Short Story and Pencil Presentation

So today in creative thinking class, I did two presentation. The first presentation was about the story that we made last week from the given random words. In this presentation, each of us illustrated two or three stories, then each of us picked one of the most interested and present it. So my group was, Nuraini (www.hellosenses.wordpress.com), Nuvia (nuviahelenaj.tumblr.com), and Andy (www.silencejoker.blogspot.com), but sadly today Andy couldn’t make it to class and therefore only Nuraini, Nuvia and I who presented. Here are the three stories we presented:

This is Nuvia’s illustration, so this illustration is about: My brother, Sky, need a bug to warm the coloured salt for self desire.

This one is my illustration, that explains: Brother needs coloured salt to warm bug through the window, for self desire.

This last illustration is done by Nuvia, her story is about: Brother and bug need to warm salt through the coloured sky window for self desire.

As we discussed about the illustration, everyone agreed that the process of illustration was not as hard as making the story itself. Even though, the story didn’t really make sense, at the end, we all managed to illustrate the story nicely.

So these are some pictures when we were presenting our illustration.

Continuing to the second presentation, my second presentation today was about the object-emotion illustration that we did last two classes. In this presentation, my partner, Nuvia and I have to illustrated 11 human emotions into an object, in this case, it was pencil. The process was pretty challenging, however it was very fun because we get to really look into human emotion and reaction to portray it into an object. So here are the Illustration we came up with:

Hardworking pencil -> So this two-headed pencil, so that hardworking people will try to maximise everything, like this pencil, normal pencil is only used on one side, but since this is hardworking, it used up even both sides.

Organised pencil -> This pencil is very neat, straight and clean, just like organised people who have these characteristics in them.

Crazy pencil -> This twisted and tangled pencil showed that crazy people mind is usually tangled or twisted and sometimes we don’t know how they think, very similar to this pencil.

Happy pencil -> Various colours portray happiness or cheerfulness in this pencil.

Irritated pencil -> The end of the pencil is illustrated to be broken because it was too irritated until it can’t do anything.

Furious pencil -> This furious pencil, seemed to be very angry and by looking at its scribble and its cracks, it shows how angry the pencil is.

Confident pencil -> This pencil is big and bold, clearly showing lots of confidence.

Fun-loving pencil -> From the shape and colour of the pencil, it is clear that the pencil is very fun and loving.

Smart pencil -> This pencil that has lots of heads is shown to be smart, because it shows that it has lots of brains and ideas.

Messy pencil -> This pencil is illustrated to be messy because of the leftover from the sharpener is still there, showing that it’s not organise and very messy.

Cunning pencil -> This pencil is fat and short, just like cunning and sly people who are usually short and fat and always have that little spark somewhere.

Lastly, these are some pictures from the second presentation.

Presentation photos credit: journalflorence.tumblr.com

Firefly Inspires LED Efficiency Boost

In this modern world, lighting is what keeps up productive at night, it allows us to do lots of activities and see at night. Thomas Alva Edison may have invented lightbulb centuries ago, but it was not as bright and as efficient in terms energy saving to lightbulb or LED lights these days.

Looking at the twinkling fireflies, scientists tried to increase light-emitting diode (LED) light extraction but using less energy. The scientists identified an unexpected pattern of jagged scales in fireflies that enhanced the its’ glow, and applied that knowledge to LED design to create an LED over-layer that mimicked the natural structure. Furthermore, scientists gathered all of the information on fireflies and making the human-made LED better.

http://www.bloomberg.com/image/iSZSoMx9dDco.jpg

So this is a pairing research assignment, and my group mate is Nuvia (nuviahelenaj.tumblr.com).

Personally, this research assignment allow me to find lots of interesting news. Other than this improved LED from firefly, I actually found some other interesting improvements too, like Gecko glue etc. However this piece of information is actually the most interesting. I think it’s really amazing, how a small firefly can shine brighter than the LED light, therefore it’s really cool that scientists finally found the idea on improving our man-made LED.

