build on in the spring. The two main priorities again being workshop planning and making meaningful progress on the written portion of the thesis. Rather than trying to execute major public-facing components during this time like the exhibition, I’m using the break to slow things down strategically and make sure the structure, goals, and logistics of the workshop are clear and well thought out. A key part of this is doing a test run of the workshop with a small, low-stakes audience (my family), which will allow me to refine pacing, clarify instructions, and troubleshoot any technical or conceptual issues before running the official session early in the semester. I’m also using this time to identify and order any remaining materials needed for the workshop and exhibition, and if I do end up having more time, to continue refining the installations so they’re more stable and resolved heading into spring.
Again on the written side of things, winter break marks the beginning of the final push on the written thesis. My goal here is to establish a strong foundation by solidifying the literature review and introduction, making sure my research questions, theoretical framing, and methodological approach are articulated well before workshops and exhibitions demand more attention. By the end of winter break, I want to enter the spring semester with a clear plan and slides for the workshop, a partially drafted written thesis, and fewer open questions so that the rest of the timeline can focus on execution, analysis, refinement, and defense preparation rather than foundational planning.
Semester Reflections
This semester flew by! As I'm sure it does for all 3rd year grad students. I'm really satisfied with my work and progress I've made over the semester. From the beginning presentation I was real hard on myself and worried about how it would turn out But over time with research, work, and planning, all the pieces became more and more clear, and I was able to put it together into a package that I believe makes sense and is important and meaningful. My opinions and thoughts on AI are always in flux, and will probably remain so for long after the final oral defense, but in the sense of research and academia as well as public knowledge it is important to inform people of the multifaceted aspects of AI as much as possible, so they themselves can decide what it's best used for and how to use it effectively and ethically, not through word of mouth of CEOs and demos, or social media rants. The hype/hate cycle is real, as is a potential bubble ready to pop. As I said in my presentations, the future is uncertain, but it's up to the people to decide if these tools should be adopted or rejected, and in what ways they should go about either, with only the informed mind being able to make the best decision.
On a process side of things, I also gained a much clearer sense of how making and research inform each other in this process. The installations, workshop planning, and technical experimentation aren't separate from the writing or theory, more so being actively shaping how I think about AI, interaction, and learning. Seeing ideas succeed, fail, or behave unexpectedly in practice reinforced to me why hands-on engagement is such a critical part of understanding AI systems, and why this work is important. That balance between thinking, building, and reflecting is something I’ve become much more comfortable with this semester, and it’s given me confidence moving forward. While there is still a lot to do, I feel like I’m entering the final stretch with a strong foundation, a clearer direction, and a project that aligns with both my academic goals and my personal values as a designer and researcher. Lastly, I just want to say thank you to the graphic design faculty, both in my committee and out, and my graduate student colleagues (even if they all won't see this) who gave feedback on my presentations and work to help make this thesis what it is and what it will be, and thank you to Alex, who is certainly a huge part in helping in all steps along the way as my Major Professor. It's not over, and there is still a lot of work to be done, but I am now more than ever confident and ready to finish strong.
This week I have a bit of progress to cover from last week due to missing the post deadline (oops!), as well as having a full committee meeting to discuss my thesis with the committee members. I'll start with the 2 projects I made a lot of leeway on, and what I still need to do for them, then close the post with summarizing and reflecting on the committee meeting.
How Original
On the how original project, a lot of progress was made in the logic and performance of the interaction itself. Every iteration is a wittling down of errors and increasing the fidelity of the matching system, making it more and more accurate to the live users poses. With this too there is a clear, pretty much causal relationship between the quality of the dataset with the quality of the match-up performance, where at this point in the project the thing that needs to be focused on more is the dataset: gathering a great deal more images (aiming for a couple thousand) to allow breathing room for all the possible poses, and accounting for the reality that lots of historical photos are low resolution, sometimes don't include a full body, and can be hard for machine vision to accurately find all the joints on a body from these low-resolution photos with variables like lighting and multiple people, among other things, that can confuse a computer. I've basically automated the process of finding joints, but I wonder if it would be necessary to make some sort of manual process for me to place joints on a photo when the automation goes wrong.
