Stone Soup

Last Tuesday in design 1, we made a project inspired by the classic children's story, Stone Soup. In the story, all of the villagers bring different ingredients to make a soup out of whatever they happen to have and ended up with a delicious feast that everyone got to enjoy. Everyone in our group of eight design students brought something to create with. We didn't plan what to make or what to bring, so our design was very spontaneous, which was exciting.

One of the biggest challenges of this project was working without a sketch. When I design, I typically like to sketch my design ideas first, to get an idea of how they will look and to explore all possible options for the project before choosing my final design. However when faced with designing in a group setting everyone had different creative processes and synthesizing them was a bit of a challenge. The majority of my group didn't like to sketch and insisted we "just go for it." I reluctantly set down my sketchpad and embarked on a chaotic journey.

Despite not having a sketch, we were still able to communicate our ideas verbally—at least for the most part. Everyone was throwing out interesting and often outlandish ideas. For every idea someone came up with, even more people were willing to offer criticisms, but fortunately everything remained friendly.

We decided to make a paper sculpture that used a tree for support instead of being freestanding. Our goal was to make the sculpture look organic—like it was part of the tree, not a bunch of craft supplies affixed to the tree. Our sculpture spiraled up the tree trunk and focused on geometric shapes and emphasized three-demensionality. The sculpture was finished by hanging paper cranes from the upper branches, which looked quite etherial.

Overall I was very impressed with the finished product. Our group collaborated well and everyone contributed ideas and worked hard to complete our project within the time limit. If I were the art director I might insist that we attempt to find a way to make the paper cone shapes without the tape showing because that would cause it to look more organic. However, our limited time and materials did not allow this to be possible.

Only moments after our design was completed, we had to tear it all down. The tree trunk was left bare and unadorned as if our paper sculpture had never been there. Today was learned what it meant for a design to be ephemeral.