RANDOM EXPLORATION & OPEN ENDING

What have I done for the studio project in this semester?

That's a long long story with twists everywhere.

First thanks to the "myself from the first semester" that help me to get into the context of "Mirror and Reflection". At that time my brief is "Design a series of products that can help people understand themselves, from external to internal, from physical to emotional."

How do you see yourself in the reflection? Will a new mirror design help anything for self-awareness?

Interesting right? Of course, yes it is! I love this project very much, however I didn't really know where I was going to because I was right in the middle of a dilemma between "emotional" and "physical". Whichever I choose, the project will surely lose some values. And besides, as a product design project, I had no idea what kind of stuff I was going to achieve...

Then a lot of things happened: great lectures, other's projects, 3D printing tech in the glass department and midterm deadline. All of these pushed me forward and they were like seeds in my mind, sometimes provided precious inspirations. 

Here is the 1st twist of my project.

Projects from István Orosz, Shirin Abedinirad and Mann Geoffrey.

After seeing through these art works, at one moment I just realized, maybe for the studio project the biggest motivation is inside. It's about what I interested in and truly loved. So I set up a new goal for myself: more experiments, more self-centered, more artistic approach.

Then I just broadened my project with "Reflection, Projection Light & Shade", because the mirror is actually one kind of the visual tricks. With my new context, I did many experiments:

My new context. Experiments.

The most interesting experiment from above is the last one which is about visual illusion. I have seen some graphic designers use this to create GIF pictures like a running rabbit or a turning wheel, but never seen on a product.

One of my sketches.

When I looked at my own sketches, I have found that when it turned, it looked just like a clock. Then if you could see the time in the illusions created by the wheel, that really could be a clock.

Here comes another twist: I decided to focus on the clock and time.

Actually I want to do a very open-ending project, that is to say I will not set a specific purpose of what I want to achieve or improve. I want to let the users play and interact with my product and get inspiration from it. Maybe they have totally different feelings and something else, everything will be so perfect because there is no given answer.

Final Design.

The real time?

Beautiful patterns?

Time conscious?

What is time?

The characters of the clock?

Or just nice decoration?

What can you read through this little devices?

I do want to know because this is the outcome of the project and I need to write the report. But actually I don't really care anything about your perspective, because that's what you gain from it, my job is only to provide you with one single potentiality.

This is it.

Alright if you want to hear me talking more about the story behind, okay that's fine.

Time is so important to us in life, it almost involves in every single detail of our daily activity. Clock is the choice of everybody on this planet. And often we have 2 ways to confirm the time: number or shape, and gradually that becomes our unconscious ability.

Clocks shown on iPhone.

The first one of the series hides the numbers. You can roughly know the time by reading the graphic.

3:30

The second one uses the dots to represent hour and minute.

8:25

You may ask, what does the 3rd clock stands for?

There is actually a third way for humans to understand the time, back to the age when we have no clocks. Our ancestors could tell the time by observing the light and nature. So I made this one with 3 different wheels, they make graphics second by second, and there are 60*60*60 kinds of combinations, which stands for every second of the day is different.

This is it.