As a designer, it’s important to continue learning and to challenge myself creatively by working in different mediums.  This past Saturday I took a Robot Sculptures workshop, led by Ann Smith, at Wellesley College and tried a medium I never thought I would.  Ann spent 15 mins or so explaining her experience with creating sculptures using electronic parts and showed some examples of her work.

To get started, she encouraged us to go through bins and bins of electronic parts, where some were organized by shape (circular objects etc.) and some by type (wires, screws etc.), and pick out pieces that catches our eye.  I have to say, it wasn’t easy for me!  I didn’t know where to begin.  I started going through the bins and chose objects I liked.  I gravitated towards circular objects, so I chose a ton of those.   I got a step closer to my concept when I found two metal pieces with ridges that looked like teeth.  I had an ah-ha moment, where I knew I definitely had to create some sort of animal!  After gathering some pieces, I went to my work station, looked at them and wondered if I can form anything out of those shapes.  After going back and forth for about 5 or 6 times to get more pieces, I looked at all the pieces I gathered and started piecing them together to try different combinations.  One piece stood out to me, because of its circular shape, its texture and blue color.  I knew I had to incorporate it somehow so it became a foundation piece.  I started stacking other pieces on top of this piece and still didn’t really have a concept.  I knew this was going to be very experimental and I would discover a concept as I worked with various combinations.

As I continued to keep stacking, I found the perfect black piece that was an egg shape that complemented the foundation piece very well.  I put this piece on top.  Then, I stacked a perfect white circle with a black border on top and thought, hey it looks like eyes on a head!  This is where the metal pieces for the teeth came in, a perfect fit!  It looked almost like a robotic bird and from there, now that I’ve came up with my concept through experimentation, the rest of the pieces came together.

Here’s the final result!

Thank you Ann for a great learning experience and Clara for organizing the workshop! You can read more about the workshop on the Wellesley College Applied Arts blog.  I *heart* Wellesley!