50 Shades of windows

Eva(Yutzu) Chen
Ideation & Prototyping
4 min readSep 21, 2021

An assignment from Ideation&Prototyping class Week 2

Task:

  1. Choose an object to work with.
  2. Make 50 different renderings of the object using different tools, materials, techniques, mediums, and experimenting with different styles, forms, and treatments while still keeping the object recognizable.

At the first glance, I was not confident at all and thought it was impossible to find 50 different perspectives toward an object. I looked around my room and chose the window. The first few words came into my mind about windows are transparent and movable, but nothing more. In order to observe more closely, I grabbed my camera and went out to take some photos of different windows.

Different windows on street

They are similar but also different. They are all glass but different in their sizes, frames, reflective rate, thickness, decorations… But how could I interpret and present windows in 50 different ways?

Without any clues, I decided to first collected some trash on road which could relate to my impression on windows or simply be parts of windows. Along the way back home, I collected rocks, newspaper, wood, colorful ribbons, broken glass and many other small pieces.

Okay, let’s do it!

The first 10 was easy. I used the pencil to sketch lines and shapes.

Sketch

Then I tried different materials or forms like simply writing in text or using tree bark. What I found really interesting was the newspaper. I tear them into stripes and sticked together, which reminds me of my grandma’s story that she once told me. She always poked the newspaper window into holes for fun. I also found some advertisement selling different windows.

Newspaper made windows

Then I cut the paper to open some windows, used broken glasses to remake a window, used ribbons as frames, used corrugated paper as blinds, sprayed water…

Below are some of windows meaning for me. It could be a flashlight, a clock, an umbrella, a life saving straw… or they could be rainbows, eyes, my refections…

OMG, my thoughts went further and further in the end. Anyway, this experience was amazing and I finally made all those renderings!!!!!!![Congrats!] Looking back, I observed and characterized the object at the beginning. Then I iterated and made changes to each one compared with its precious one. In the end, I thought abstractly about the meaning of windows. It’s interesting to repeat the process that goes from the the part to whole, from concrete to general and back to the origin again.

Final work 1
Final work 2

What I have learned:

  1. push myself to think differently, from whole to the part, from general to concrete
  2. just do by your hands and they will tell you
  3. observe more in daily life and feel diverse materials around us

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