Last week in Design 001, we were asked to make something out of random objects we had brought with us to class. The project was inspired by the children’s book, Stone Soup, written and illustrated by Marcia Brown, in which a village comes together to create a stew out of whatever they happen to have and end up sharing a delicious feast together. Our group had a very random collection of items including an empty orange juice bottle, a little pink stuffed rabbit, some paper cranes, a sheet of cardboard, a stack of newspaper, paints, some hair bands, and a few other random objects. The challenge was trying to find inspiration in this strange assortment and creating something with it. When we started the project we really didn’t know what we were going to make, we just started working. The cardboard sheet was folded into a triangular shape and we started to make a bunch of “cootie-catchers” from the stack of newspapers we had. One of the paper cranes was placed upside down on the rabbit’s head as a crown, and we used strips of paper to tie together bundles of sticks together. After compiling all these pieces together, we were a little lost for a while as to what to do with them, but quickly the idea of using these items to create a throne for “the bunny king” was proposed and after that the project quickly grew. We painted the cardboard structure with a swirling leaf motif to relate it to the bundles of twigs that were framing the toy rabbit’s “throne” and further decorated it with the cootie-catchers we had assembled. It was very fun to see how the project evolved as we continued to work, and transform from an arbitrary assortment of objects into a small sculpture of an elaborate throne for “the bunny king.”
