This weeks task “cooking with gas” was a task used to help us think about the processes and methods that we use when we practice and how we could expand and dive deeper into why we do different things throughout our design process in relation to the ingredients that we had chosen from last weeks “raiding the pantry” task.
In the “raiding the pantry” task I selected and used the 3 ingredients; Raw, Processed, and Standardized to help me generate models and ideas that relate to my area of research (which at the time I was still trying to narrow down exactly what this is). These 3 words were very useful as throughout my design practice I tend to stick to a set structure when designing and I like to refine this as far as I can go to get the best possible working model. Thus the words raw to processed and standardized were ideal to help me put in words and explain what my design process is really like.
When approaching this task I thought it would be best to have a draft research question sitting in front of me the whole time that I could keep referring to, to help me keep on track. Research question this far:
How can waste and off-cut materials be used to create light weight modular “homes” for a nomadic person?
By taking this idea of a home as somewhere that someone feels most at ease, comfortable and safe I have played on this idea of what is a home? Is it physical? A large building, or structure that we use as a vessel to collect things that we have stumbled upon throughout our lives? Or is it something more intimate than that? Is it a feeling, a connection, a belonging.
Throughout this phase of ideation model making I was really drawn to this idea of creating something intimate and interactable through the metaphorical term of home. I started by bringing together a series of materials that I have collected over the last few years, off cuts, extra sheets of card, scrap pieces that would have been thrown away and I started to make.
Keeping in the back of my head my research question, and how would I go about creating something that could portray this idea of what is home? And what is home to me. As I travel a lot between my home town and Auckland city where I study I find it very hard to find a sense of where I belong and what home is to me. The more I thought about it the more I came to realize that home is more than just a metaphor or a physical place, but rather it is a feeling. When I travel from place to place there are things I take with me every single time, things of significance, things that don’t have a measurable value to anyone else but to me they couldn’t be bought with any amount of money.
This is when I started to think about it more and in the loose sense of the word, I am a nomadic person. I have no fixed home, and I am forever travelling back and forth between places where my friends and family reside. So when I started to make these models I kept thinking about what is significant to me, what is most important to me when I travel from place to place. Space was a big one, having to cram a lot of things into a bag where they don’t fit comfortably. How cold I create something that I could take from place to place that would not take up much room but when I get to where I am going it can be unfolded, constructed, or rearranged to create a strong self supporting structure of some kind?
I then started thinking about how i could use these words of Substitute, subtract and reconstitute to create a structure that could be constructed and deconstructed to be easily transported from place to place. I found it quite easy to bring these through into my design practice as ways to think about my methods.
- Substitute
- person or thing acting in place of another
- vessel becomes an object/table/space for a nomad
- vessel in place of home
- Subtract
- to withdraw or take away
- method of thinking about a nomad
- taken from one place to another – person
- no one place is home – physical home is “taken away”
- Reconstitute
- to constitute again, reconstruct
- different way of using materials
- changing material properties, collapsible
- modular construction, reconstruct
Georgia Christina Grace 