Stone Soup Experience

According to our class reading: "The Etymology of Design", we see that the Greek root of the word "design" is "schedio" and derived from the Greek root "shedon" which means "nearly, almost, about or approximately. So essentially in design, we strive to achieve ambiguity. We don't plan everything we do. We go through three steps when designing:

1. Thinking

2. Doing

3. Looking

We all go through these steps, and not necessarily in this order. The concept of stone soup is designing without planning. We all contribute something to create another something. This is exactly what our Design 001 class got together and achieved.

This was the "trash" that each and everyone of our group brought to use in our stone soup project.

The process of this project was very fun in that everyone of the members pulled out their sketch books in an attempt to plan out what we would build out of these materials, but ultimately scraping that idea altogether. We looked at the materials and proceeded to jump straight to the "doing" step of the process in designing.

Each of the members started taking parts of the pile and building. What we learned from Housefield and Lauer was right. We cannot help but employ the three steps when it comes to deign. After building separate parts of the stone soup project we had to employ the "thinking" step to eventually bring our contributions together, thus creating this:

It was clear that this object was the work of several creative minds, as if we look at different sides and angles of this design, there are very different textures, styles, and materials used.

If we look at "creativity from without" in a different light-one that does not consist of museums, and popular art like that of Andy Goldsworthy's inspirations from Nature; but instead remember that Design is everywhere and always around us- we can see this element all around us and throughout history. The main reason as to why our class did this stone soup project was so that we as designers can understand and learn how to design with things all around us.

Look at those who won the Nobel Prize this year for the creation of Graphene. As Housefield has pointed out- this was the result of their little stone soup project. they worked with things they had as a side project. this was a very interesting experience and I feel that most designs are like the the children's story "Stone Soup"- we can craete designs inspired by anything and everything around us.

Et Voila,

All the Photography by Minh Chau or yours truly.