Developing Ideas Exercise: The mountain valley

During our art portfolio class, we were assigned to develop our ideas using one of three methods given.

1. The meditative approach where you close your eyes and imagine your theme and the possible outcomes. 

2. The mountain valley where you look at your ideas and rank them from best to worst (top of the mountain to the bottom).

3. The flag where you design symbols/ drawings and words on a flag to represent your project.

Over the last 2 weeks I have been generating many different outcomes for my project, therefore I wanted to use the mountain valley option to rank them from best to worst. This helped me understand which of my ideas are more suitable for the project and get my thoughts more organised. 

The first and best idea that I have thought of so far is creating 6 different foldable products. I started doing research on foldable products in the last post, but I am planning on looking at this matter in greater depth in future blog posts. 

The five out of the 6 products will be foldable and the 6th product will be a cupboard that will be used to store these foldable products. This will conserve space and it also looks at the functionality of the products, not only the aesthetics. 

The second idea which excites me as much as the first one is to create 6 variations of one chair. The design on each chair could be different to represent various cultures. In contrast with the first one, this idea focuses more on the aesthetics instead of the functionality of the products. 

Some other ideas that I ranked lower in my mountain include products with geometric shapes, different shades of purple in each product to create a spectrum of colours, stained glass. A couple of these ideas can be incorporated in my final design as it refers mostly to the finish of the product (paint or material). These focus more on aesthetics and they don't look at functionality as much.

Concluding, I think I will start developing my first idea as it is the one that stands out the most. It has a main topic of 'conservation of space' and I can focus on the functionality of the products alongside with the aesthetics.