Endangered animals
I actually have never seen an elephant in my life. While I was doing the research of endangered animals on the World Wide Found of Nature (WWF), there are a number of elephants that are on the list. On this planet, there are only two kinds of elephants, Asian elephants and African elephants, and a number of both of them are on the endangered animal list. For the next few minutes, I started to research each subspecies of elephant that is on the list.
When I was researching for Sumatran elephants, a piece of heartbreaking news came to me on the top of the search results. In July this year, a male Sumatran elephant in Indonesia was found dead and his tusks are missing — the autopsy shows that he was poisoned, and his head was chopped off.
I felt heartbreaking, ashamed, and disappointed. This is horrifying — it is 2021, and human is still trying to make the most profit from an animal that is already in an extremely critical situation because of human activities over the years. After two months of the murder of this 12-year-old male elephant, there is no update if the murderer who took his life was caught or not, and it seems like the news has been faded out of people’s attention. I decide to use my recycles to “bring back” this male Sumatran elephant who was murdered, as a way to honor him and apologize for the cruelty and pain that human have brought to him and his family and peers.
About Sumatran elephants
Sumatran elephants are one of the subspecies of the Asian elephants, and native to the Indonesian island of Sumatra, according to WWF. They are usually smaller than African elephants, and also among the lighter side of Asian elephants. Male Sumatran elephants have tusks while females have very short tusks or even no tusk.
There are only 2,400 to 2,800 individuals of Sumatran elephants so far on this planet. Because they only live in the Sumatran rainforest, they do not have a lot of predators, other than Sumatran tigers, who can be predators of baby Sumatran elephants. That is being said, human activities are the main reason of Sumatran being critically endangered today.
According to Facts on Indonesia, climate change, human re-settlement, and agriculture are the three main reasons of Sumatran elephants experiencing habitat loss that really put them and other unique species that are native to this island in a more and more dangerous place. Much of the remaining forest cover is in blocks smaller than 97 sq mi, which is too small to contain viable elephant populations.
Poaching is another huge reason that puts the elephants’ survival to the edge. Even tho Sumatran elephants have smaller tusks than other subspecies, poachers are still trying to hunt them and sell their tusks on illegal ivory. And since female Sumatran elephants have very small or no tusk compared to the males, the sex ration caused a huge slow down of reproduction of babies — their population had declined by at least 80% during the past three generations. The Sumatran Elephant is recognized as one of the species that is critically endangered by WWF.
Mind-mapping and getting started
Learned from classmates from the last assignment, I found mind-mapping a useful tool to organize the pieces I need to consider and prepare. I went through a great number of Sumatran elephants photos from different angles, and their comparison to other elephants in terms of sizes, shapes, weights, colors, and tusks, here are important pieces that I need to design in order to make the elephant:
I went through my recycles to get some ideas what can I use and how should I plan a way to best utilize them to make my elephant.
Before getting started, I had an elephant sketch with the potential materials to make them just out of my mind. I found this to be a good start for me to organize what I have with me and get a general idea of what I am expecting for — for all kinds of design, sketching is an important skill that designers should have to be able to communicate what is in the real-life and what is in their minds.
The process
Elephant outline
I started to sketch out the outline of the elephant first on the cardboard to get the size and shape. It is not an easy process that I didn’t actually know how big I should make (and it turns out I miscalculated the size to be too big that I was running out of materials). I want my elephant to be more of 3D model than 2D, so I decided to make two elephant outlines and use magazine paper fillers to add some volume.
I found what I made is very loose because the glue doesn’t work the best on uneven surfaces. I used recyclable tapes from Muji to wrap around the elephant to tighten it up. Now the problem is to make this elephant more “3D” looking. I need to look for something that is easy to flex with but also can add more volume. I found this cooler bag I got the other day from online grocery shopping — one side of it is silver and the other side has bubble wraps. I used the same recyclable tape to wrap the cooler bags piece by piece around my elephant to tighten up and shape the elephant out.
