Home is a tough thing to describe abstractly. I found a poem, appropriatly titled "Home" and did a study on it. Every line of the poem described different aspects of home such as "home is where the family gathers." It was a simple poem, but representing each line was a little tougher. I did a few thumbnails (1st through 4th image) for each line of the poem, all trying to convey the ideas I was presented with. Some of my favorite lines of the poem went along the lines of home is a place you will find one day, and another that was something like home is a place where your defenses fall. I took a few ideas from both of these sentences. To represent finding home, I chose to abstractly represnt a magnifying glass. I thought it would nice describe a search for something while also creating contrasting geometric shapes, and the magnifying part would create an interesting enlargement and shrinkage of objects. My final parti (5th image) is a simple 2D concept having to do with a magnifying glass. Then the real trouble came in.
I think I have a real strength with abstractly representing my ideas in a 2D format, but 3D is where I have difficulties. I can never see my drawings as have multiple planes, I tend to think they just look pretty as is. So when I had to take my parti to the next level, I was stumped. I think this is going to be one of my new goals for myself, to work on representing things in 3D. I have a lot of troubles with going from drawing to model. One of my first concept models below (6th image) was off of a different idea than the magnifying glass. The 6th image was how I tried to represent your defenses falling away, as stated by the poem. I liked the idea, but it seemed so simple and basic. So I created another concept model (7th image) and tried to represent the idea of the magnifying glass. It had different sized circles and lines right? Well in the end, I combined them into my final idea (last image). The spiral and different sized lines stayed, but I incorporated the "falling away" idea by adding a few more dimensions. I kept nice, solid, warm colored lines at the top of the spiral, and had the short, broken, dark colored pieces falling away and gathering at the bottom of the spiral.
Overall I thought this was a great way to combine my ideas but I still wish it had been a bit more intricate and complicated. I didn't have much time to work on this however, so all of this is really whatever came to mind first. It was nice working like that because I didn't have time to overthink it or be picky about what I created. I had to trust myself and hope that I would create something I liked.
Although it seemed like a lot of work at the time, I think I learned a lot from this experience. It threw me straight into making ideas and producing results. I'd never really pushed myself to do that before. The time frame I had to work with insisted that I kept focus at all times and rarely took breaks. I feel like this gives me a better understanding of what I'll be working with in the future because not all design is just a problem and coming up with a solution whenever I feel like it. Everyone has schedules and deadlines they have to meet and now I get to work with that sort of pressure. I'm very satisfied with the work I produced when I was so stressed about it. Looking back, it feels like a success and a good learning process, even if I didn't feel that way at the time!
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
