blog post2

Monica Lu
Liz Grayburn
Jonothan Harley
Stella
Huan Xie

Upcycling

Rationale

As this project was about upcycling, the material I used was very important to me as I wanted to help turn waste into a beautiful product. With this in mind I was prompted to go with using E-waste, cable wire in particular as e-waste is such a big problem as there are so many products being discarded due to the fact that replacing is much more efficient and cheaper to repair the item which is also known as design obsolete.

With these considerations I was inclined to use the insulated wires you find when you strip down telephone or network cables. The insulating wires found in the cables have very bright contrasting colours which I wanted to use in my advantage.

My product “Spirals” is a small decorative bowl used to hold small objects such as keys, lollies and etc.  Spirals incorporates the different coloured wires to make a visually attracting bowl that anybody would want to put in their home, its inviting, attractive and appealing. 

Design for Life

Watching the series design for life has inspired me to become a better designer. It was quite shocking to see that a lot of the people that were accepted into the show were very young like Lachlan who has just finished his 1st yr of uni which ranged up to rob who was 32. I was also suprised that Nebil had started his own freelance design company whilst in his 2nd year, It makes me feel i should do better as i'm already a 2nd year student.
But after watching more into the videos i realized that it doesn't matter what age you are as age does not matter when design is about dreams, aspirations, and good ideas, and that isn't constricted to how old you are.

After watching their first task of finding 2 objects which represents either ecology, function or gender made me reminisce back to our studio task where we had to mold a sculpture out of clay from smelling a scent. As we needed to find the designers intent behind the product which was represented in smell (shape, line, color, texture). It helped me a little to understand why we needed to study all those tedious tasks during first year.
Phillipe Stark described how he liked design which was rooted in everyday life and was connected to all and how art was for elitists. With this in mind Stark has designed many products which were sculptural like his lemon squeezer which cannot be used as the lemon juice corrodes the gold plating and is mere sculptural, or his kettle which is useless, so i was quite puzzled as to how Phillipe Starks design philosophy tied into his work.