Object d’imagination
by Michèle Nardelli
When is a teacup more than a teacup…and if you look for long enough at that shiny flip-top bin in your kitchen, does it seem to have a personality?
Being able to humanise the average egg cup or colander was a huge advantage for 157 UniSA industrial design and visual communications students this year when they took on a special design project for furniture and home centre, IKEA.
Their task was to use everyday objects from the IKEA store to develop characters and tell a story in a book without words about what might happen in the store after it closes.
UniSA lecturer in Graphic Design Luci Gianattilio and Industrial Design course coordinator, Esther Ratner, said the project offered the right sort of challenge for first year students and was a perfect example of how the University encourages experiential learning across disciplines.
"We organised the students in teams with each group comprising both industrial design and graphic design students and they had to work collaboratively on all aspects of the project," Gianattilio said.
"The project required several final ‘products’ – the development of a 3D IKEA character; a storyline that would communicate something about the creativity of the products; and an actual story book produced using visual images only, in keeping with the IKEA concept of delivering product instructions visually for an international audience."
Gianattilio said the learning goals for students were to have real experience of working in teams that combine people with different skill sets. The students were also required to complete a journal documenting the process.
"The project tested and stretched a lot of skills – collaboration, creative thinking methodologies, time management, working to a brief for a client, and it also encouraged creativity and exploration of design ideas within a context," she said.
The first year students obviously enjoyed the assignment. Their imaginations and ingenuity delivered all kinds of fabulous creations with component parts including tea-strainers, seagrass baskets, lampshades, clocks, lights, balls, scrubbing brushes, wheels, Allen keys, ice cube trays and a whole range of other household bits and bobs.
"We had the run of the store to collect all of our materials," said team member of the "people’s choice" winning entry Ella Hermann (pictured above right).
"It was challenging for a range of reasons – simply working in a team meant we had to work out leadership roles and how to get the best out of everyone in the group. Then there were the creative challenges in designing both the story and the character."
Her team’s creations included a character named Sheldon that was constructed from a clock and various plastic jugs and cups, as well as a teacup character, and a snake-like creature made of flexi-hose. Their creations drew more than 200 votes from the 800 customers who voted in the "people’s choice" competition. They were each awarded $100 IKEA gift vouchers.
The UniSA prize winners for the work that best met the brief was won with Klunk – a robot-like character who in his story was on a journey to repair his eye light. Each of the nine students in that team were awarded $100 cash.