"Objectified"

A documentary film “Objectified” by Greg Hutwit, talks about different industrial objects and the progress of design. I remember it talked about the Japanese toothpick that we, Asian, always use but didn’t realized the design. The tail of the toothpick can be removed as a sign of used and also used as a rest for the toothpick. Other than that, there’re the CD player and the tote bag designed by the Japanese designer, Naoto Fukasawa. The CD player is a simple square shaped box on the wall. The album will start playing once to pull the robe hanging below the box. It’s a modern design with everything in white. Yet, it uses similar structure of a lamp and placing it to a CD player which is quite interesting. On the other hand, he designed a tote bag. What’s special about it is that it has a shoe bottom attached to the bottom of the bag. It’s a circumspective because when people are holding lot of things at a time, they can put the tote on the floor without haven’t it falling. Chair designer, ronan & erwan bouroullec and Paul tahon, demonstrated some of their designs. They’re mostly in simple and modern and clean shapes. The red chair above is an example. The inspiration of this design is from vegetables and plants. The detail of the chair represents branches gently curving to form the seat and the back. The plant like branches gives us the sense of geometry of the model.

Miss Wax-Jewelry design

Street fashion is always what I’m interested. The graphics, the colors, the edgy old school feeling are street fashion. If you’re also a street fashion geek, you have probably heard of brands like Rock Smith, Nike, DC, Crooks and Castles, Hellz Bellz and many more. Yet, there’s a hidden jewelry brand called “miss wax”. The style of miss wax jewelry mostly focuses on simplicity. They use simple geometric shapes but put them with sharp and bright colors, sometimes with gold as well. It’s like a new “80s” style with huge and colorful earrings, but also with modern feelings to them. 

The necklace is with gold-plated rope chain and seven strips. The subtle design of the black and white horizontal lined strip reduces the noisiness of the gold. Yet, the vertical strips give us the sense of edgy and modern. On the other hand, the “MT” shaped earring feels us the 80s feeling. The bright color way of bright orange, yellow, blue caught viewer’s eye at the first sight. The way it uses letters as the shape of the design is also very modern and vintage in the same time. Finally, here’s a dark purpled and black earrings. There is repetition of circles from the shape of the earrings, also the circular lines in the middle circle. Even though there’s no bright or variety of color used, the use of lines beautified the design also reduced the dullness. To see and know more about “Miss Wax”’s Jewelry, go check out her website.

Chair

Thinking about a mass-produced object of industrial design, aside from the Apple technology, let’s talk about the office chair. Chair is something that we see and use everywhere. We sit on the bus, we sit during class, and we sit at home. We spend most of the time sitting, yet we mostly neglected the importance of a good chair. The photo above is showing an ergonomic office chair. These office chairs are well designed that excel at helping our body to fatigue and stay in the right postures when we’re spending so many hours a day sitting. It helps reduce shoulder, back and neck strain.

In the accent of design, there’re adjustment on the handle and height of the chair which allow different people to set the chair into the right shape for them. Sometimes we need different handle heights when doing different things and it allows us to put our pressure in a comfort way. On the other hand, there is an extra support on the back which is absolutely helpful to reduce our back pressure which sometimes made us feel tired after hours of work. On the other hand, there is a headrest for people to rest on or to reduce our neck pressure. It’s also optional when some people find it useless, they can remove it as well. About the material used for the chair, the seat is made by leather which prevents it from getting dirty easily from food and beverage. Moreover, the back is made of nylon with holes in between which helps spread away heat.

Compare and Contrast - Pense Gallery

Last week, I went to the Pence Gallery for the “12 Voice” Exhibition. There’re quilts from different artists with distinct styles and representations. The use and combination of organic shapes and colors bring out individual feeling and messages to art pieces. From the pile of collection, the “Book of Hours 4” by Joan Schulze is the first piece I fell in love with at the first sight.

“Book of Hours” 4 was made in 2008 at Sunnyvale, California. Artist, Joan Schulze, stated that “It is not a question of realism, but of finding new and fresh visual thinking…” This quilt is made by collaging variety pieces of textiles and images together. They’re made by silk, cotton and paper. Main techniques that Schulze used was glue transfer process, machine pieced and quilted. There are piecing and stitching of different pieces with variety of textiles and photographs. If you see close up, there’re diagonal lines of sewing to balance with the vertical and horizontal combination of fabrics.

Personally, I like the way it has so many information in a piece and our eyes are busy going around the piece, interpreting different ideas and messages from the artist. The shapes and color use are also my favorite things of the piece. Schulze used subtle colors in the center of the piece, like pure blue and grey to reduce the business of the whole piece. The brighter color use, like orange, light blue, cyan and dark colors around the edge are appealing as well. Even though the piece is combined by different small pieces of fabrics, I like how some patterns sort of connect together by repeating shapes and connecting lines. I also enjoy how Schulze uses images and textures, yet they look quite united putting together. Moreover, Schulze added some yellow paint at the top of the piece to create a focus point from the busy and informational patterns. 



