The ANTIDESIGN

In Des001 today we visited the concept of Stone Soup. This idea is from an old children's story, which is captured and portrayed wonderfully in Marcia Brown's Stone Soup. The concept was to create out of nothing, and ultimately, to become inspired to use what we could find.

 As my peers and I embarked on a project to make a creative and aesthetically pleasing piece of art out of the items that we found or had brought to class with us, we were constantly thinking about different ways to utilize the same materials. This is a process that doesn't just breed creativity, but also an amount of inspiration in itself, because we were in a situation where we were forcing inspiration. This, as I continuously argue, is what design is to me. Designers keep themselves in a perpetual state of inspiration, so that when the time comes to do something, they have a plethora of ideas (and i MEAN a plethora). We will never be able to put into motion every project we imagine. We must pick and choose the concepts worth pursuing, or worth experimenting with.

This is why we started out our Stone Soup with sketches of what we thought we could create. In the end, though, our project came out with a bit of artwork from each of us, and didn't really look like anything we imagined beforehand. Putting the piece together was surprisingly easy. With a group full of designers, we were at no loss when it came to ideas. We had almost too many different materials to work with when we really looked at what we had brought and the trees around us. Deciding to use branches in the piece was the first step, and the branches provided a framework for our other materials.

This act of creating without reason, planning, or stake in the end product reminded us of preschool, and we all had to quiet our minds to create things in pure simplicity. There was no complicating the design with messages, rules, symmetry, coordination or theory; there was only the process. We took the final piece down only minutes after finishing this ephemeral piece of art.