Inspiration can be found in the littlest things; from a simple gesture, random acts of kindness, art, innovative design, and speeches. As a young designer, I have found inspiration from the strangest places, people, and events. Most importantly it’s what I have done with these moments of inspiration that separates me from everyone else. This is true for you as well, because no two people are alike in thought and subconscious awareness, and that is what makes us all so unique.
When studying in Italy, Robert Irwin’s Process of Abstraction was a focus of the course work and everything that we saw. His paper on this process has helped me to break down what I see into the bare minimum and apply it to the pre-cognitive and cognitive phases of design. Pre-cognitive is the light, edge, and color. Cognitive is hue, value, rhythm, figure and ground, scale, and texture. Once having applied the pre-cognitive to something, using the cognitive mind-set allows you to be more open, artistic, and aware of the needs of the design and the surroundings.
On a recent trip to Monterey Bay, I stopped at Capitola to visit the beach and found piles of driftwood. Not only on the beach, but people saw the driftwood and had the inspiration to apply their ideas to what they saw. It may be archaic, but its design, it’s the process of abstraction, its inspiration as a process.
(I find inspiration in this because people are utilizing nature and building something that they created in their minds. The textures, lines, forms are also good ways of getting inspiration for designs.)
In some of the next posts I will share my process of abstraction applied to my project in Italy.