Part 2: Ideas - Words to pictures - Making a moodboard

For this exercise we were asked to select a word from the same list as for the previous exercise and to make a moodboard.

I thought it would be interesting to use the word I had chosen before - kitchen. And so picking up from my earlier kitchen explorations I searched in magazines, catalogues and online for images and text.

I sorted them into categories and started to paste them into place. This in itself was an interesting process. Just by moving images and words around the board brought new ideas and thoughts about the topic. For example, by placing a laptop image, representing using the kitchen as a place of work, alongside an image of kitchen scales, made me think about home/work balance - so I pasted those words onto the scales.

Something that was evident was the amount of stereotyping in advertising - I know it's not necessarily a bad thing - it can be used to great effect and with great humour.

This was an enjoyable and playful activity - but also proved to be a useful tool.

Part 2: Ideas - turning words into pictures

For this exercise we were asked to select a word from a given list and to draw everything that comes to mind without concern for the accuracy of the drawing or the prettiness of it.

These quick drawings at the early stage of the design process are for ideas generation and not generally for others to see.

I chose to draw the word kitchen.

I started the first page of drawings too carefully I think - trying to make each one look right. But I managed to become less meticulous and drew quick ideas rather than accurate drawings, and started to group similar ideas together.

I had a look at some learning blogs of other students to see what they had done for this exercise.

It was very interesting to see similarities between theirs and mine, plus I discovered some good ideas to try. One student had done some textural rubbings from their kitchen - so I decided to have a go at that.

Using a kitchen material (cooking foil) I rubbed the surface of items such as cooking utensils, the textured surface of a non-stick baking tin and wall tiles which achieved some kind of a 3-dimensional effect.

One student described this exercise as creating a visual spider diagram - I think that's a good description.

I then went on to create a second page of kitchen drawings.

This time I think I was more successful. The drawings were made more quickly and simply as I moved about the page to record and expand on ideas as they occurred to me.