Design Briefs: Geek and Formulae

Brief 1: Objects Repel, Objects Attract

‘The most exciting attractions are between two opposites that never meet’
Andy Warhol

This brief has two main aims the first is to research into relationships and the second is to realise the patterns you have explored.

Objects Repel, Objects attract. Using this idea, explore relationships within and between objects that are both metaphorical as well as physical. Begin to unveil emerging patterns and begin to visualise the discoveries you have made. It is the manner in which objects react and influence one another that is the focus of this brief. Realize the environments your chosen objects interact with and how the objects(s) affect its environment social, culturally, politically and also technologically.

Relationships and the patterns that they generate can have many forms. Think about mathematical and geometrical but also emotional and physiological relationships that can occur between objects. The associations that you choose to investigate can range from an emotion such as a laugh and its interaction with a joke to a more material association such as that between a brick and a house.

Your aim should be to identify your items of choice within the first day and then to explore this relationship over the next day and a half. You should aim to leave yourself at least a day and half of responding to the relationship you have uncovered.

The aim of the brief is to help discover unrealised as well as new relationships between objects. The result in your discovery will enable you to create a visual response to the second aspect of the brief which is pattern.
The visual response can take various forms such as video, artefact, graphical or audio. The response should identify the pattern that you have unveiled.


Brief 2: Rational, Irrational.

‘Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way.’
Edward de Bono

Throughout your education you are taught traditional thinking. This discourages open-mindedness and therefore inhibits you to design out of your already made preconceptions.
By questioning a traditional preconception aim to develop a new understanding of a preconceived idea. Develop a piece of design which is inspired by irrational thinking such as the idea of Edward de Bono shown above. Allow your design to be inspired by your individual thinking or you may attempt to prove your irrational thinking true.

For example what would happen to your logic if you began thinking 1 +1 =11?

Responses to this can be both systematic and also full of beans. The idea of irrational thinking is to help the user to expand their thinking but also to use to use this process to come back to rational responses to an originally irrational line of thinking.