On Friday each student took his or her own stab at what this semester’s project could be, and I was not disappointed in their efforts. At the end of the review I discussed options as to where to take the project from here with our client and then pulled the students back together to relay our thoughts and deal out the marching orders for the next ten days. It was understood by the Studio that in the next phase they would be working in three small groups, further exploring concepts brought up in the individual designs. When the work is all so strong it makes a hard decision for me to choose just three directions to explore.
I have started to think of this small group design phase as an opportunity to make three great deserts. As I noted before, all the student work was well conceived but most were sort of one dimensional, kind of like butter. I love butter, but I don’t eat butter for desert. Butter is an integral ingredient of many things I love to eat, but not too appetizing by itself. My job is to try to compose each group with similar interest students, with each having individual strengths that the others in the group might not have. Now that there are more heads than one working to a singular goal, I expect each student to bring their own unique talents to the group and make the collective project better than any one person’s could be on their own. Sounds good, right?
I expressed my affinity for knolling in a post last semester, so you can understand my excitement when I came across these images by way of a google image search for “visual recipe”. Leave it to IKEA to visualize the directions, but where’s the allen wrench?