design a poster based upon a subject about which you have strong feeling. communicate this feeling as much through "form" as by descriptive or symbolic means. your poster should evoke a direct emotional response even before it is "read."
the title, xi stetch, suggests an eleventh christian commandment. this commandment, stretch, and the accompanying twister board within the church congregation, responds to the magnificent contortions in which one must engage in order to reconcile competing elements of christian docterine.
the composition is intended to express moroseness, as spoken through the darkened tones, gothic constitution, and isolationism. however, the twister game, which is most often associated with playfulness, and the christian cross, which for many connotes hope, contribute to the irreconcilability of the piece.
using pencils of varying hardness, do a detailed study in actual size of a complex organic form. next, enlarge a complex square inch of your study to a square 6" x 6" or larger. the objective is to see acutely (one symbolic effort is hardly enough) and to experience the change of image that come with a change of scale.
red bell pepper; sliced
entrepreneurship is all about leveraging resources and taking action with the goal of creating value. your challenge is to use an assigned, everyday object to create as much "value" as possible. students from around the world are invited to participate. the global innovation tournament falls under the auspices of the global entrepreneurship week.
competition: 2008 global innovation tournament submission: my darling ethyl, recognition: ingenuity award; audience award
david goligorsky and i decided to give this a shot. this year's every day object: the water bottle! the tournament lasted four days, at the end of which each team was required to submit a short (under 3 minutes) youtube video in which they featured their new, value-laden bottles. something like 500 teams from around the world signed up and about 200 submitted videos.
david and i spent considerable time fleshing out the characteristics of the water bottle-- e.g. the neck, the cap, the label, the threaded feature-- and used this perspective to better understand and then tweak the frame from which we viewed the challenge. we imagined several unusual propositions for the bottle: the bottle as a weight, the bottle as building material, the bottle as a container, the bottle as a musical instrument, the bottle as buoyancy, the bottle as an educational tool, the bottle as a utilitarian object. we quickly narrowed our focus to the threaded cap.
we basically treated the bottle cap as a linear actuator wherein human-derived torque translates into linear displacement. this led us to consider applications that require small amounts of leveling-- such as uneven tables. to make the idea sticky, we took the absurd, slapstick route, creating a silent movie choreographed to scott joplin's "cascades."
to our delight, david and i received two awards for our video: the ingenuity prize and the audience prize! our trophy took the form of four box seats to a san jose shark's game and a game of ice hockey with guy kawasaki, respectively (who knew so much ice hockey would accompany my move to california?).
produce a three-dimensional object that is particularly gratifying to handle. use any material that works.
my process began in the field. i spent considerable time simply deliberately feeling as many objects as possible. within a few hours, my hands became hypersensitive, similar to the feeling when you clinch your teeth together as hard as possible and feel the urge to clinch harder still. only further grasping eased the annoyance of not exerting my hands' muscles. i became fixated on the need for leverage-- the sort of resistance one experiences from a sturdy lever or a cane pressed firmly into the ground.
i arrived at a design that compiled this field research and some clay study. i originally intended to secure the aluminum to a firm base, allowing one to achieve the leverage previously mentioned. however, while walking home after machining the bulbous end, i found myself unable to stop twisting and forcing the blub into one hand, driven by the other. i found this added "control" extremely satisfying and thus decided to include the wooden handle.
paint at least 100 objects, each with a different color for each of the three exercises. these projects will help to define the differences between color intensity, value and hue. use as complete a pallet as possible. painted objects should be larger than one inch in any direction. 1. make the center areas bright (saturated, intense) progressing, unit by unit, towards a dull (desaturated) perimeter. 2. make the center light and move progressively toward a dark outer band. 3. go from warm color to cool.
produce a flat design in two or more colors that has no background; that is, one in which the spaces between the forms are as positive as the forms themselves (as in a checkerboard). the objective is to make all the parts of your composition interrelate-- use all of the space and make it all work.
many designed objects must be grasped or handled as well as seen to be experienced. with this in mind, create six different textures on a surface that feel as well as appear different from one another.
i was browsing the internet while particularly sensitive to texture. i immediately noticed my keyboard. it was an older keyboard ripe with crumbs, hair, oils, and various spills. i imagined a new keyboard whose keys enable a user to experience, one at a time, various textures while typing. this project resulted.
as a functional prototype i suppose it serves its purpose. the textures are arranged such that the most common digraphs and trigraphs in the english language exhibit as wide a range of textures as possible. for example, the textures associated with the common trigraph t-h-e purposefully differ from one another. try spelling your name; you'll likely strike a wide sample of textures.
as a project, the work lacks process. one might expect (correctly) that the majority of the design effort occurred in my head rather than in the field. research demonstrates that design efforts that live and fester in the head prove inferior to those born from a conscientious attempted to explore with the hands.
