DESIGN PRINCIPLES - PROJECT 2 (SENSE OF PLACE)

31.08.21 (Week 4 - Week 5)
Christie Angelica Bakhary (0350655)
Bachelor of Design (Hons) in Creative Media / Design Principles

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LECTURES
The importance of observation

• How does designer "know" what to visualize in an idea?
• Attentive to your surroundings
• Pay attention do details
• Biomimicry
• Looking at the nature and mimic them to create a design

Fig. 1.1 : Biomimicry 

• be mindful to your surroundings
• Try something new
• Connect with nature and ignore distractions/disturbance
• Challenge yourself to a mental workout
• record what you observe
• Stay inquisitive

Sense of Place

• Getting a sense of place with only visual aids
• How you express your sense of that place
• Documenting the observations - photographs, diary, talking to relevant people, etc.

Fig. 1.2 : Sense of place examples\

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PRACTICAL

Before starting my research, I first think of a theme and place that were meaningful for me. I immediately have an idea to recreate some things about my childhood memories and what I love as a child. Below I wrote a short story summary about how my childhood was.

Short story:

  Childhood may not be my best phase in life as what some other kids do. I can say that at that time I've gone through quite some horrible things (it's like only 35% of it that were nice and the rest were bad). Of course I also have some things that I love, I remembered that I really love going out to the amusement park. My most favorite thing to ride there is ferris wheel (although I am scared of height) because I get to see how beautiful the views look like from higher place, how we can really enjoy the view in a slow pace. One moment I remembered was when me and my family went to the Universal Studio and Sentosa in Singapore. Back then we're having so much fun there and I was really happy because I got to do and see many exciting / cute things with my complete fam, which it’s not that possible to do it these days. 

  As a kid who supposed to love their home, I do not like my home, not because it is bad/etc, but because at that time it doesn’t feel like a ‘safe place’ for me, instead it was a ‘scary’ place. But other than all of that hatred towards my house, I still love my bedroom.    It's basically my 'safe' place where I can hide from all the noises out there.

 So I decided to combine both of my favorite childhood thing, ferris wheel and bedroom into one design. 

Visual Research
My plans are either to make an isometric or 3d art with Blender/Adobe Illustrator. So I search for 3D bedroom and amusement park references on Pinterest and Behance.

I found both of this really cool artworks :

Fig.2.1 : 3D amusement park art (Source : Behance)

Fig.2.2 : 3D amusement park art (Source : Behance)

For the color palette, I decided to go for a vibrant, retrowave color.

Progression / Idea Exploration
Starting out by making planes (Shift+A) in 4x4 for the room base, then I extruded the planes to make walls out of it. I also made a bigger base with 50x50 plane size to place under the room base.

Fig. 2.x : Adding planes for wall and floor base

Fig. 2.x : Wall and floor base

Next to make the bed, I added a cube, then adjusted the size and the corner to make it not too sharp and looks more like a realistic mattress. After that, I duplicated it on top of it and make it more smaller to form the bed.  Before making the blanket, I apply collision to all the elements so that the blanket didn't fall through the bed.

Then I added another plane and apply cloth 

Final Submission

"A Safe Space"

Short Description :
  Childhood memories. Childhood was not the best phase in my life like how it supposed to be. Instead some of it was filled with bad and toxic memories. However, like some people do, I also still have many good and happy memories to remembered. My safe place as a child would be my own bedroom, where I can hid and really take a rest from everything that were going outside there. Although it didn't have that very nice and cute design, I still love it because it gave me that warm, comfy, and cozy feelings. Moreover, I slept together with my sister which made me feel less lonely in that room. 

Close-up details :

A photo of me and my sister back then in around 2008-2009ish (yea at that time I was Kungfu Panda Po's sister:D)

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FEEDBACKS
General feedback
Analyze the place, look from all perspective (multisensory perspective)

Adding audio to an artwork can make a huge difference to it. Lastly, considering things like figure ground method and space is important in composition

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REFLECTION
I found out that I love creating artwork/design that involves my daily and personal lives because it’s the place where I can really share and tell what my ‘stories’ are (because I kinda have a problem with opening up and telling stories to other people). In this exercise I also tried a 3d software which I've been wanted to use it since then but I never started and turns out it was a very fun experience. Other than that, I also discovered that I started to like using Blender (although it was kind of frustrated and really complicated at first) and that it was so satisfying to see the 3D models, so I'm planning to dive in and learn more about 3D arts.