Phase 3: IDD-2 | Capstone

Instead of directly starting with a redefined brief, I went back to phase 2 and started by drawing onion, its slices and dices (cut and chopped by myself). This helped me to more clearly understand the curved lines, it's shape and similarities in different onions. This gave me the main feature which makes all the onions similar to each other and then I made connections in my research. By this, I got 3 associations that create the true essence of the visual language (or material culture) of onion (like its layers, spherical bulb-like structure and curved parallel lines). I went back because I was actually missing a lot of information and primary research and needed to connect the dots by which I could define the context of its material components.

Then I started by finding the non-material aspects that will make my context more relevant and by exploring what and why they were present. While finding its non-material aspects I found that a lot of negativity is associated with the onions and design does not spread negativity, so I started to find positive from those negative thoughts attached with onion. From that I got the best association, i.e., Protection which completely explains the purpose of every negative association like onion produce smell and tears for its protection and layered structure also gives the feel of protection. The onion protects us also with its health benefits and fights against diseases. In Egypt, onion is used as a protective item from evil spirits and also helps in achieving eternity and known as the greatest source of water and food.

Then to connect Protection with interior designing I started exploring it and get various keywords like a door, window, a safe, wardrobe, chandelier and a shoe rack and these were making the best connection to my context and my field and selected 3 design opportunities, i.e., a door, shoe rack and a chandelier. And from these, I first selected to explore shoe rack for further journey. After that, I finally made the redefined brief.

In phase 4, I change my opportunity to door just my curiosity of getting much better results than the shoe rack and thought door is making more sense in creating a context of protection but still did not found and lacking my efforts. Then in the crit feedback ma'am told me that I selected those opportunities whom which I had zero knowledge and had fallen into the different field of product/furniture designing and also didn't explored a lot if got into, so she suggested me to change my design opportunity again and make a 3D door-like structure that represents my onion, layers and protection with same associations that I had been making for the door now it's just converted as a decor item.

Reflection

The IDD 2 actually helped me make more relevant connections to everything in my explorations and also introduced the non-material context which completed everything in context creation. In phase 2 I did a lot of research but didn't think that I had collected a lot of contextual associations like the layers and the protection which I also didn't explore in IDD 1 first but now I can use that in my final stage. I realised that my process of designing was different from others they were all capturing the non-tangible aspects first but I just did that after finalising its material aspects first. I explored my process of designing.