Theme Generation

This week was all about finding a theme for our FMP and improving our reflection

What I did

• Wellie mindmap – listing different ideas about what the wellies could be if they weren’t wellies. This was done to get our imagination going.
• 4 mindmaps – based on a list of ideas we received if chose ‘Stop and smell the flowers’, Communication and Function. I then chose one of my own ideas of pollution.
• Researching art activity – involved writing about a piece of artwork with more information added at intervals.
• Book research – finding books based on 2 of our chosen themes to explore.
• Specialism poster – listing places that we would find our ‘fashion’ specialism.
• Innovative fashion research – finding images of crazy fashion that inspired you.
• New blog – setting up a new fmp blog with different sections for our posts.
• New planner – starting to use a planner to help keep ideas and plan your time.

Reflection

Doing the wellie mindmap was an interesting way to encourage us to be more imaginative, however, it was difficult imagining them as anything else, so I struggled with this task.
I liked having a big list of ideas to chose from, however, a lot of them were very similar and I think I picked ideas that linked together in some way or another.

The first mindmap I made was ‘Stop and smell the flowers’ and I found this theme very difficult to generate ideas from. I know the premise is about escaping from everyday stress and taking a minute to appreciate life, however apart from that there isn’t much more to say, so I decided no to choose this one.

The next mindmap was about communication, which sounds difficult for idea generation, but it wasn’t too bad if you think out of the box. This sprouted all sorts of ideas like:

• body language
• how languages have evolved
• morse code + brail
• electronic communication – phone, email, text

This stirred up lots of ideas and could be an interesting concept of exploring the good and bad of communication, however, I feel as though this isn’t a strong enough topic on its own, but would be better as part of a larger topic.

My third mindmap was a topic thought up by myself, which was pollution. This topic could be split up into a number of sections regarding the type of pollution, whether that could be land, water or air pollution etc. I really liked this idea because I thought I could explore the idea of air pollution and evolve it towards the quality of indoor air. I was initially inspired by an ad by Velux windows about the Indoor Generation and I thought this concept was very current and could create a lot of awareness, to people who have no idea about this problem. This idea was certainly a contender but I needed to make one more mindmap before I decided.

My final subject was called Function and I interpreted this towards exploring the function of living things. This idea sparked ideas surrounding the study of necessity, purpose and body part function (organs/muscles/skeletal). Considering I find this topic very interesting and it relates to my further progression later on this year, I decided to further explore this by creating another mindmap to expand my thoughts. This included ways as to how I could explore this topic through artist-inspired techniques like hands, foot and mouth art. After this, I had pretty much decided this was going to be my theme.

The researching art activity was a helpful way to get us to reflect more deeply about a given piece of work. Since we are the creators, we know the most out of anyone why we do our work, so we have the biggest advantage to reflect properly, compared to someone who knows no background information.

I have found it really easy to find books on my topic. While there are no books on my kind of ‘function’, almost any human anatomy book is helpful because it talks about the function of the body, which is what my project is about. I will do a post later on talking about the books I have found for my research.

We then had to create a poster featuring all the places we would find our specialism of ‘fashion’. While my kind of textiles is slightly different (conceptual/sculptural fashion) this really helped to broaden my ideas in visualising alternative outcomes for my project. This then led me to research some crazy fashion ideas that I believed to be very innovative and could provide me with inspiration within my project to constantly push my ideas.

I’m hoping through using the planner I will be able to write down all my thoughts that get lost after I have left my blog writing for too long. Furthermore, I think it will make my sketchbook make more sense because anyone looking at it will be able to see my thought process behind my work.