The skin
I got this pretty purple wrapping paper the other day from NYU bookstore that I thought would be a great material to mimic the skin texture of the elephant. Soon the challenge comes:
- I am running out of paper to make a tail
- The glue shows up pretty badly after it dries out
- The shape of the elephant starts to blur out because the materials is too thick and heavy
I got panicked for a moment and tons of ideas came to me randomly that I am once again pretty sure I’m not good at handcrafting. I went to sleep and decided to fresh my mind again to get some new ideas.
The tusks and a new idea
The next day I started with cutting out the tusks and re-arrange the layers of my elephant. I went back to my idea of doing a collage elephant, and maybe the lack of patterns is the reason for making this elephant look like an old European-style kettle. I went through my magazine and picked out some colors that I think would go well with purple and also can be used as color cues for the audience, which I will explain further later on. The collage is fun but actually strategic, which is unexpected. I really like the natural tearing lines, but also I have to be smart of the color combinations, layers, even the general shapes.
The eyes
Now what I am missing are the eyes and ears. When I was looking for a bottle cap to draw a perfect circle, I saw my cereal pack — the cookies on it are great models for the eyes! I cut out two cookies, and use them as moulds to cut two more circles. I cut out two smaller circles with slight tips from a black cardboard package, and combine the three pieces to the elephant’s eyes. This imperfect black circle makes the elephant looks “angry” in a way — and I do like that personalization to what the Sumatran elephants are facing in terms of survival right now.
The ears
Finally, it comes the last part of my elephant — the ears. This is the part I actually changed what I have planned into something I totally didn’t think about at all at the beginning. The original plan was to use cardboard and glue the ears to the body; however, it doesn’t make sense to have 2D ears to be placed on a 3D elephant. Do I have something that’s easy to flex and fold that can show a 3D effect? Yes, the Amazon package bag! I cut two pieces off and fold them into a fan shape and finally glue them to the elephant. The parts that weren’t glued onto the body really create the 3D effect while maintaining the characteristics of elephants’ ears being huge like fans.
The final work
Here is a photo of my Sumatran elephant made 100% with recyclable materials. I would also like to explain how my design thinking and decisions shown on him in terms of how he is being made and how he looks.
This elephant is made to memorize the Sumatran elephant that was murdered in Indonesia back in July this year. His eyes make him look angry, which is intentional because human beings murdered him in such a cruel way only for profit, and his peers are facing critical life situations because of human behaviors. The collage magazine pieces symbolize their broken habitats which are destroyed by human beings (agriculture and forestation mainly), but also shown as a “coat” for him that shows he deserves protection. The color red shows a sense of warning that the Sumatran elephants are in critical danger of survival, and it’s the time that human beings wake up from the greediness and saving all the endangered animals in particular by enhancing animal protection laws and harsher punishment over illegal poaching and ivory trading.
Summary
This is not an easy process for me, but a really creative designing and handcrafting experience. It took me around 3–4 days to finish making the elephant, from researching the ideas to finalizing the prototype. A few take-aways:
- Be brave to think out of the box, and be creative and play with whatever I have in my hand or mind. I think one thing that’s really challenging for me is that handcrafting is such a one-time thing — once it is done, it is hard to hit delete or redo like what I usually do in Illustrator. However, on the other side, it is challenging and interesting too because what we finally come up with is more of a handcraft-y and natural prototype that probably isn’t what we envisioned at all. The sketching really helped me to build the start of the process, while I learned to adapt to new situations and ideas that I ran into during the process.
- All recycle come back to us. Using recycles really resonates with endangered animal theme that when it comes to design products, no matter it’s digital or tangible, sustainbility is something that designers have to keep in mind. What we design all come back to us, both in a good way or a bad way — when ivory was firstly introduced as a material for artcrafts such as sculpture, poaching becomes a career for people to make money, and this directly resulted in a huge impact on elephant population all over the world. Whatever we design, we have to think about the consequences just as importantly as the functionality and economic benefits.
- Save the Sumatran Elephants by donating to People’s Trust for Endangered Species!
