[dheavy]

I have a degree in Fashion Design.

It was about a decade ago or so. I was finishing high school and contemplating studying graphic design or animation in a renowned school in my hometown (Les Gobelins, Paris). I befriended freshmen who were being sucked up into Flash animation trend and we started working for short-lived startups as Flash animators.

Then I discovered the works of Joshua Davis', Erik Natzke's, Robert Hodgin's (aka flight404) and it was the first epiphany — I started coding. It became a part-time job and a time-consuming intellectual pursuit up till now.

I knew nothing about it, but chose Fashion Design out of curiosity and because it's an interest I could share with my sister, but kept programming everyday. I never regretted it. In some way, it's very much like architecture (technical + philosophical + social impact). I even worked as a fashion designer for a short period right after, but it was not for me.

I learned HTML, CSS and PHP, then AS3, all thanks to the massive amount of literature available. I worked part time, paying part of my school tuition. When I graduated, I used my connections within the fashion industry to work as a Flash dev in a creative agency specialized in luxury brands.

Today I'm a full-stack web dev doing mostly JS, Python and studying Lispy dialects. I currently hold a position in an academic lab, where we blend design, research and engineering to study social sciences-related question within large data sets.

I'm studying math and algorithms to make a transition for the web to other scope of interest.

[ewolf]

> I currently hold a position in an academic lab, where we blend design, research and engineering to study social sciences-related question within large data sets.

That sounds very interesting! Care to elaborate?

[dheavy]

Sure! It's Sciences Po médialab, in Paris. https://github.com/medialab (linking Github, as it's much more relevant than the actual site).

The tenets of the lab have (more or less) to do with exploring Gabriel Tarde's theories of "Actor-Network" and monads (nothing to do with FP, mind you). One of the fundamental idea behind this being that everyone now generates traces on the web, and anthropologist/social sciences researchers may use them as a new "terrain" of research.

It was founded by anthropologist and philosopher Bruno Latour, and a group of engineers (who knew each other from school, where they were dabbling with programming for networks/exploration of the web early on). By network, I mean graphs (math).

Projects usually involves triumvirates of designers (usually specializing in information, sometimes students/researchers themselves), engineers, and politics or social sciences academics. Often being two things at a time.

We have regular hackathon-like sessions called "datascapes" where we explore (sometimes, dormant) data sets, either from the web, or digitized (i.e. scanned historical archives, etc...) to make sense of it, and come up with relevant research questions.

(We also do boring stuff to pay the bills, so that we have enough freedom to work on project we like afterwards).