June Cai's Design Blog: Concept Development

Overall, the process of the concept development was really educational, inspirational, and interesting. The concept development was made for the project which is re-purpose the old depot to a new building which will has three parts of space---residence, studio and the gallery. First of all, I went to the depot to take the inspiration picture and I ended up using the picture I took (show below image 1) from the layer of the train because there are icicles going down the train, creating lots of different layer and angles. Then I started exploring different patterns from the inspiration. I mainly focused on the color contrast that icicles created for the colors of the train. As showed in the image 2, I ended up using the patterns that I taken from the portion of the person’s hat. It is not only because there are color contrasts, but also the curved lines. I felt there are kind of movements going on and at this stage, I suddenly catch another phrase---transient eternity. I got this phrase because icicles are stable while trains are supposed to be moving. That forms a contrast in another way. After that I incorporated different color scheme into my parti, I finally decided to use the blue and yellow because psychologically, yellow is a color that is most fatiguing to the eye and it gives a feeling of frustration and anger, so it could represent the “transient” part. Blue is used to represent the “eternity” part, because it conveys a feeling of calmness, serenity and tranquil. After I decided the color, I enlarged, resized, rotated the parti to create the movement for the textile (image 4). Those movements also help to create a sense of eternity like it goes forever. At the final stage, I made the model (image 5). I randomly tore some yellow pieces and also tore their first layers to make them look rough. I glued them together non-directionally to create different angels and versions. Those yellow pieces are representing the transient part. The long and smooth blue pieces are glued around those yellow pieces to ease the stress of yellow. Those blue pieces are slightly curved. The blue is functioned to give a sense of wave and eternity. The the plastic stripe us add through to bring the idea of transparency of icicles and it also kind of functions as cohesion to make the model looks like a whole.

Generally speaking, the concept development was really helpful for me and I felt I’ve grown from last semester. I could picture patterns more abstractly and I could also transform the abstraction back tangibility. I felt I gain a lot through this development both academically and psychologically.