Recently I got a chance to mentor M.Des final semester students for the course “Abstract 3D forms” at IIIT-Design & Manufacturing, Jabalpur, MP. I would like to share few glimpse of the same. Your feedback is most valued.
Duration : 3 days (24X7)
With the intent to sensitize students about the emotional aspect of forms, I wanted them to bring out their own emotional self into the forms which they create.
Each student was supposed to pick one of their favorite super hero. We started by understanding those super heroes – watching them, acting them, talking like them, walking like them- becoming them. This helped in understanding form stance, weight, balance, proportions, movements, and overall feel. This also made students conscious about each characteristic they need to change to get into the ‘form’ of the superhero.
Then they were asked to think of a super human which they would like to become. Students are then advised to write the description of the super human and his/her power in crisp 300 words. Further, like in previous exercise, they were again advised to start behaving like the character they just now explained. This would help them to deepen the understanding of the super human, his powers, character, body balance, movements, and ‘feel’.
Finally students were asked to imagine and visualize the transition phase when a human turns into that super human and to express that in a physical form. They were free to explore any material, method for form exploration. Only constraint being it should have a physical form.
Whole exercise was followed by group discussions, where everyone was surprised to discover that the forms they made were actually their own reflection at various subconscious levels. Eg: A form looked very chaotic. It had a well defined structure, but body does not have specific form or structure. It looked very mysterious and grey. The student who made that form had a chaotic brain. His friends claimed that he is very mysterious. And he himself said that he is not very rigid in his thought process, he is comfortable with grey zones & ambiguity. To the extent that he and his form looked very similar – skeletal. He called himself ‘Soul’.
Here are few examples of what we got by the end of 3 days. In process we saw 11 students behaving like 11 super human, they became their own super human, they became their own self. And they made the forms which reflected their own emotional being.
crosseddesign 