Hi fellow assignment teammates, just some quick ideas regarding the exhibit we’re doing for Public Space, Design Academy Eindhoven.
So visiting-artist last week Max liked our idea of many variations on that theme of visualizing symbiotic relationships. I’m thinking that, in the interest of time and effort, some can be just that, visualizations, while others can be actual working relationships.
The former, for example, might be simple a graphic on a weigh scale of the empty bottles: the graphic might depict the music volume, or the calories we now consumed which can be burned riding the bicycle to run the lights to see better to drink more beer with…repeat loop ad infinitum.
The latter, for example, may be actual ropes attached to people’s seating: when they sit down, the display table goes up…etc.
I was also thinking that our other small, and feasible (they have to stay feasible, we don’t have much time for anything else! aka simple and easy to make and beautiful in that simplicity) items we have to make, such as the furniture, doesn’t necessarily have to be all ‘recycled’ or repurposed materials. Making an entire furniture set out of used cardboard may be too much work. At the least, it may just come off as cliché and ugly.
Instead, this theme of inter-dependant relationships among components of a system could be extended. What if the furniture was a combination of existing furniture and recycled, secondary materials, working together to form something new and functional and beautiful?
Like, make one leg of a chair out of old pop cans. Or combine a…uhm…a light bulb with an old toaster to keep snacks warm…wine bottles chilled in old paint tins, pens filled with left-over ink from the printers, etc etc.
Finally: for the next two weeks I’m cleaning and setting aside all substantial food packaging in case we need to use it: glass jars, milk cartons, etc.
Jeff
p.s. I was inspired in part by this recent Lunds Universitet project for Milano 2008 that had groups of design students collaborate on a chair, with each student unaware of what portion the other students would contribute to the final product:
http://www.student.lth.se/industridesign/galleri/utstallningar/milano_08/vain/
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