 

The other piece that I’m interested in is “Journey” by Linda Colsh. It’s made in Belgium at 2006. Colsh says “Each of my quilts in 12 Voices is a narrative about a real person whom I photographed…knowing nothing about her, I think about her, and draw or write about her in my notebooks. “ Colsh develop her character and made up the life and background. As we can see, Colsh mainly uses pale and cold colors for this piece which is totally different from the warm and enthusiastic color of the form piece which really matches with the loneliness from the character’s back. Instead of combining cotton patches, Colsh painted and printed some of her photographs and drawings and collage them together. Even though there’re also some different sizes of patches combining together, it looks less busy than the former one because of the textile and tone of the whole. The three black vertical lines helped direct where viewer’s eye should go and made a focal point for the piece. The repetition of pattern, the person’s back view, at both horizontal edges also balances out with the black lines.

Compare and Contrast- UC Davis vs. Foothill College

Thinking of a comparing and contrasting a design, it’s hard to pick one from the pile. Remember I was super amazed by the design of the econ building at UC Davis when I first saw it and I totally fell in love with the design of the building. Let’s make a comparison and contrast with the econ building and my previous college, Foothill College. I took some photos at the econ building last week, and I really adore the simple and modern concrete design. The designer had a great use of lines and they looks good with the shadow together. The concrete gives the sense of simple, yet there’s beautiful textile on the surface to reduce the dullness. The concrete walls combined with glass are a combination of modern designs. On the other hand most of the buildings and classrooms in Foothill College are made in wood. Yet they are mostly one floored with bricks housetop. However, they seem to put in more green to the campus. However, the admission center of Foothill College also looks similar to the econ building of UC Davis. They’re mostly made in concrete but combining wood together. The lines of lightings at night also give the sense of modern similar to the econ building in UC Davis. However, even though they uses similar materials, I think the design of the econ building in UC Davis are very tricky .You may find a lot of geometric shapes or interesting compositions throughout the building if you spend time observing it. Here’re some photos of the econ building I took last Friday and photos of Foothill College I found on the interenet.

Design as conversation - Old Spice

Remember I was working at an international advertisement company, JWT, last summer in Hong Kong. "Advertisements" remind me of design as a conversation. We see advertisements everywhere anytime. Advertising are on the internet, television, newspaper, flyers and more. It's everywhere and so close to us that sometimes we're unconscious about it. Imagine the world without advertisements. I’m pretty sure the part of the society will stop running. Yet, what are the elements of making a memorable and successful advertisement that always stick on viewer's mind?

I'm sure you've seen a lot of cool advertisements during the super bowl. If you ask me to think of the most memorable advertisement that I've seen, the first one that pops up to my mind is the "Old Spice" shampoo commercial,"the man your man could smell like me". There're psychological elements in it which the black guy in the commercial talks every script really fast and limit viewer’s time of thinking. The repeating sctipt,"Look at your man!","Back at me","Now back to your man","Now back to me" produce an illusion to the women which makes them think man who use old spice shampoo are much better. On the visual aspects, there is beautiful scene, like on the boat and luxuries like diamonds to attract people's attention. The commercial reached over 10000000 hits on youtube after the super bowl. In a month after the commercial, the sales of old spice body wash increased 27% from the former year and sales rapidly increased in time. To know more about the case study of the “Old Spice” advertisement, check out this out .

Stone Soup

The stone soup experience not only allows us to produce an art piece, it’s also a chance learning how to work with others as a team. Ingredients of our stone soup are mainly paper boxes, newspaper/magazines, strings and the lantern shaped decoration from our mentor. When we first arrived the place, it felt kind of weird as we don’t know each other very well and everyone was quiet. Then we took out materials that we have bought and Noelle, the mentor, asked us to plan ahead or maybe sketch out any ideas. Yet, it’s kind of hard to think of any ideas just by seeing what materials we have. Therefore we just started right away by making something out or maybe putting things together. We used the lantern shaped thing as a head and hanged it on to the tree, we then used another lantern combined it with soft drink cans and put it along the head as a body. As there’s a paper box, we hanged it along and there’re words “tips are welcome” on it. There’re also some extra decoration of cut color papers that put along the string that tied up the main subject, so the strings look better and sort of tie together with the main subject than just being a string. The stone soup seems to be quite satisfied for everybody in the team and it brought a memorable experience for my first time doing art work outdoor with a group of people.