Date: 29th July 2019, Monday, Session 1
Our First Integrative Studio Session was conducted after the integrative seminar lecture. In this lesson, we were first shown a TED video called You are fluent in this language (and you don’t even know it) by Christoph Niemann.
This was a brief introduction to the concept of a balanced amount of abstraction/minimalism. It was a video though which I understood that as designers we need to use empathy as a tool to create drawings/ images that can be easily deciphered by our users and evoke desired emotions in their minds using as minimal detail as possible.
We were assigned the task to create 25 abstract visuals using only lines and dots on a10x10cm square to communicate the following-my happy place, my state of mind when I wake up in the morning, my thoughts when I look outside the window and highlights of the journey to the school on any day.
Session-2
We began our integrative studio where we assigned to complete our previous sketches and were asked to present our ideas to our faculty.
Well, most of my ideas were rejected but then I realised that our faculty member was not only looking at our sketches but he was also trying to understand our thought process. The process of ideating Abstract expressions was a tough task for me as most of my ideas were either too literal or were not evoking the desired emotions as I wanted to convey. I tried to develop my ideas continually. I gradually and after a lot of brainstorming was able to come up with better ideas and I was slowly learning the art of storytelling. Vaibhav Sir’s words “Treat me like a client and not like a teacher” really struck a chord and made me think much harder and improve on my concepts.
That day, I learned the basics of branding. I realised that people buy the ideas, emotions, stories and concepts behind the commodities. Then only when they are convinced with these aforementioned little but important intangible aspects they will trust your product or service.
Through Sir’s constant rejection of my ideas, I learnt to deliver better ways to communicate my ideas both on paper and through conversations.
Session-3
In this session, we were instructed to express our metaphors in the integrative seminar on 4×4 inch file cards. I was having a tough time to work with the material and failed almost on every one of my iterations in terms of quality. I could not translate many of the ideas from the paper to the file card but nevertheless, I completed all my iterations. The iterations were conceptually developed from the sketches in the images as shown below.
Session-4
Given above are images of my iterations in my sketchbook from which the paper models and the file card models were conceptually developed. It was really difficult for me to stick to what I had drawn on paper and to extrude the same into a 3d model. In some of my 3d models, the effect of the emotion was not as I had expected it to turn out as my material handling skills were not adequate to support the kind of extrusion I was expecting. Nevertheless, it was a great learning experience as I was learning how to express myself on different materials and was learning how to handle various materials in different ways.
Learning Portfolio 