ideas in form
This project series questioned the meaning and usage of Sign Languages as one of the way to convey the sense of love, care and protectiveness within the domain of parenthood in many different ways extracting hand gestures, facial expressions and body movements from the context, creating artifacts; 2 dimensional, 3 dimensional and 4 dimensional. Below is my process of this project from start to end.
1D :
(Initial domain maps)
(Words mapping)
After mapping out all the words I select 5 words below to work with.
The story is written as a way to narrate my point of view reflected from those 5 words – ‘Early childhood development’, ‘Speaking Environment’, ‘Gestures’, ‘Native Speaker’, and ‘Bilingual’. After reading the story to classmates without telling them my 5 keywords, most of the classmates guessed similarly except for Jason who had suggested that he sensed the feeling of ‘love’, ‘care’ and ‘protectiveness’ from the story. After getting this feedback, I re-read my own story and decided to change my words and do more research on my domains and words. New chosen 2 words are Non-verbal and Parenting.
2D :
HAND GESTURE - definition of the word "Sign Language” and the way it is being perceived by people in general as a communication used only or mostly by deaf people. As the research on this subject continued deeper, I found that the gestures of sign language are used differently for different spoken languages around the world.
I started questioning what if parents have their own versions of sign language how might that be? How would they communicate their love through these hand gestures?
Below shown a line drawing of hands gesture in which I had extracted from the original context of a mother who was knitting something for her child. From the photo, I can sense ‘love’, ‘care’ and ‘protectiveness’ the same way my classmate sensed from my story.
Even though, the illustration seems to appear as a normal line drawing, when zoom in to look closely those simple lines are actually made up of words and story in which I wrote to narrate the love and care.
“We’re busy through the day. We didn’t have much time to play. We’d wash your clothes. We’d cook your food. We’d knit your scarf and it will keep you warm. We’d knit and knit and knit and knit. We’d never stop and it will keep you warm.”
Finalised production of 2D is a laser engraved canvas of this illustration. Originally I wanted to use embroidery as the execution method but with time and pricing constraint I decided to adjust and adapt using this method instead.
3D :
As I started thinking about my 3-dimensional artifact, I looked back at the workshop we had in our class as our ideation for 2D, where each of us took turns to draw one after another.
This drawing is the one that I started. I drew a mother who was holding her baby while saying ‘I love you, my baby.’ in 3 different languages. Somehow someone who took their turn to draw after me turned my drawing into a robot.
Inspired that drawing and Fritz Kahn’s illustrations, I started thinking about how a robot would act as a mother(or father)? what is its way to communicate love and protection to its children?
I decided to use a facial expression of when parents blowing food to cool it down before feeding their children to develop further. I tried to think of this as the functionality of a robot. Below shows the process and demo of my first prototype. The way it works is when something that is hotter than my default setting temperature comes near it, it will trigger the fan to cool it down.
After having the main function works, I started thinking about finishing product. I added LED lighting which will blink
4D :
In the brief, 4-dimensional artifact needs to involve either interaction or time-based.