Before beginning this master’s program, my work already revolved around questions of storytelling and communication. Coming from a background in interior and exhibition design, I became interested in how people understand narratives through space, atmosphere, and visual cues rather than through long textual explanations. In my previous thesis, I explored how lighting can support storytelling and guide perception within an installation. The project focused on how visitors interpret meaning through sensory experience, even when verbal guidance is limited.
Alongside this academic interest, communication has also been a personal challenge in my everyday life. Living and studying in a country where my mother tongue is not spoken means a constant negotiation between languages. I move between Persian, English, and German depending on the situation. Certain thoughts are easier to express in one language than in another, and sometimes I struggle to find the right words even when the idea is clear in my mind. Because of this, communication is something I am highly aware of. It is not simply a neutral tool but something that requires constant adjustment and creativity.
This experience gradually led me to search for ways of expressing ideas that depend less on words. Music was one of them. Part of my motivation for learning the violin was the desire to express emotions that are difficult to articulate verbally. Drawing and painting have been a lifelong and often frustrating challenge, but one that kept my interest in visual language alive. Photography taught me to pay attention to gestures, light, and composition as carriers of meaning. Even baking, through my small project Dot Pastry, became a way of thinking about how taste, color, form, and presentation can communicate without a single word.
In the first semester of this program I explored storyboarding as a method of visual communication. I examined how a narrative can be conveyed with as few words as possible, relying on images, sequence, and context. Looking back at that research, I notice something important. Storyboarding was never really my topic. It was my first case study. The actual question underneath all nine blocks was larger: how do images communicate when words are reduced or removed entirely? Storyboarding answered the part about sequence, about how images work together. What it did not answer is the part about the image itself.
This is where my plan has changed, and I want to document it openly, because the change is part of the research. My original intention was to spend this semester deepening my illustration skills and to leave photography for the following semester. But while planning, a sharper question appeared. If the same simple story is told once through illustration and once through photographic imagery, what does each visual language actually do to the message? Does one version feel clearer, more trustworthy, or warmer than the other? Treating the two media separately, one in each semester, would never answer this. A direct comparison is the only way.
How I will explore this comparison, with which stories and what kind of test, will come in the next blocks. Here I only want to mark the turning point. The direction has shifted from learning one medium at a time to asking what each medium actually does.
The direction is now more structured than a few months ago, but the thread is the same one I keep returning to. It is the ongoing search for ways to express meaning when words alone are not enough. This semester, I am turning that search into a question that can be tested.
