Design Sojourn

A few years ago I was involved in design mentoring junior high school or lower secondary school students in the pilot run of the Many Ways of Seeing Project (MWOS).

Based on the work by Nelson Goodman, and a few others, this design project was developed to foster creative thinking and seeding design appreciation in teenagers. The project had hope to encourage a future generation of people who can understand and appreciate the efforts required to create a good design. The latest incarnation of this project can be found here.

Part of the initial stage was to go out and look at everyday objects differently and then to use them as inspiration for future designs. Students and mentors would go out with cameras and take pictures of objects in different scales and perspectives. These images then would be used for inspiration and showing the students how designs are created. To this day this is one of my favorite ways to get inspired to create original product designs. As a result I also feel a great adrenaline rush looking at pictures such as this “zoomified” set from Trazy’s Flickr set.

Here are some of my favorites from “zoomified”, of which I intentionally left out the descriptions so that it would not influence your thought and to allow your mind to generate your own conclusions.

I did a quick search and found a lot more images, again without descriptions:

Source

Getting inspired by looking at other product designs only encourages creation of similar looking work. But if you step out and look at the rest of the world in different perspectives you can find endless inspiration for the creation and pursuit of the original design idea. I hope this got you out of your chair and outside!

First image set via: The David Report

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