Malicious Sycophancy
In contrast to the sort of collective connection and experience with humanity as a whole in "How Original", this "Malicious Sycophancy" project takes the opposite direction in creating an experience that uses a users brainwaves to create an over-generalization in the guise of a solely individual experience.
This project centers a more intimate—and potentially harmful—dynamic: how AI can manipulate perception and mental health. Cases of “GPT psychosis” are growing, with AI gaslighting people into believing they’ve unlocked universe-altering equations or other delusions. This risk is amplified by AI sycophancy, where models over-agree to maintain engagement and positive experience, even at the expense of user well-being—now potentially affecting nearly half of adults and a majority of teens who report using AI for emotional support.
Drawing from things like rorshach tests and astrology, these things that are not valid and considered sort of pseudo science still impact peoples lives and decision making, with AI now being added to this list. In this instance, the user puts on an EEG monitor that in real time scans their brainwaves, which are mapped to what “emotions” they are feeling. That data and these emotions are fed into a custom chatGPT instance, which gives them a totally unreliable psychological analysis. Every aspect of this is initiated when a user makes the choice to put on the headband, with the visuals all being drawn from that data.
Visually speaking, this one has the most work to be done stylistically, where (like Alex said in the meeting), exploring things like color, motion, type, etc. will be important to consider as this takes more shape over time, specifically adding more distinction in the output / takeaway to give it some variability compared to the other projects. This could be highlighting the chat output? Adding an audio element? Things to consider, but importantly the backend interactions are solid and I have a good understanding of how the brainwaves appear on screen and how that data can be manipulated visually.
Committee Meeting
Rounding out this post, I had my first, very late, committee meeting today, that I think went very well. On a spectrum of "the entire thesis unravelling and falling apart" to "no changes see you on your oral defense", the sense I got is that the direction is good, it makes sense and is clear what I am doing next, and covered some of the lingering questions I still had. We covered some good ground on what research looks like in these circumstances with the workshop, the newly defined expert interviews, and beginning to plan out in more detail what the exhibition looks like and how to lay it out, in the sense of a physical space and the details about it.
On the interviews, I initially thought that I had to get them through IRB to be anonymized, but Alex made it clear that I can use them much more openly, being able to quote them and actually show their work to make some of my points and positions clearer to the thesis audience, which is definitely very helpful for me.
Second, the framing of the workshop, where the actual research of the data being generated by participants is taking less of a main-stay, while the focus on what I'll actually present for my thesis is going over more of how it went, an assessment of the approach, and covering what worked, what didn't, and how future iterations could be improved upon, which is much clearer to me in how I'll go about planning the workshop over winter break.
We also talked about some considerations with the exhibition, planning out the space, thinking about how certain things will be presented, where they will be placed, considering where backdrops can / should go in order to limit the amount of people that could potenitally interfere with the motion tracking, etc. This I'll cover more in the final reflections / next steps post as I'm writing this pretty much immediately after the meeting, so with a little more time to think and reflect I can be much more perscriptive of the next steps.
Next Steps
In this sort of transitioning period between design finals week and time before break, I want to have a gathering and reflection of everything I've done and what I will do. I have the workshop outline so I know at a high level what structure that will sort of look like, and I have an outline of my written portion, that while I haven't looked at it for a little while, is more of a starting point than from scratch. This will also look at all the materials I'll need for both the exhibition and the workshop, things like cameras, cables, mats / tape and monitors for the exhibition, and usb devices for the workshop for people to take their projects with them. Again, I'll expand on this more for next weeks post, but the synthesis is I have a game plan that I am ready to act on for winter break and into spring.
//about
Ryan Schlesinger is a multidisciplinary designer, artist, and researcher.
His skills and experience include, but are not limited to: graphic design, human-computer interaction, creative direction, motion design, videography, video-jockeying, UI/UX, branding, and marketing, DJ-ing and sound design.
This blog serves as a means of documenting his master’s thesis to the world. The thesis is an exploration of AI tools in the space of live performance and installation settings.
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