#playblock

Things have changed, I’ve updated my last concept quite a bit. I showed my idea to the T.A’s and I got very useful feedback, with their critical feedback I was able to see my project from another perspective. So at home I began to criticise my work and wrote down questions so I could answer them myself and evaluate my work, from this I realised I needed to work more on my concept and also work on the philosophy behind my idea. Here are some of the notes/sketches made; https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B30LG4O8n9x7UlVBbjRjVEtjMTA&usp=sharing . The tweaks I made to my collection process affected the current drawings of myself(25), as I won’t be able to use them anymore due to the update. Because of the differentiating qualities of drawings (since I didn’t set a requirement to the drawing process some people spent 30 minutes+ while others spent less then 1 minute), I decided to set a requirement which would make the outcome of my artefacts more fluent. A 2 minute countdown for the drawers and they also can’t use an eraser. Even if the drawer cannot “finish” his drawing of my face, his un-finished work is just as good, and maybe even better. I was excited to see how far people would get done and what they would choose to draw first and leave to last (so I can see each persons perspective on what my more defining features are). I saw this quote during my research session, “drawing is the language of expression” and to be honest I was kind of looking forward each time I was being drawn to see each persons unique arts styles and how they express themselves through their drawings and what word they choose to label me with through the drawing as well. I will be doing more (reflective/process blogs this week). 

I decided to scratch the other concepts I came up with as I came up with a cool idea, I call it the “Draw Me” Project, so I thought I should compile a collection of drawings from a variety of people, I wanted people to draw a self portrait of me on a white piece of paper, they could spend anytime and use an eraser if needed. I liked this idea, as I thought that the interactive process of drawing was very playful and would contribute a lot to my overall collection process for this project. I feel that I will carry on with this concept and build more on it. I am gonna let loose of all the other ideas, because I want to fully focus on one thing at a time, rather than trying to do a whole bunch of different projects/collections and hand in a mediocre work at the end. I need to spend a bit of more time to plan out the philosophy behind this concept so I can understand it at a level where I 100% know what I am doing and can explain it better.

So after some brainstorming and planning I came up with a few ideas, me and Ian @existentialoser also teamed up to work on some side projects. We came up with SnapShit/InstaShit an app which worked as a guide for toilets that had tips and tricks for specific toilets along with a collection of the pictures of the toilets themselves. But after some very helpful and critical feedback from some of the T.A’s we realised the various faults with our ideas. They were too functional, and before we even started we had an end idea at mind and making an app was just going too far, although it was a good idea, it was just not meant for this specific project. Other ideas we came up with, consisted of an unfinished list, we were focusing on gathering step 1′s from various different to-do’s/guides/how to’s and just printing them into a long list of useless step 1′s, we thought this was a brilliant idea, but then after showing our ideas to the T.A’s for more feedback we realised that it wasn’t really a collection or something that someone would label as “playful artefacts”, but rather a long list of words, another good idea, but not meant for this project. At home I decided to start on some solo work, after more planning, I came up with an idea was comfortable on building further and pursuing, I called it the Triangle Concept. I was basically cutting out triangle shapes from this special cardboard textured paper, and from then I wanted to use different unique art art styles on each paper. 

Our first assignment for Play Block is a “Playful Collection”, were we need to gather a collection of artefacts with the gathering process being playful, well thats how I am quickly summarising it. Now I need to come up some some solid ideas and concepts.