I had a great conversation with Clare today. She helped me trace my thought process from the initial inspiration to where I am right now. My process was directed by a series questions that I asked myself while I was navigating through the city of London.
What made me stop in the city was the first question that I asked myself when I was exploring the tube line with my partner. I noticed that I was drawn to street buskers all the time and stopped to watch their performance. That questions led to a product design idea to create an expandable bench for the buskers to help them engage more audience. Then I asked myself what does this object do when there are no buskers around? Is it a design product that I am making or a sculpture? Then I just realized that I want to make a structure in the public space that can be decorative when no one is around, playful when people interact with it and functional when it needs to provide a particular function. The original idea for the buskers became one of the functions of the structure. The idea transformed from a product made for a specific group of people to create a structure that stimulate certain experience and performance for the public. The structure is fixed but buskers are nomadic and audience are in transit. How does the constant flow of people interact with a fixed structure is something I need to find out.
I noticed the sound of the music brought people together and that created a very focused energy within the crowd. People are focused on the performance. When the performance is over, that focused energy became disbursed. Like cutting off a very tight string. Suddenly, everything is very loose. I want to create a physical structure that help invite/promote/enhance that focused energy in the public space. When it is not used for performance, it is a physical structure that stimulate child-like experience with objects that invite and encourage play and touch.
When the space is transformed into a performing stage by reconfiguring the structures, it creates an enclosed circle, just like the circle people naturally formed around the buskers. It created this temporary space that contains a very focused energy in the middle of the city. That energy sucks you in and block you from the outside world for a brief moment. Buskers are like magnets, their music creates a magnetic filed in the space where they perform and the attraction between them and the audience has very intense energy, and that energy disappear once the performance is over. The structure has the flexibility to restore the openness in public and release that tension and temporary disruption.
My next research focus is going to be playful, interactive structures that are deployable/transformable. More configurations produce more dynamic stimulations through interaction. How can I make my structures to produce more configuration? That is what I am gonna explore…
RCA Graduate diploma 2019 