Ideal gift
Ideal gift, what is is?
We have been give an assignment to create an ideal gift for one of our group partners. My partner was fond of traveling, sailing and astronomy. I have decided to make a spaceship for her, so she can travel to the space. Also, I have decided to create a pattern for her.
The color for the background is browny grey, it brings out the colors of the front objects and creates the visual layers.
The perfect gift. My partner for the project gave me three interesting facts, these facts were that he like F1, met Richard Branson before, and that he has four siblings. A had a couple ideas, but my first thought was to make a racing car for five people, which ending up looking almost like a sort of space shuttle. I wanted to include something about Richard Branson as well, he owns a lot of airlines, and the label that owned The Rolling Stones, so I thought to name the car ‘The Rolling Stone’. With a bit more time I would’ve made the car a bit more detailed, or added colour to car, probably focusing on black and red.
Our task was to come to the session with 3 facts about ourselves and share these with a classmate. Using these facts, we then had to brainstorm and sketch out ideas of what could be considered the perfect gift for this person. The facts that my partner gave me were that her family name is ‘The Angels’ in Spanish, her family works with fire arms for their job, and that she once met Bruce Forsyth. We were then given some random words that we had to try to incorporate into our design. One of my random words was banana. My finished design was a trophy of an angel holding a banana gun. The thought behind this is quite self explanatory, but I chose for it to be a trophy ornament because when she said Bruce Forsyth I thought of Strictly Come Dancing and the trophy.
So for the ideal gifts project i was working with a story about a trip to japan, my partner described Japan as an entirely different world. This got me thinking. How could I actually create another world? The idea i settled on was have a bubble that represented another dimension which contained some symbolic elements of Japan.
I was then given the random word of coffee. I had seen a trend in kawaii Japanese artwork using drinks bottles as containers for their artwork and thought this would be a brilliant way to convey my idea. So here we have Japan as coffee.
For Kim’s Ideal gift project we were asked to prepare 3 interesting facts about ourselves and then share them in a group. We then had to use someones facts to create an ideal gift for them and use prompt word to further develop our ideas. My partner said they had met Bear Grylls and been skydiving so I thought a a flying jeep would be suitable (jeep is adventurous like Mr Grylls and they must like flying if they have been skydiving so…flying jeep). One of my words was ‘fan’ so I added some rotatory fans to the car.
Three facts that I was presented with were that someone had two birthdays, someone had never broken a bone, and that someone fell off of a horse once. While reusable birthday cake and horse stabilisers looked promising, they were ultimately dead ends. Oner rejected idea was a birthday cake Rubik’s cube– enough combinations to see you through every birthday you’ll ever have.
The fact I went with for my final idea was that my partner had never broken a bone, so I reasoned a thoughtful gift would be a chance to finally break one. A bone breaking machine seemed a little too on the nose, and two random words, bottle and skeleton didn’t lead anywhere. My final random word was clown, which I think had potential.
For Kim’s project we had to design ideal gifts based off of our partners’ interests.
My first partner enjoys playing the violin as well as watching horror films and Studio Ghibli. I decided to design a horror themed violin using recognisable illustrations such as spider webs, bats and skeletons. However, the next stage of this project was incorporating a random word into our designs. My word was ‘bridge’. I decided to make the violin a ‘bridge to the other side’. I represented this through the ghosts appearing from the bow of the violin. My final gift can be seen below.
My second partner loves sparkling water as well as watching Disney and Marvel films. I decided to design a bottle of sparkling water that has buttons on, to allow you to change the flavour of the water. However, my random word was ‘aeroplane’. This gave me the idea of how to make this bottle more easily transported. I combined this concept with the prompt of Disney and came up with a bottle that can shrink and expand, taking inspiration from Disney’s Alice in Wonderland. My final design can be seen below.
I was unable to decide which design, out of these two, I preferred and so I decided to experiment with both and create final outcomes for them. They are both so different, and so I found it hard to compare them!
Overall this was a fun project as I was able to spend time creating many ideas and concepts, before experimenting with my two favourites. It was also a great opportunity to get to know my class mates, which has been difficult due to the current situation of Covid-19!
For the ‘Ideal gift’ project, my partner was interested in skateboarding, guitars collecting records. I then chose my random words of ‘shoes’, ‘clocks’ and ‘bottle’. I began brainstorming 6 different ideas focusing on their interests and my random words. I experimented putting a clock with hands on a guitar front and using a solar powered digital clock on a skateboard. For the word ‘bottle’, I created a guitar shaped water bottle, however felt this may not actually be very practical. To explore the idea of his record collection, I customised a pair of skateboard wheels and the front of a guitar with his favourite record. My final favourite idea that I developed was a pair of shoes with skateboard wheels on. For my final idea, I then also customised the wheels with his favourite record album on. This meant that I had incorporated 2 of his interests and my chosen word of ‘shoes’. I was very happy with how this came out and felt that it was a cool, personalised present. It encouraged out of the boxing thinking and fitting to somebody else’s specifications like a client.
As my partner Hannah had a passion and business in designing custom trainers, I came up with a custom design of my own. Going through some ideas I found that there could be a lot done to the design on a shoe and that the opportunities are great. I was given the three random words ‘fire’, ‘electricity’ and ‘clown’ to work with so I decided to go for a very light expired design with bright colours and a floodlight at the back to represent ‘electricity’. For ‘fire’ I came up with the idea to put a fire hazard symbol for safety on the side of the shoe next to the floodlight as the having such I bright light next to fabric could cause a hazard. And as for ‘clown’, I first tried to incorporate a clown nose onto the back lip of the shoe, however, I did not like the outcome of the product. After that, I decided to try and let colour represent the ‘clown’ and a came up with this final product. Sadly the colour does not represent the clown as much as I would like but the colourfulness in addition to the eeriness did make a connection for me.
The project is to design a present for a classmate based on their interest and see how we can develop it with random words.
Ideal Gift was an interesting project to do because I got to learn more about my classmate interests and see what kind of work, they can do based on my interests.
One of my partner favourite tv show is called a game of thrones and His favourite animal is a cat and I used the cat as a symbol in his Game of Thrones house, In GOT they have houses logo to represent their surnames.
My random words were birds, explosion, and umbrella I experimented with all those words and choose an umbrella with the cat as my best. The final work resembled that of an Egyptian symbol which I found very interesting and I felt it suits the theme of Game of Thrones.
My Experiment
