Research

When starting this project I reached out to my gift receiver, Xueqing Wang, to see what are her main interests. We corresponded over email and I looked at her Instagram. Her two major interests were photography and plants. Other research we did as a class was read The Gift by Lewis Hyde and D.H. Lawrence the Shape of Design by D.H. Lawrence.

Exercises

One exercise we did when starting the project was to learn about the actual reveal of gifts and how opening them can be a major part of the experience. My first concept was inspired by NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and NBA Topshot card opening sequence, and I sought to incorporate that idea into Xueqing’s passion for photography.

Iterations

I quickly realized that wasn’t a very original idea, and I wanted to incorporate her passion for plants in the project as well. I sketched a few different ideas out but was not in love with them and wasn’t sure which new technology I would use. I struggled coming up with an idea until I was browsing Snapchat before class and had the idea that I should use their Lens Studio to create a virtual garden using her pictures, combined with flowers.

Concept Statement

My gifting design project was based on the quote, “These are the elements that resonate with the audience, because the work becomes a link between two,” by D.H. Lawrence in the Shape of Design. I wanted to relate the wording of the link between the two as my gift recipient, Xueqing Wang, had a passion for photography and plants. I wanted to make it personal, so I used her own pictures from her Instagram, and I had the pictures grow out of a plant to a flower. For each flower color, I tried to have it relate to her pictures. In this age of COVID, the gift had to be virtual, so I made the flowers appear in virtual reality using Snapchat’s lens studio. With it being in virtual reality it can be taken anywhere and she can view the plants and pictures anywhere she is. When publishing a lens there is a QR code to share the lens, and I glued it to an actual flower pot to bring the flowers to life. The graphics were made using a mix of Photoshop and Illustrator. The QR code on the pot was glued on a bristol back using rubber cement.

Production

I first started my production by taking pictures from Xueqing’s Instagram (@xuueqiingwang) and finding flowers that I thought fit each color scheme. I then took them and made a collage of flowers surrounding each flower in Photoshop. My next step was building a pot and stem in Illustrator. I then combined both graphics in Photoshop.

My next step was importing them into Lens Studio, where I placed them with a foreground shadow so that they stayed on the ground. It was difficult to conceptualize  at first, but once I figured out the first one it was fairly easy to do the rest.

My last step was to go to Lowes and get a flower and pot to put the QR code of the lens on. I made the mistake and got a pot that was too small for the code, since the code has to be a certain size to be able to be activated. I then went back to Lowes and got a bigger pot but I ran into a different challenge: It was curved, and when the code was curved the code was unable to be read. I decided to go back to the smaller pot and add a bristol backplate to the original printout of code to give it more support. I admit that aesthetically it might not be the best but it was the best option for functionality.

 

I loved the end result of this project, and it was inspiring to learn how to use Lens Studio to create something in virtual reality, which is something I had never done before. You can download the filter here and you can find a video of the filer being used here.

Link to Portfolio