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Kate Chon

6 updates, last on Oct 6, 2026

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Questions this week

Week 5

This week I kept coming back to the idea that the loop is grey. It is never fully good or fully bad. So the real question is how we choose what works for us inside it. Reading Bhandari and Bimo and looking at these works pushed that question in a few directions. - If the algorithm shows me "repackaged" versions of myself, am I making myself or just watching a reflection of what I already liked? - When does being understood by the feed turn into being boxed in by it? - Can I work with the algorithm on purpose, the way users comment or like to stay on a certain "side," and still keep my own creative voice? - What happens to meaning when content has no context? If "the TikTok is the message," where does the maker go? - In Nosedive, the rating becomes the person. How close are likes and views to doing the same thing to designers? - Hito Steyerl and Zach Blas both look at hiding from the system. Is opting out the only way to protect yourself, or can you stay visible and still keep something private? - Lauren McCarthy put herself in the role of the smart home assistant. What does it feel like to be the one watching instead of the one being watched? - Paglen and Crawford show how machines are trained to label people. Who decides the categories I get sorted into, and can I refuse them? - Nam June Paik's TV Buddha watches itself forever. Is endless scrolling a kind of meditation, or a trap that only looks calm? - If the loop will always be there, what would "thriving" in it actually look like for a designer day to day?

Week 4

This week I kept asking whether the words I use in my thesis are neutral or already carry a position. Writing the truisms made me notice that "the loop," "taste," "voice," and "thriving" all sound like descriptions, but each one hides a claim. I asked myself whether my taste is really mine or whether it was delivered to me. I also wondered if feeling comfortable in the loop is the same as being stuck in it.

Week 3

The question I'm leaving with is this. If every save is a signal with no reason attached, can a small pause help me stay inside the system without letting it decide who I am?

Week 2

Does the algorithm create a beauty standard, or find one and narrow the room around it?

Week 1

How much repetition does a system need before it starts shaping a self? The goal is to thrive in the system without disappearing into it. But what does disappearing actually mean? Losing the line between my taste and the system's suggestions, or no longer noticing there was one? Does the algorithm create a beauty standard, or find one and narrow the room around it? Is the pressure coming from people, or from the audience the feed implies? If the standard is tuned to me, is it harder to recognize as a standard at all? Hacking means using a system in ways its makers did not intend. Is that a better position than refusal? It assumes you stay. Spotify recommends from what I did. AI takes context and instruction. Is that more agency, or the feeling of more agency?

Weel 6: Provotype

This week I kept thinking about what happens when the loop stops being on my side. What if the loop gets bored of me? What if it has no memory, and I keep getting the same recommendation over and over? I wondered whether boredom could be a reason for the algorithm to kick me out of my own feed. I also kept asking what it means to ignore a recommendation. If I skip something, am I resisting the algorithm, or just becoming predictable in a different way? Thinking about Spotify, I wondered how much of my "taste" is actually mine. The biggest question was about judgment. What if social media judged me within my own taste? What if every time I did something, it called me out with stats, like how many people did the same thing, how similar I am to them, or where they are? What if it ranked me in real time? I thought about dance trends, where you copy a move and the platform gives you back a score and a rank. I also wondered what would happen if the loop pushed me into a language I don't know, and whether that would feel like discovery or like being shut out. Underneath all of these is one question: if the algorithm can judge, rank, and get bored of my taste, do I still own it?

Research discoveries

Week 5

So far I've been looking at the loop from a few angles. The readings, the artists, and my own scrolling all point to the same thing. The loop is not one thing. It is made of smaller parts like behavior, voice, and taste, and each part can pull me in a good, bad, or neutral direction. What I've noticed: - When I collected screenshots for my poster, the same faces, gestures, and trends kept repeating. I didn't search for any of it. The feed kept handing it back to me until it felt normal. - Bhandari and Bimo describe the "algorithmized self." On TikTok, people mostly interact with the algorithm, not with other people. We shape ourselves by reacting to versions of ourselves that the feed reflects back. - Artists like Hito Steyerl and Zach Blas respond by hiding from the system. Nam June Paik and Lauren McCarthy respond by watching it closely. That range helped me see that resistance is not the only option. What I've realized: - Crit helped me separate my terms. Influence is the force. The loop is the dynamic, a continuous action that keeps repeating. Thriving is my objective. - The loop is composed of parts like behavior, voice, and taste. Because the action repeats, it slowly shapes each one. What I watch changes how I act, and over time it changes my voice and my taste too. - I don't want my thesis to be anti-algorithm. My position is closer to pro. The loop is always going to be there, so the more useful question is how to use it without losing yourself. What surprised me: - The TikTok design pushes people to create, but most participants in the study saw themselves as viewers. People don't always do what the platform wants. - Users knew their data was being collected and saw it as a fair trade for a good feed. They only felt uneasy when it became "too accurate" and started showing people who looked and acted like them. - People use likes and comments less to connect and more to steer the algorithm. That made me realize we already negotiate with the loop every day, often without thinking about it. Where I'm going next: - Looking closer at the continuous action and breaking it apart into what it is made of. - Mapping what is good, bad, or neutral about each part and what it influences. I want to ask what is positive inside the good and the bad, and build a scale instead of treating it as one or the other. - Defining what thriving means for me. Right now it is still thrive = ?, and I want to fill that in through my own experience. - Exploring the pros and looking at all the possibilities through case studies. - Backing up why my position is pro. That means looking at the full range, from people who resist the loop to people who fully embrace it, and showing where thriving fits.

