I am taking four design classes and a German language course. My design classes each meet once a week and are all very different from each other and quite different from what I am used to at Ohio State. The language class meets twice a week but tends to conflict with the design classes at times, and since I will get no credit for taking it, I only go when I do not have other classes, so it is more of an opportunity for me to pick up some new German vocab and such. Though I find the German language quite difficult and somehow I default to Spanish when I can't figure out what to say in German, yet my Spanish is still not good enough to effectively communicate anything but everyday chatter with the Spanish erasmus students.
My design classes are taught in German, though some students speak in English (for my sake) and the professor's clarify important information to us in English. The main studio class is called Entwurf, and is taught be a man named Tom Philipps. The theme of the studio is "unterwasser" which means underwater. We spent the first week or two brainstorming about underwater technology and various areas of underwater interest including habitats, wildlife, exploration, preservation, observation, and pretty much anything involving the "deep blue". From there we each chose a direction and made mood boards and started sketching what we want to create. My proposed idea for the project is a communication device that works between wildlife and boats, more specifically to alert manatees when a boat is in their nearby proximity. Since manatees cannot hear the boat propellers underwater, I am investigating other forms of communication. While it is possible they can hear a noise on a different frequency, I am choosing to investigate using bursts or jets of cooler water to influence the direction the manatee is swimming and keep it away from the boats. The device will ideally have thermal vision that can alert the boat when a large animal mass is nearby as well allowing the boater to take extra precaution. I am not sure how this will work just yet, but my teacher seemed very intrigued by the idea of using water and/or temperature to influence the animals because previous attempts have been primarily using sound. So any advice and ideas are welcome!
My second course is a packaging design course taught by my favorite of the professors I have encountered, Frau Jagle (though I really like Mr. Philipps as well). Maybe I just like Frau Jagle because she thinks my wacky packaging attempts are quite beautiful and interesting. The intent of this class is to develop packaging for an egg using glorified copy paper. We have spent the first couple weeks constructing packaging in class and many different techniques have been tried by the class, from folding to weaving to crumpling the paper up and making a sort of nest for the egg. I am working on blossom like packaging that will hold a single egg. I have been looking a bit at origami and trying to learn more about folding and creating strong structures from paper. Though mainly it is just a free for all and sometimes I end up with something interesting and efficient at the end of class and other times I do not. In a few weeks we will test the packaging (I am not sure where we have to drop the egg from...hopefully not too far!). From there, we choose are best solution and create some sort of graphic detailing how the packaging is assembled and how it protects the egg. Though she does not want traditional boring graphics so I think we are allowed to really experiment with how we can communicate this. Then we are making a little process book including research, our attempts, our testing, and our final product with infographics.
My third design course is called "halbfunf" which means "four-thirty" as in the time. This is a very difficult to follow course because it is basically a group of communication design students with maybe 4 industrial design students and we discuss the whole time...in German. The objective of the class is to invite speakers to our school and design all of the propaganda for their talks...so posters, fundraising, all kinds of good stuff. On the first day we were graced with someone offering to be our translator...he has since left the class. So our translator was replaced with another translator...who has also left the class. And I use the term "translator" loosely as they would only really give us a 3 minute description of everything that happened in 3 hours worth of class. So then we were without a translator and had no clue what was going on for a week. Then Jackie (another Buckeye in communication design) and I decided that it was stupid for us to sit there confused and we were just going to design something and see what they thought of it...and it went really well and we even earned ourselves a new translator! And we are most likely using our idea to promote the first speaker...who is the head of a fancy supermarket chain with really healthy and fresh foods...think Whole Foods at home. And we designed pinwheels which we are going to make really big and hang on the trees outside of our school. They were excited about this because the trees are being removed soon so it is one of the last times we will get to use them and they thought it would make a nice statement especially for a eco-friendly guest speaker. We were quite excited everyone liked our idea and told us that it was a perfect mix between industrial and communication design. And we earned ourselves a new translator because he liked our idea so well, so overall one night's work was quite successful for us!
We also had a fundraiser for our halbfunf class last week. We made and sold soup at our school...well I carried tables, hung posters, and cut many loaves of very hard bread into little pieces. This was quite amusing because they gave me this bread to cut about 5 minutes before the event was to start. The bread was very hard and the knife was very dull...which resulted in me cutting at lightening speed and getting a giant blister on my hand from the not so ergonomic knife and then the blister popped and it was just awful! Then my forearm was super sore for the rest of the day....oy!
So, my fourth and final design class makes little to no sense at all to me. We each chose a topic based on a random discussion about helping tools. I told a story about how I was trying to eat a yogurt when mom was here but we didn't have any spoons. So we tore the foil cover off and folded it to use it as a spoon. My teacher loved this and we decided I should design some special yogurt or on the go food packaging that can work without utensils. My topic then morphed into mobile food in general and I have a slew of pictures of people I don't know eating assorted German fast food...we will see where this goes...
That's about all for now. I am headed to Paris on Thursday and Friday, and Amsterdam on Saturday and Sunday! A whirlwind weekend. I am going with Jenae who has already been to Paris so we may have to keep the touristy things to a minimum, but we will still see the Eiffel Tower and the Arch and the Louvre is free on Friday nights so I plan on doing that, and we might go to Versailles. I think maybe I will go back to the Louvre in December on a day trip (it is a 4 hour straight train) so I can explore a whole day there on my own. Then Jeff comes the next weekend and we are going to Brussels for 2 days and Madrid for Thanksgiving weekend and perhaps another daytrip to Amsterdam or Erfurt. After that it is only about 3 weeks until I head home!
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