Reshape Your Way to Inspiration

Take your idea and adapt it into a dance. Adjust it to produce a soap opera. Amend it to become an Olympic competition. Change it into a game. Or have it metamorphose into pornography. Whatever you choose to do; use it to reshape your idea in other forms to keep  turning  out possibilities.

Play Hangman with New York based design studio, ghettovinyl. Their Chalkboard Wall Vinyl Kids Game includes a letter bin for used letters on the left side and a built in score board on the bottom right side.

StumbleUpon Something New

 

StumbleUpon random web pages, filled with inspiration, with the click of a button. Create an account. Define your interests. Add some random non-interests for added exposure. And click that Stumble! button over and over for some external stimuli.

With his Foot Wear Art, Israel footwear designer, Kobi Levi courageously blends the boundaries between fashion and art with every pair of shoes, he creates. Shoes become his canvas through which he portrays his unique point of view. From slingshot sandals and bubblegum pumps to banana peel flip-flops; each pair is tantamount to functional art.

Make it Compostable

Faster, cheaper and easier has become the mantra of modern man. We live in a throw away society built upon convenience; but now that the long term viability of humanity and the planet has been compromised, the ability to leave no trace behind has become a design selling point.

Creating a new kind of throwaway culture and new value for short term use;  Young Ju Do, a fashion student at Central Saint Martins in London, devised a series of compostable accessories derived from edible, biologically nutritive organic materials. Returned to the soil, the one-time jewelry is cycled back into the food chain when consumed by micro organisms.

So experiment with edible, biologically nutritive and organic materials designing with the intent to leave no trace behind.

Organic Reshaping

Reshape something organic. Raid the fridge and poke around the vegetables. Grate some carrots. Cook some beets. Mash some butternuts. Or juice some beans. And  mold. Cast. Shape. Form. Fashion. Or sculpt with it.

While most designers make use of existing materials Dutch artist Geke Wouters creates her own. Her collection of paper-thin bowls are made from carrots, peppers, beet root, leeks, tomatoes, and other vegetables. Each delicate piece of edible art is made using a drying and forming process that converts organic materials into paper thin layers, giving you the sense of a microscopic view into its intricate cellular structure. True to the natural materials, no two of these vegetable bowls are alike.

Knit Big

Dutch Artist Geke Wouters's love for fabrics and clothing is obvious  in her work. Designed by Wouters and produced by Cropus Interieur Vormen, the Clavicula sofa,  is developed from concrete-iron and 27 meters of white terry, cut into strips. The cotton ‘bandages’ are sewn together to create a single thread from which a carpet is knitted using a mammoth pair of knitting needles crafted from 2 x 2 meter broomsticks. The ‘carpet’ is upholstered around the concrete-iron frame.

Handcrafted, one-of-kind items are  key to contemporary decor. So use common techniques in new ways. Rethink knitted items. Enlarge it. Extend. Expand and magnify, the materials and tools to cover furniture and accessories in their own bespoke knits.

Collaborate with Nature

Co-operate and join forces with something. Thing being the operative word, as opposed to most collaborations which include someone. So  start something and team up with,  band together and pool resources to conspire with nature to create something extraordinary.

American artist, Hilary Berseth, organized honeybees architecturally. He constructed basic frameworks of wire and wax, allowing his honeybees to finish the job. Berseth’s armatures each go into a closed box in the spring, and then the respective colonies take over, filling out his templates with wax cells, and stuffing it with honey. His manipulation of natural processes resulted in beautiful, subtle effects with cacti-like formations, curvatures and elegant flowing lines.

Embark on a spurt of guerrilla gardenening

Steve Wheen alters potholes in east London using plants and miniatures to create natural sanctuaries in broken urban spaces.  Guerrilla gardenening seems to date back to a school group in the USA some years ago and since then there have been various other similar projects. Part art project, part labor of love, part experiment, part mission to highlight how bad roads are, Wheen came up with the project as part of his university course and created his blog to log his gardening activity and take some photographs, as a creative outlet.

So locate a pothole. Till some soil. And add dash of growing color to create your very own hole of happiness. Then lurk around to capture and appreciate the astonished responses.