My intent for this project was to create a gift for my mentor that I chose based on similar interests. The mentor I chose for this project was Sydney Rohr, a second year interior design major. I chose her as my mentor because we are both very interested in fashion, dogs, and makeup. To learn more about Sydney’s design interests I asked her a series of questions which included: What interests you about design? Who is your favorite designer? What’s your inspiration when it comes to design? What is design to you? Based on those series of questions, Sydney explained to make that she loves the way a space and impact a person’s mood, whether it’s in a negative or a positive way. She also said her favorite designer is Kelly Wearstler because of her unique design and fashion styles. I also learned that Sydney is inspired by the different materials in a space such as textiles. The use of textiles has taught her to push herself as a designer. Before I learned about Sydney’s design interests/inspirations, I was very lost on what gift I should construct for her, but once I learned more about her and her favorite designer, my ideas began flowing fairly quickly. For this project, we were instructed to chose a quote about design that would influence the construction of our gift. I wanted to make sure I used a quote from Sydney’s favorite designer, Kelly Wearstler and the quote I chose was, “Everything is about color. If you look at magazines and advertising and television, the thing you remember is the color.” The reason I choose this quote was because fashion magazines are very influential on everyday fashion and Sydney is very interested in fashion. Also, the different colored textiles in a space inspires Sydney and there are a lot of different textiles/patterns in different magazines. The three materials I used for this project were: mat-board, rubber cement, and magazine paper. The total amount of money I spent on this project was $0 because I used materials I already own/found around Hayes Hall.
Ideation
To start off this project, we began brainstorming our best gift we’ve ever received. Mine was my first dog when I was going into kindergarten. He was my best friend up until the day he died. Once we determined our ‘best gift’, we then began examining design quotes and created three categories per quote: form, action, and purpose. The reasoning for the three categories was to think about how we could visualize the quote into a physical form. As we found more quotes, we continued analyzing each one and brainstorming under each category. As I was in touch with my mentor, I asked her a series of questions to learn more about her, her work style, and her inspirations. As In learned more about her, I continued writing down the information she displayed to me to keep my work organized.Our second exercise, after our ‘best gift’ exercise was to find an object from around the room and create a packaging for it. The object I chose was rubber cement and once we chose an object, we had to begin researching that objects impact on the environment. I learned that rubber cement is extremely harmful to the environment due to it not being a water based solvent. The chemicals within rubber cement are associated with causing wildfires. My original vision for the packaging of rubber cement was to build a sphere out of bistol paper and on the outside of the sphere, I would have drawn a rough drawing of the globe and red spots for wildfires. Unfortunately my idea for the sphere did not work out due to the gapping between each strip of paper.After my first attempt at creating a packaging for rubber cement, I decided to created a box for the rubber cement to sit in with drawn flames on the outside to display the flammability of the product and how harmful it is to the environment.
Iteration and Production
To start off ideation, I chose to have my quote be from my mentor’s favorite designer, Kelly Wearstler, a famous interior designer and architect. The quote I chose from Wearstler was, “Everything is about color. If you look at magazines and advertising and television, the thing you remember is the color.” My original idea for this project was to create a three dimensional poster made out of magazine paper and focused on the use of bright, vibrant colors.Soon after I began brainstorming ideas for my gift, I decided to create a 6×6 box with magazine paper on the outside of the box from various interior design and fashion magazines because my mentor is very big into fashion. My mentors favorite designer, Kelly Wearstler inspired my layout of the box by adding three sphere balls on the top of the lid. Wearstler loves to add an unconventional look to her pieces and the inclusion of spheres is very important to her work. Originally I was going to create a template that I could use to cut and score on my matboard, but after testing, I found it extremely difficult to score matboard without having the layers peel/separate.Due to matboard being difficult to score, I had to cut out each individual square and glue them together using tacky glue. When I tested this process, my lines were very clean and the angle of the two pieces of matboard were very close to 90 degrees.When I tried constructing my final box, I added too much glue to the corners, which made the alignment cause issues. To make the box more stable, I decided to add strips of paper on the inside of the box at each corner, but after this instead of making the box more sturdy, it ended up causing the opposite.Once I finished cutting, constructing, and gluing a new box together, I was finally able to start adding magazine paper to the outside of the box. My instructor and I realized that a water based solvent would possibly cause the matboard to lose its stability, so instead of using tacky for the whole box and magazine pages, I chose to shift my adhesive product to rubber cement, rather than tacky glue.Once I constructed and glued magazine scraps to the 4 sides of the box, I was then able to do the same to the top of the box and adding the three spheres on top.Final composition: front and side views of ‘packaging’.Final composition: top and inside of the container with the quote added inside.Final composition: gift with the lid shifted to the bottom.
Size: 216 in^3
Money Spent: $0, I used materials I already owned/found around Hayes Hall
Packaging: Box with the lid on top (holder for different items such as makeup or writing utensils)
Gift: Box with the lid on the bottom (intended for a plant to be stored inside or a pot of flowers)
Materials: Mat-board, rubber cement, and magazine paper
Reflection
This project was by far my favorite project all year because of the loose number of restrictions for our gift. We had the opportunity to create a gift that we wanted to build based on our mentor’s interests, that are also my interests. But, all projects bring a number of challenges along the way. My biggest struggles with the project were making sure I stay within the three material maximum and creating a box with four 90 degree angled sides (or as close as possible). It took me multiple tries to find the right technique on how to create a nearly perfect box. After many failed attempts, I learned that in order to create a well constructed box, I had to use as little glue as possible. Also, working with three materials was extremely difficult because I wanted this gift to look well constructed and not like an arts and craft project. I know the reasoning for only being able to use three materials was to make do with the materials we already had, but it definitely was not easy. I also wish my craftsmanship looked better than it turned out, especially for the bottom of the container with multiple burn marks from the laser cutter and it not fitting perfectly into place. I believe I really excelled in creating a concept for my gift and utilizing the gift within the packaging. In conclusion, I enjoyed creating a gift for my mentor, Sydney and learning about her design experiences and interests and connecting with her through shared interests.