For more scientific information, take a look at this website:

http://www.osa-opn.org/home/newsroom/2013/january/firefly_inspires_led_efficiency_boost/?feed=News#.VCFo216A31o

Forced Connection

First thing first, in the creative thinking class today, each of us had to present our ten faces from object. In the presentation, my lecturer was wondering where did I find so many sink? So let me tell you how and where. I already had the idea of sink for my faces from object, but I realised that there wasn’t enough sink in my Singapore apartment. So during the tutorial week, I went back to my country Indonesia particularly in Surabaya. Then I told my mom about this assignment, she then said “why don’t you take a picture of the sink from our house?”, that’s so right! And I go around my house and took lots of picture of the sink 😀 interesting right?

So, this was me presenting:

And these are the ten pictures I presented:

So after a brief presentation, we were divided into eight groups. My group members are: Nuvia (nuviahelenaj.tumblr.com), Nuraini (www.hellosenses.wordpress.com), and Andy (www.silencejoker.blogspot.com).

Together, we were give ten random words in an envelope, then we have to make ten stories using the words. Our lecturer called this activity as forced connection. It was quite tough because words that we get were like: sky, warm, colour, window, self, desire, need, brother, bug, and salt. As you can see, the words are barely connected. But somehow all of the group members interacted together and came up with funny sentences that might make sense or might not make sense. It was so fun working with creative people, all of them have different ideas on creating the sentences. Throughout the process, that other group find it challenging, we somehow make it very fun, interesting, creative and hilarious.

Then at the end of the day, we finished it up with ten extraordinary sentences.

1. One day, brother desires warm coloured salty bug for sky self-need.

2. Bug needs brother to colour the warm sky on the window for self desire.

3. Brother needs coloured salt to warm bug through window for self-desire.

4. Warm coloured sky needs a brother to bug salt for self need and desire.

5. Brother bugs salt through warm coloured window for self need and desire.

6. Brother and bug need to warm salt through coloured sky window for self desire.

7. Warm coloured sky bugs brother through windows for self needs and desire.

8. Warm coloured window needs a brother and a bug for self desire.

9. Warm coloured salt needs a window to bug brother for self desire.

10. My brother, Sky, needs a bug to warm coloured salt for self desire.

This is what Nuraini, our scribe, wrote:

Not quite done yet, our lecturer told us to illustrate the stories or sentences that we made and we have to present it next class. So if you want to see our illustration, check my next post 🙂

Alone vs. Lonely

Alone and lonely?

What’s the difference? It’s actually quite simple. The idea of being lonely, is sad. Because when we are lonely, we actually long for something or someone to fill our time, our empty schedule and our void heart. Sometimes it can make us feel depressed, because we don’t where we belong or which community we belong to. Isolation is one of a common example of loneliness. Living in this world full of people, of course we choose not to be isolated but somehow being lonely is not our choice.

http://nukelearfishing.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/after-service-coffee.gif

Loneliness is a negative state of mind, however, being alone is a positive state of mind.

We can choose to be alone if we want to. An example of being alone is when people want to find peace, happiness and joy. They usually stay away from all the craziness (such as, works, friends-drama, partners, etc.) in their lives and just spend some time alone to find those peacefulness in life. Different than loneliness that usually make us feel so desperate or bring us down, in a way being alone can help us define who we really are, because when we are alone we rely on no one but ourselves.

http://www.fitneass.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/relaxation-techniques-to-clear-your-mind-and-refocus-480.jpg

Analogy in Interior Design

Designing a normal apartment is easy, but what about designing a 200 sq ft apartment and making it bigger?

In this video, you will see that the analogy of interior design and spacing matters a lot. With advanced furnitures and a great interior concept, a 200 sq ft, relatively small apartment, can be very multifunctional. As you can see, it can be a huge bedroom, bathroom, dining table for six, fully equipped office, etc. so from this design example, done by the MIT students we can see the important analogy between interior design and space, after all space can be manipulated with great interior design and advanced technology nowadays.

I personally think that this is very interesting, something that we can adapt for designing our own apartment. As an interior designer, looking at this kind of new innovation is really important. It helps me see that a limited space can also be very spatial in a way. Also learning about the improved technology nowadays is also very crucial.