Week 4

So far I've explored how recommendation systems shape identity, starting with my own TikTok feed. My first print, A Cycle of Repetition, arranged screenshots into a loop, and seeing it laid out flat made the feed look like one person repeating. Bhandari and Bimo's idea of the algorithmized self gave me language for this, since they argue that people engage less with each other and more with a filtered version of themselves. I collected precedents from Nosedive and Nam June Paik to Hito Steyerl and Zach Blas, and what surprised me most was that almost all of them are about escape. My life doesn't work that way, because I can't leave these platforms when I work on them. The users in the study didn't leave either. They used likes and comments to steer the algorithm, which shifted my question from how to escape the loop to how to thrive in it without disappearing. Writing truisms this week also showed me that words I had treated as neutral, like the loop and thriving, already carry positions, which tells me I'm still defining the phenomenon rather than describing it.

Week 3

Through my research, I've explored how recommendation systems shape the way designers see their own taste and work. Bhandari and Bimo's idea of the "algorithmized self" gave me language for it. On TikTok, the self forms less through social connection and more through repeated engagement with a system that reflects us back to ourselves. I noticed this in my own process. When I wrote my 10 taste words before scrolling, the list read like a brand description. That made me realize the way I describe my own voice may already be shaped by platforms. What surprised me most was that accuracy felt worse than error. When a system described my work in a way that felt right, it was more unsettling than when it got me wrong. It made me question how specific my voice really is. I've also realized that escaping the system isn't the answer. Hiding from it can mean disappearing from people too. The more useful question is how to stay inside the loop without letting it decide who I am. If you have real results from any of the prototypes, like your Blind Sort score or the Lens labels, add one line with that detail. A specific finding will make this stronger.

Week 2

What came out of this week was a definition more than a finding, which is that the loop isn't social connection but repeated engagement with a system, and the self takes shape through that repetition. Having that sentence changed where I look. I've been treating beauty as the clearest case, since the standard arrives through a system tuned to me specifically, and I can't tell anymore whether the algorithm produced the standard or just found one already there and narrowed the room around it. Spotify and AI are still unresolved but sharper, since Spotify recommends off what I already did while AI takes instruction and lets me talk back, and I can't tell whether that's more agency or just a tighter attachment. The thing that actually surprised me is smaller than all of this. I went looking for people caught in loops and almost nobody describes themselves that way, they like what they get, so if the position is thriving without disappearing then most people already believe they're thriving and the word I'm on the hook to define is disappearing. I don't have it yet, which is why the next step is the phenomenon and not the application.

Week 1

What came out of this week was a definition more than a finding, which is that the loop isn't social connection but repeated engagement with a system, and the self takes shape through that repetition. Having that sentence changed where I look i've been treating beauty as the clearest case, since the standard arrives through a system tuned to me specifically, and I can't tell anymore whether the algorithm produced the standard or just found one that was already there and narrowed the room around it. The p5.js sketch got at the same problem from the designer's side, because I had to write every rule it ran on and the output only looked inevitable to me because I'm the one who typed those numbers in, which is about as close as I've come to seeing my own position in this. Spotify and AI are still unresolved but sharper now, since Spotify recommends off what I already did while AI takes instruction and lets me talk back, and I genuinely can't tell whether that's more agency or just a tighter attachment. The thing that actually surprised me is smaller than any of this. I went looking for people caught in loops and almost nobody describes themselves that way, they like what they get, so if the position is thriving without disappearing then most people already believe they're thriving and the word I'm really on the hook to define is disappearing. I don't have it yet, which is why the next step is the phenomenon and not the application.

Weel 6: Provotype

This week I explored the loop through making instead of reading. I made a parody ad for a fake product called TASTE™ and an interactive p5.js sketch called The Loop. In the sketch, the algorithm ranks you, gets bored of you, forgets you, and judges your dance moves. The biggest thing I noticed is that there is no neutral move inside the loop. When I built the skip button, I wanted it to feel like resistance. But the system still learned from it. Skipping became data too. That changed how I think about my definition. You can't step outside the loop by refusing it. Refusal is just another input. I also realized that sameness is easier to show than to explain. In the sketch, the more predictable you get, the more the screen turns beige and every post becomes the same post. Seeing it happen made the idea clearer than any sentence I've written about it. What surprised me most was humor. I expected the work to feel heavy, since it's about surveillance and losing your taste. But making it funny made it easier to sit with. A fake pharma ad or a stamp that says "CERTIFIED NPC" lets people laugh first and then recognize themselves. I think humor might be one way to thrive in the loop without disappearing into it. I'm still not sure where the line is between the loop shaping me and me shaping it. That feels like the question to keep pushing.

