Samantha Swol

For this project, I wanted to find a unique way to catalog a collection digitally. The piece was created during the Covid-19 Quarantine, and I wanted to focus on a critical missing component to the e-commerce experience: tactility. Using my collection of a very popular brand of toy, Squishmallow, I began to explore ways to document these items by how pleasant they are to touch. People who are interested know the value or rarity, but I wanted to showcase the personality coupled with the squish! As someone with sensory processing disorders, shopping online for things like clothes to even vehicles can be an excruciating experience due to not being able to touch something until you pay for it. Imagine a vivid rating system of how something feels to touch in detail, from vehicle interiors to furniture upholstery. I used the fun language and sense of community the brand has built while creating my own typographic design for the project. Instead of repurposing the logo I used the organic shape and movement throughout the website design.

This group project between Samantha Swol, Luke Fabricatore, and Mai Nyugn saw us exploring a specific set of environmental issues - flooding &/ droughts. Our group ‘No Drought About It’ then began to research these environmental issues from global to local. We investigated the many solutions in practice among different regions, and documented these. We then began to prompt ourselves to think into speculative solutions. We came up with the idea of a series of scalable FloatPlots. These plots were inspired by Detroits vacant plots of land that are paved, causing flooding, and worsening eroding during droughts. We thought, what if you were able to create ‘bowls’ that could collect the floodwater in these plots of land, and then create a stable platform to host usable land above these reservoirs of water. Our prototype demonstrates the idea of adding a public park on top of one of the FloatPlots, and the park would repurpose the water for plants, fountains, or any other number of maintenance needs. This could be scaled to host buildings, factories, or more to enable building in flood zones and reduce the impact of both environmental crisis. We then branded this in a way that would entice the local community of Detroit, and not alienate any residents. Through our research, we generated a persona and built our presentation around telling his story. Completed in Affinity Designer 2, Keynote, Photoshop, Illustrator, inDesign, Miro, Laser Cutter, Blender & 3D printing.

This project was featured in the College for Creative Studies Student Exhibition in 2022. This project evolved from researching and documenting an object, its meaning and function to deconstructing those elements into a typographic collage. The object I had selected was an Ulu Knife my grandmother had gotten as a souvenir on an Alaskan Cruise. This object was perplexing to me, as it was mass produced with a steel blade, wooden handle + holder, and an embossed stamp of ‘ALASKA’ and an illustration of the state. The meaning behind the original object was to be used as a Woman’s Knife. This tool was multipurpose traditionally used by Inuit, Iñupiat, Yupik, and Aleut women. This would be used for carving meat, cutting bone, carving blocks of ice, skinning animals, cutting hair, and more. The design of the knife allows for someone with less upper body strength to do heavy duty cutting with less strength needed by distributing the weight differently. These tools were of great significance to these women, with cavings detailing life stories and some believed to have their spirit passed on within the tool. Seeing the Alaskan Souvineer so detached from its original meaning then lead to further research into the identity of womanhood. I then created the complimentary posters using projection techniques, combining physical pen marks, printed typography, photo scanning manipulation, inDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop.

Group project between Samantha Swol, Luke Fabricatore, and Julian Dilat. Using specific sets of tools and technology including Augmented Reality, the MakeyMakey input console, webcam + tv, pressure plate activator to create the working interactive experience and more. For this project we created a filter that would randomly approve or deny you based off of your written apology and if you seemed sincere enough. This is commentary on the current situation with the Chinese app WeChat and the social, financial, travel and other problems being banned from the application can cause and how integrated a 3rd party app is into culture. This was my largest scale expedition into experience design, and making an actively usable demonstration that could stand on its own without any behind the scenes manipulation.

This project was featured in the College for Creative Studies Student Exhibition in 2022. In this project I wanted to create a timeline of important projects by April Greiman and honor her legacy without copying her style. Instead of a book, posters, website or other mediums I chose to do a design manifold for this timeline. I chose this fold style to pay homage to one of her most famous pieces ‘Design Quarterly issue 133 poster Manifold 1986’. In this piece she took the traditional magazine size space she had to work with in print for shelving and publishing, but instead made a full body scan of herself one section at a time and created a 25 1/2 × 76 in. (64.8 × 193 cm) offset lithographic design manifold. I used a color gradient on the back of the piece to represent the multitude of color and vibrancy Greiman has worked with in her career. Using inDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator + sourcing photographic documentation of works from various publishers online.