Object – Emotion/Characteristic

After the long tutorial week (which was kind of a holiday for me, even when lecturers said it wasn’t holiday. But it pretty much was, because i got the chance to go home to my country and reunited with my family yay! 🙂 we finally continue lessons and today’s class was quite short, yet it was interesting and it really forced us to think about things beyond normal. So, today we were grouped in pairs again, but with different partner. I was paired up with Nuvia (nuviahelenaj.tumblr.com), she’s so quite but she’s really nice and creative. Then our assignment was to associate certain emotions and characteristics to the given objects.   For our team, we were given the first object which was pencil. So we have to illustrate the pencil to represent the emotions of characteristics that were discussed. The process of thinking creatively on how we were going to illustrate the pencil was quite challenging. Truthfully, Nuvia and I were confused for some times, then we were stuck in some of the emotions, like charming/confident, irritated and cunning. We thought that these three were the hardest, but then we managed to illustrate all of the emotions and characteristics. So here are the sketches we came up with.

What a challenging activity! Next class we need to present our illustration as well as the faces of objects that was done individually (check out my faces of objects on my previous post). Looking forward to the presentation 😀

Faces from Object

During our tutorial week, we were given an assignment to look for objects that can form or look like face. So of course it has to have eyes, nose and mouth. Then when I went home, i saw that the bathroom sink and it actually resembles a face. Look at the pictures bellow, then you will understand what I mean.

Most of the sinks are unique and different in its own way. But all of them have similarities. All of the bathroom sinks have two handles that look like eyes and it has a spout that looks like a nose. I think this assignment is very interesting, because it forces us to be more aware of our environment 🙂

Empathy in Artist’s Outcome

What is empathy? According to psychologist, empathy is the experience of understanding other’s feeling or condition from their perspective, by putting ourselves in their shoes. The feeling of empathy can also be an attribution of feeling that can be expressed into something like into painting.

Born in the countryside of France to peasant parents, Jean-Francois Millet spent most of his childhood in extreme poverty. As he knew how hard peasant work for living, most of his painting subject was dedicated around the working class. Feeling what the peasants felt, Millet’s paintings were able to realistically capture the strong, hardworking peasants, who were living in humble conditions. Though, critics could not accept Millet’s subject of painting, he still dedicated his painting to depict how important the peasants’ works were in his time. His empathic illustration of the peasant life touched some viewers, including one of the famous artists in the 19^th century, Vincent Van Gogh. Amazed by Millet’s deep affection and empathy towards the peasant, Van Gogh began to learn Millet’s style and embraced it to his artwork too.

Through Jean-Francois Millet, I learnt that as an artist, empathy and affection definitely help me to express my feeling into artwork. Looking at Millet’s experience, I also understand that when we can relate our experience to what we do, generally we will be able produce better outcome.

“There’s a reason we do the things we do, a reason we are who we are”, this quote stated by an anonymous, showed us that there’s always a reason why do things the way we do. Like artist, there will always be rationale behind their artwork.

Here are some of Millet’s paintings:

L’Angelus, 1857-1859 [http://www.jeanmillet.org/175405/Angelus-(Angelus-Domini)-large.jpg]

Les Gleaners, 1857 [http://www.jeanmillet.org/174715/Gleaners-large.jpg]

Blog’s Assessment

So today, we were working in a pair with our partner from last week’s activity to check each other’s blog. My partner was Zahirah (zaraaa-16.tumblr.com). Looking at her blog, I saw so many interesting things that can be applied to my blog. After assessing each other blog, turned out that we needed to assess one more blog from our classmates. But interestingly, we couldn’t check each other’s blog like we did in pair. So I decided to check my classmate’s blog, Florence (journalflorence.tumblr.com) and in return, my other classmate YuLee (kimyulee.blogspot.sg) checked my blog.

There were lots of good things I saw from my teammates blog. Most of them were really creative, they decorated their blog with colorful backgrounds, and most of them have good quality pictures that really represented their journals.

The point of this activity allowed us to improve more on our blog and it will also let us see how others recorded their journals. I learned a lot from their blog posts and I with their feedback, I would definitely try to improve my blog.

So here are the assessment papers done by my classmates while they were assessing my blog:

First Assessment, by: Zahirah

Second Assessment, by: YuLee