Tutorials, 13.02.2018

Lecturers' notes, sketches, my own notes, a mind-mapping exercise

Hello,

Mondays and Tuesdays are main studio days for the 3rd year Interior Design students at the University of Northampton, which means two full days of design work and tutorials with three of our lecturers.

Here is a little summary of each of my tutorials this week:

I have been incredibly inspired by the Analogues project developed by Edward Ogosta Architecture, as I feel that it brings a visual representation to words, communication and creative storytelling - and that's exactly what my project is about. Consequently, I have been talking about this with my lecturers, and we have been exploring the way I could apply this technique in the development of my concept.
This week's tutorial with James has been extremely useful, as I showed him a series of sketches in plan that I have created as a way of mapping out my programme in the existing building. We had a little look at Giambattista Nolli's plans, and how he drew building conglomerations as solids, and left the public/open areas empty, thus achieving a special effect in his plans. We then talked about the importance of light in the space. James highlighted the fact that it is essential to clearly define the sequence of public-private-bookable spaces in my project. Finally, James suggested I further explore the ideas of nesting, contrast, light, darkness, standing up, sitting down - both in plan and section sketches.
Dave has helped me today with a couple of problems that I had with my 3D model of the existing building. He gave me a couple of tips of how it's easiest to organise layers and shapes when doing 3D modelling. We also talked about the nature of the auditorium that I am planning to design, and he suggested making use of the space under the auditorium.
Graham has challenged me today with a mind-mapping exercise, which involved starting off with a term, such as "narrative", and writing down, as quickly as possible, the first five words that come in mind when talking about it. We then continued doing the same, this time with one of the five words written previously as the starting point. After repeating these steps around five times, we ended up with a chain of associations - some logical and some pretty random. We then selected a word out of each group of five, which gave us a "line", a "sentence" if you like. Here are the two examples that we ended up with: intelligent - brain - creativity - symbol - poetry - literature - author - narrative, and unique - person - problem - project - action - narrative. Graham explained the fact that there are associations in our subconscious, which we probably aren't very aware of, however, they can be extremely useful to explore as part of the conceptual phase of a design process.