Other work

Week 5

This week I spent a lot of time with the poster, A Cycle of Repetition. I collected screenshots from my own feed and arranged them in a circle around a single cursor. I wanted it to feel like the loop itself. The faces, gestures, and trends start to blur together the longer you look. Along the side I listed words that kept coming up for me while scrolling, like constant scrolling, watch, control, filtering, observation, likes, and parasocial. Making it helped me see how much of my feed repeats without me choosing it. I also read Why's Everyone on TikTok Now? by Bhandari and Bimo and highlighted the parts that connect to my thesis. The idea of the algorithmized self stuck with me the most. It gave me language for something I had felt but couldn't name. Alongside the reading, I started building a collection of references. I looked at Black Mirror's Nosedive, Hito Steyerl's How Not to Be Seen, Lauren McCarthy's LAUREN, Zach Blas's Facial Weaponization Suite, Trevor Paglen and Kate Crawford's Training Humans, and Nam June Paik's TV Buddha. Each one looks at being watched, rated, or reflected back in a different way. Putting them side by side showed me the range of ways artists respond to systems like this. I also took time to process my crit feedback. Separating influence, the loop, and thriving gave my thinking more structure. It also made me realize I need to define thriving for myself before I can build the rest of the thesis around it.

Week 4

This week most of my time went into getting ready for the research fair. I had to figure out how to present my research without slides, so I turned my work into a set of printed sheets that read like slides. Each one has a single idea, a big headline, and an image. I went through a few versions. First the sheets were too text-heavy, then I tried a larger landscape format, and I finally settled on 8.5x11 so they would be easy to print and pin in a grid. Laying everything out in order made me see how my inquiry actually moved, from my first poster to the algorithmized self, through my precedents, to where my question shifted. I also wrote a script to walk people through the wall and timed it to fit seven minutes. That meant cutting things I wanted to say and trusting the sheets to carry some of it. Choosing what to leave out was harder than I expected. It showed me which parts of my research I can explain clearly and which parts I'm still working out. The truisms were the other big piece this week. Writing short, blunt statements like "your taste was delivered, not developed" pushed me to commit to a position instead of just describing the loop, and I added them to the wall as their own section.

Week 3

This week I focused on making my research tangible through seven rapid prototypes. I turned my questions into different forms so I could test them instead of just writing about them. I designed a Blind Sort board that echoes my Cycle of Repetition poster, with numbered squares arranged in a loop for testing whether people can tell my work apart from my feed. I also wrote a short first-person story about showing my work to Google Lens and watching it get labeled. I spent time in p5.js too. I adapted Patt Vira's Disco Grid tutorial into a sketch where my work rebuilds itself out of squares, and moving the mouse slowly hides it inside Perlin noise. I also built a feed sketch that pauses and asks "Why am I saving this?" before every save. Alongside making, I kept reading. I looked at Kyle Chayka's Filterworld, John Cheney-Lippold's work on algorithmic identity, a study by Ruiz, Molina León, and Heuer on design friction in social media, and an audit of TikTok's recommendation system by Boeker and Urman. I also pulled references from Black Mirror and Bo Burnham's Inside to think about loops and self-reflection on screens.

Week 2

The piece that named the convergence. Tolentino traces how filters, FaceTune, and cosmetic procedures produced one homogenized face, described to her as young, poreless, cat-eyed, and distinctly white but ethnically ambiguous. This is the closest thing I have to a case study of my own question about whether the system creates a standard or amplifies one that already existed. Her answer leans toward creation, since people started bringing filtered images of themselves to plastic surgeons as the target.

Week 1

Most of the week went to getting the semester settled. Registration took more back and forth than it should have and I lost time to logistics I wanted to spend reading.

Weel 6: Provotype

Here's a free-writing draft. I pulled it from projects you've been working on lately, so cut anything that wasn't actually this week. Outside of thesis, this week was full. For my Usability class, my team and I are testing the LA Parks website. I worked on the test plan and presented it to my teammates before we build the study in Userlytics. It's funny to go from making a fake feed that judges people to writing tasks that check whether a real website is easy to use. Both are about watching how people move through a system. I also kept going on the Studio Mococo website. I had a check-in with Gabrielle and shared Figma boards for her comments. She's in Amsterdam, so a lot of it is planning around the time difference and making the boards clear enough to explain themselves.

Other questions or notes

Week 5

:)

Week 4

:)

Week 3

:)

Week 2

Having trouble progressing more so stuck

Week 1

I'm still struggling with the topic of my project and where to take it next. I also put pressure on myself to make the thesis a strong portfolio piece, and something that connects to where technology is right now.

Weel 6: Provotype

:)))))

References

Week 5

Week 4

Week 3

Week 2

Week 1

The great hack on Netflix

Weel 6: Provotype