What's your Occupation?

Project 2 all started with an action of my choosing. I first was supine. Arms and legs outstretched toward the ceiling.  With a simple side roll I was able to find my feet and was then able to move easily into a standing position. A very common movement. Laying to standing. The challenge of the first stage of this project was to synthesize the various movements into a singular form or spatial volume that depicted the volume my body occupied during the different stages of this action.

Drawings of the fragmented body.

I struggled with this concept initially because one of the goals was to not simply show three human forms mashed together, but rather the volume created and occupied by the movements. What's more, I had to first draw the form that I  intended to construct. I hit my first major hurdle when I found I did not photograph enough information to draw a plan view of the movements. As a result, I thought it would be easier to deconstruct the body and make an attempt to render the volumes in parts. Big mistake. Instead I should have taken what I already had and moved into sketch models of what I was envisioning. And THEN go back to the drawing, and so forth. The first models I constructed were of a diaphanous aluminum mesh material. Very easy to manipulate, but any material is useless  without a refined plan. Of which I did not have.  My first iterations were fragments of the movement: torso, and left and right legs. The result in my opinion was a horrifyingly terrible rendition of what the assignment required. 

Center: Torso movement, Left: right leg, Right: left leg

After discussing and critiquing my process, I was able to identify the several missteps I had taken along the way. So  in my next iteration I first began with the model and moved to drawing as required.  In addition to beginning with the sketch models, I also found that a simple superimposition of the photographs provided some much needed information as well. And although the final model was not to depict the human form that did not necessarily mean that I could not start with the human form and work toward my abstract, volumetric goal. This direction yielded a much more satisfying result. I was able to move from three individual figures to a singular volume that fairly accurately described the volume occupied by the movements.

The second stage of Project 2 required an extrusion of the discovered volume. I now had to insert the volume into a 10" x 10" x 5", cube. Because I was working with a volume that created multi-directional facets in the occupied space, I needed to develop a method to transfer the form effectively. I devised a framework that I then used to methodically and incrementally translate the sections of the form onto a series of templates that could then be used to create the extruded volume in the cube.

Mistakes are paramount to the design process.  They help us learn new and sometimes more effective approaches to solving a given design problem.  While it was not my intention at the beginning of this project to undergo an action that could serve as an interesting metaphor for the design process that was to follow; I found it interesting that it coincided with the saying: "We fall down so that we can learn how to get back up."