The Introduction
When this project was introduced, I kind of freaked out because of the name of the project. I have never been the best at drawing people, especially their faces, so I was not very excited. It took me a few days to truly understand what was going on, but then I finally hunkered down and understood that this was a representational abstraction. This made me super excited because I could just picture what I wanted to do from the beginning. I am excited to keep the ball rolling on this project
Exercise 1
The beginning of this process was pretty fun. It started with me looking deep into myself and categorizing my main mental states. I had some help with some leading questions. Here are the questions and my responses to them.
How do you think through a problem?
- I typically tend to just roll with whatever I am feeling in the moment, or I consult a bunch of people that I trust. I am very optimistic and seldom think there is a problem I can’t get past or work through.
Is it methodical?
- There is no method to my madness when it comes to problem solving, unless it is something that actually requires some sort of construction of something. Outside of that, I tend to just go with my gut and let everything work out.
Is it spastic and unorganized?
- Yes very much. This is sometimes problematic, but most of my problems are solved quickly because of this so it also has some good consequences to it. I don’t get caught up on things, but I sometimes make the wrong decision.
How would you describe your thought processes using an adjective/energy/feeling/emotion?
- After answering the first few questions, I realized that my problems are mainly solved socially, empty-mindedly, and after the decision is made, reflectively. Socially because I sometimes require other opinions, empty-mindedly because I make quick gut-felt decisions, and then I am reflective afterward so I can improve my decisions later on.
Overall, my mental state is slightly odd. There are some things that I think through incredibly methodically but some things that I do not think through at all. If I need to be really focused I can be, but most of the time I am just rolling with the flow.
3 words:
Social
Empty Minded
Reflective
After finding my 3 main descriptive words, I made a mind map to help with my shape creation and ideating. Here are my 3 mind maps.
My 50 Rapid Prototypes
Now that I had my descriptive words mapped out, I knew what direction I had to go in next. The problem was figuring out how to display each word through shape. Here is my thought process on how each shape should look.
Empty minded: Rounded edges and very bubbly, no straight lines, and very unpredictable.
Social: Elongated shapes that look as though they are reaching out.
Reflective: Compact shapes that represent the inward-looking on my own brain.
After I had an idea about what needed to happen to display these feelings, I started rolling on my iterations. This was actually pretty fun to mindlessly doodle (with a little bit of direction of course).
The shapes that are starred are the ones that I originally selected because I thought that they best represented the words I wanted to display. However, I ended up changing it up a little bit. The shapes below are the ones I ended up working with.
Blob: The blob displays my empty mindedness. I go through long periods of time each day where there is nothing happening in my head. This is a good thing. I am able to completely forget about everything and even dream a little when this is happening.
Crown: This is not an egotistical thing. This crown is laid over the top of my blob shape that displays my empty mindedness to display that I have control over my mind when it is empty.
Star with 4 triangles: This is my insightful shape. I am decently good at getting a read on people and this helps me help myself through helping others.
The spinning hexagon: This shows who I am socially. I am always moving. This is to represent my eyes constantly moving around and searching for new people to connect with.
The oval: This shows the talkative aspects of my personality. I am usually leading the conversation, which is why there are a bunch of ovals connecting to the big oval (me).
The Triangles connected by a tube: The way I get in touch with my own heart is through words, so this shape connects my mouth to my heart.
Now that I had my shapes, I started ideating about where I want to place them on my head. It doesn’t usually work like this, but the first iteration I made actually made the most sense to roll with, so I did. Here is my first iteration where I simply placed where I thought the shapes should be located.
3D Exercise (Coil method)
For an online participation activity, we worked on the coil method where you use coils to make shapes extend into 3D. This was actually really cool to me. Here is what I ended up with for the exercise.
3D Ideation
Now that I had my placement iteration, I began to start making some ideas for how the shapes were going to look in 3D. Below are multiple ideas on how I thought the shapes could possibly look.
