Creative Strategies-LA Souvenir / Bricking the Pattern
Last week in Creative Strategies class, we learned about pattern breaking. It's about how to think out of the box and stay away from cliches. We even did a little "game" in class-sorting out a set of different brands of chocolates. Through this process I came to understand that at the primal stage of thinking, everybody tends to reach out for those most "normal" ideas. But as the thinking process going on, there are going to be all those weird, absurd and brilliant ideas popping out.
The third project is about using the principles of Pattern Breaking to create a new concept for a souvenir from Los Angeles that is truly unique but also breaks away from cliches. It's definitely a challenging and fun project. It is challenging for me because I've only been in LA for several months, so my personal feeling about LA is so different from those who lived here for years. It's also hard for me to find all those symbolic element that really can represent LA's spirit. So I began with a research to find out the LA image in most people's eyes.
And it's a little bit surprising for me to find there are so many hatred and loathing about LA, a lot of people think LA is being overrated and people here are egocentric and arrogant. Besides, people complained about the traffic here (which is a common issue for every big city). So based on this, I tried to tease out the keywords for LA.
Also, I began to find out what are the existing souvenirs in LA(trying to see what's in the opposite side of Pattern Breaking) and evaluating if those souvenirs have achieved their goals of solving the problem.
After I acquire all those information about LA and existing souvenirs, I came into the visualization part. I sketched several ideas and finally decide to come up with a brick "book" of LA in which I made fun with the book's name and book's review.
I think souvenirs are the medium for people to preserve their memories about a certain place. And most souvenirs work in a way by simply translate all the memorial visual images of the city into people's memory. So I tried to break the pattern here by creating a souvenir that has all the multiple memory sources for people to retrieve.
Choosing the form of a brick, I tried to relate all those key words like"big city", "traffic", "construction", "heaviness of history", etc(a lots of people think of the riots happened in LA).
During the crit, Frido said he appreciated the courage of this project to break the pattern so far away from the starting point, however, it's a little bit hard for people to relate a brick to LA directly. After seeing other people's projects, I now understand more how to balance the distance you moved from the original idea. And a lot of the times, you have learn to control degree you break the pattern, depending on the different direction you want to approach. Anyway, this project itself is a pattern breaking for me, in terms of making things, all those laser cutting and spraying etc. And most importantly, trying to take on an approach that is a little bit "dangerous" and see how it goes is a very rewarding process.
