Personal Making Assignment 6: Materials

This is a two part assignment investigating the materiality of objects. In the first part, you will take yourself on a physically grounded “artist date” and write a reflection paragraph on it. In the second part, you will collect 5 every day objects that could be valuable design materials, but might be often overlooked, which we will use to design together in class on Monday November 18. The learning goals of this assignment are to understand how materials have agency and impact design, and to give yourself space to decompress and nuture your creative inner child in a usually very hectic time of the semester.

Part I: An artist date & a material conversation

First, take yourself on an “artist’s date”. This idea is specified by Julia Cameron in her handbook on how to be more creative, The Artist’s Way:

An artist date is a block of time, perhaps two hours weekly, especially set aside and committed to nurturing your creative consciousness, your inner artist. In its most primary form, the artist date is an excursion, a play date that you preplan and defend against all interlopers. You do not take anyone on this artist date but you and your inner artist. No lovers, friends, spouses, children—no taggers-on of any stripe. If you think this sounds stupid or that you will never be able to afford the time, identify that reaction as resistance. You cannot afford NOT to find time for artist dates.
Your artist needs to be taken out, listened to. There are as many ways to evade this commitment as there are days of your life. “I’m too broke” is the favored one, although no one said the date need involve elaborate expenses. Your artist is a child. Time with a parent matters more than monies spent. A visit to a great junk store, a solo trip to the beach, an old movie seen alone together, a visit to an aquarium or an art gallery—these cost time, not money.
Think of the child of divorce who gets to see a beloved parent only on weekends. (During most of the week, your artist is in the custody of a stern, workaday adult.) What that child wants is attention, not expensive outings. What that child does not want is to share the precious parent with someone like the new significant other. Spending time in solitude with your artist child is essential to self-nurturing.
Commit yourself to a weekly artist’s date, and then watch your killjoy side try to wriggle out of it. Watch how this sacred time gets easily encroached upon. Watch how the sacred time suddenly includes a third party. Learn to guard against these invasions.

While assigning you to do an artist date may make the date feel “productive” and go against the point, I am still going to anyway, and hope you can make time for at least 1 (ideally 2) hours out of your day this week to nuture your inner creative child. Specifically, during the date (it can be anything—visiting the Benton, working on a crafts project you put aside, just taking a walk outside and observing the birds), please pay attention to physical sensations how your body engages with the material world. So the modified rules of this assignment is that the date should not be done by looking at a screen or with a computational device (so no iPad drawings - sorry!): this should be an hour for you to be physically grounded in your body and, ideally, interacting in a conversation with materials.

To recap, go on an (at least) one hour date that

  1. Is not something you would normally make time to do in your schedule
  2. Nurtures and heals the creative part of you
  3. Does not involve a computer
  4. Is you alone without others

Note that creativity is broadly defined: it doesn’t have to be making arts or crafts. It could be cooking or baking a new dish. It could be going on a walk to gather inspiration from our natural world. It could be going to live theater or the museum. It could be journaling with your favorite pen and that notebook you’ve been meaning to use. It could be playing an instrument you’ve stopped playing, or playing a piece with no performance to rehearse for. It could be dancing for the sake of moving your body.

Immediately before you embark on the date, jot down a few notes:

  • How am I feeling right now?
  • This past week, what part of me was neglected?
  • How am I feeling about going on this date?

Do your date (one hour may feel long and uncomfortable at first for not being used “productively”–resist the urge to stop early or check email or study or do work). Try to slow down and pay attention to your senses (touch, sight, smell, sound, etc.). Immediately after, jot down:

  • How was I able to engage in play during my date? What did that feel like?
  • How was I able to nurture my inner creative child? What did that feel like?
  • How was my perceived sense of time during my date? Did time move quickly, slowly, or as usual?
  • Note any sensory experiences or material engagements that occurred
  • How do I now feel about the neglected part of myself I previously identified?

Change these notes into a reflection paragraph. Feel free to include photos, and any other things you want to talk about or reflect on with how your date went.

Part II: Bricoleur

Bricolage: construction or creation from a diverse range of available things. Derived from the French verb bricoler (“to tinker”)

There are so many things in our world. Some of these things are fixed (and often useful or valuable in their current shape and form, such as your laptop or chair), while others are eager to be reshaped, reconfigured, and reimagined. What are the raw creative materials around us that you may take and remake?

In your accessible landscape (e.g., your room, closet, kitchen, garden, laboratory, dumpster, sidewalk, etc.), conduct a scanvenger hunt to locate and document 5 unique artifacts to serve as materials for prototyping. The materials

  • Should be physical
  • Should be reconfigurable (i.e., don’t steal a coffee maker that’s in use to take apart, but you could steal a coffee filter)
  • Should be unique (i.e., not 5 pieces of differently colored paper)

In general, if someone is not likely to notice or care that the object is gone, you can appropriate it as a material for this assignment.

Take photos of these 5 materials and label them with what they are and where you found them. Add this to your paragraph reflection from Part I. Bring the 5 materials to class on Monday November 18: we’ll design with them! (You could potentially even gather these materials during your artist date…)

Grading & Submission

On Canvas, a PDF that contains:

  • Your reflection paragraph from your artist date
  • Photos of your 5 found materials + a description of each
  • The general feedback paragraph: How long did you spend on this assignment? What felt challenging or easy? How is the workload of the class matching to your expectations? Anything else?

Estimated/expected time: I expect this project to take no more than 3 hours outside of class time: 1 hour for your artist date, 1 hour for your reflections, and 1 hour to gather materials.

Rubric

  • ✓+ : Reflection paragraph shows insights and high engagement with the artist date; materials are unique, unexpected, and interesting
  • ✓ : Reflection paragraph shows good effort in thought; materials are unique, unexpected, or interesting
  • ✓- : Reflection paragraph is generic; materials are generic things you can pick up from the Hive