design development
February 20, 2009
Further meetings today and yesterday saw us talking through various possible refinements of the idea. We agreed that the initial thoughts on how to combine our concepts were rather disjointed (the single seat, 2 debating podiums and 2 anonymous forms we had ended up with didn’t strongly represent anything). We discussed alternatively having a simple, recognisable concrete slab developing along two different paths towards being two different interesting podiums for debate. From here we decided that a direct translation from one extreme of design to the other might make more sense visually and we discussed whether the first design should lose its unique features, becoming something very plain before gaining different unique features to become the other podium design, or whether we should lose the ‘plain slab’ idea and merge straight from one podium to the other.
Today we merrily landed on the solution to base all of our five units on one design, which appears very different either side up and seems to flip over in the interim steps. To us this represents the 2 sides of an argument and the visual realisation that neither exists without the other. We would like to incorporate a well-engineered design of voids and weights in the leaning forms to push the limits of what you would expect capable of standing up. We will also be using the textures and colours experimented with in the intial design stages to define the two different sides and maintain a continuity throughout the sequence. Once the design had been set in concrete (yes this was actually said..as a joke..) we settled on dimensions, materials required and-bizarrely-the plan to meet up tomorrow on Saturday.
