Realizing Urban Space

A couple of weeks ago, I picked my up mom to go shopping. When we returned, I noticed a group of teenage girls walking in the street. I wondered why a group of girls was walking down the middle of the street and not walking on the side walk. There was no snow or other obstruction blocking the sidewalk. My mother brought to my attention that due to large number of abandoned buildings lining the sidewalk, these girls probably felt safer walking in the street. This had not occurred to me. This means that in this environment, the area next to the street has a new purpose. Because of the lack of housing, this area is no longer filled with parked cars, and has become a new thoroughfare for pedestrian traffic. It is an area that can be focused on in my design.

Hip-Hop: Transforming Space

In order to make these objects as visible as possible, I chose to design outdoor objects. I spent the weekend taking pictures around the neighbor hood that I grew up in, Englewood, for inspiration (pictures shown above). One of the things you may notice from the picturesare the staggering number of vacant lots. This lot of sketches mostly dealt with giving value to things and using "ornamentation to transform a space. Here are some of the sketches:

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I was thinking that some of the ideas I talk about in my thesis; using what you don't know as a method for design (which I list under rupture) and ornamentation (which I list under layering) are similar to the ideas I am toying with in my Repair Class. The ideas on repair come from the "Cult of Done Manifesto". I am focusing on resolutions 1 and 4 from the manifesto. They are:

1. There are three states being, Not knowing, action and completion

4. Pretending you know what you're doing is almost the same as knowing what your doing, so just accept that you know what your doing even if you don't.

Here is one of the ideas from that concept. I will post more when I get them scanned in.

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Updates.

Here's a little more info about the previous sketches I posted.

I made some quick mock ups of the pendent lamp sketch.

The rock that are photoshopped in the vacant lot represent a project I worked on a year ago. It was a concrete sub woofer:

I think it fits in the categories I listed. For one it takes a utilitarian objects and makes it ornamentation to some extent. It incorporates a process that was unconventional (cast concrete) into the design of speaker. I think this easily satisfies the rupture, or the not knowing. Know one told me this would not work, so I had no reason not to try it. As far as flow, it is a return to the beginning. It takes something that is "hi-tech" and incorporates low tech processes. I think their is a lot of circular flow and equilibrium in its design.

Ornamentation

I've been thinking about the idea of ornamentation which I described in the paper below. Here are some sketches I did last night.

Ornament Sketches 1

Hip-Hop: Layering, Flow, and Rupture.

I felt that a lot of people had a lot of tie understanding my thesis. I spent the entire weekend doing research and writing this little addition. It took a critical look at what makes hip-hop culture unique. I have thus produced a rough rubric for what is hip-hop. I have distilled it into three categories: Flow, Layering, and Rupture. This paper is a rough draft. It still has plenty of misspellings and grammatical errors. It also contains no citations. I wanted to put it out there as soon as possible to give you guys the flavor of what I am going after in my designs. Please comment on the ideas in the paper since they are the crux of my thesis.

Hip Hop Design

Thesis statement and Bio

Here's the thesis statement and bio that I gave the school.

Eric's Grad Thesis Template (1)

One of the things I carried over from my winter break doodles was the idea of a bike redesigned under my hip-hop design model. I stated playing with various ideas such as materiality (covering the frame in concrete as show in sketches 1 and 2) a glass seat (sketch 2, and making it more social by adding opportunities for more than one person to fit on the bike. I slowly started to embrace the idea of accessories. sketch 3 shows a brief foray into this.

Bike Sketches

Here are some of my initial sketches over winter break:

Winter Break Sketches

Over winter break, the thesis took a slight turn. One day while foraging for diner, a friend brought up my thesis. He said that he liked where I was going with it, but felt that I was holding back. A lot of what I was talking about was black culture and how it has been stolen over a number of years. I agreed, but honestly didn't know how to address this without being clumsy. Around the same time, another friend of mine introduced me to this video:

After watching this I was sold. My thesis would be about hip-hop design. I came to the conclusion that i cannot talk about helping the youth with their identity problems while ignoring the disproportionate number of issues that youth of color face. This also could not be done, by saving punk, hip-hop, etc. from the big bad Corporation. Instead I wanted to save identity by placing markers of identity out there in the world. A person of Italian decent walks down the street of Chicago, they may see show rooms full of italian inspired furniture. When a person of Greek heritage walk down the street, they see many types of greek inspired architecture. When I walk down the street I see nothing which represents my heritage. Perhaps if Hip-hop grew into a larger culture, encompassing architecture, design, science, etc., this could change. I would like to produce things that represent an inclusive hip-hop culture.

More past stuff

Here is the accompanying Presentation I used when I presented the paper before the SAIC Thesis Critique Panel.

Binder 3

I'm going been working on this thesis for 4-5 months now. I'm going to try and get everyone upto sped by posting some of my earlier research.

Design and Its Relation to Sub Cultural Appropriation 2

The Beginning

This Blog will document my process through my thesis as well serve as tool to gain feed back from many people