Her phone rings. SHE goes out. I get up and kick the ball hard, very hard. Ball hits the wall, then another wall and then the vase. Vase fall down, makes a sound. SHE returns to the room. I am collecting the broken pieces. The ball is stationary, lying in passage but in a different place, waiting, again.
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In a room, SHE is watching TV and I am working. I see a ball lying in passage. I am tempted to kick it hard. I get up. SHE stares at me. I go back to work. SHE continues with TV. Ball continues to be there. Waiting…
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A random thought:
A few days back, I came across a photograph of a teacher presenting a 500.00 Rs. note to a student for scoring 10 on 10 in Design subject.
To me 10 out of 10 does not make any sense, It is more like death, where there is no room for further improvement. Specially in design subjects, where no answers are perfect and everything can be improved.
Updated: Nov 13, 2015
I was the part of audience today at the conference / seminar / discussion (whatever you call it), which was organised at British Council, New Delhi and focused on Design Education. Poster below,
During the discussion many questions were raised by audience and panel as well. I have tried to pen down as many questions as I could remember and think were worthwhile.
1. What steps design educators take to ensure that they are well-informed and aware always?
2. Every year a different set of students enter design education, with the changed set, do educators also change?
3. ‘Sustainability’ is a big issue and concern for Design Institutes in India. What measures Design Institutes take to ensure that this pressure do not adversely affect the design education?
4. The fact that there is a paucity of Design Educators in India. How do institutes plan to address this issue?
5. Do Designers in profession or practice make better educators? If yes, what are institutes doing to ensure more participation from such in Design Education?
6. With globalization, what steps are institutes or educators taking to ensure International exposure to the students?
Design is highly subjective and it will be injustice to students and education to expect or make it objective by giving all the importance to the ‘end product’. It is also very important for us, educators, that we make students understand ‘subjectivity’ as a term. Students shall learn to reject their own ideas and look at them from an outsider’s perspective.
To be continued..
Large file sizes and higher loading time of presentations might be due to heavier images in the presentations. Now that most of the teaching and learning, product presentations, idea presentations are happening using Microsoft PowerPoint, it is must that we know how to make these presentations lighter in size. I assume most of us already are aware about compressing images in PowerPoint. Here I will talk about Libre Office, the free and open source productivity suite.
I am using Libre office, which is a free and open – source tool and it let’s me do most of the things that I would do using Microsoft Office.
Libre Office can be downloaded from here.
This post is about making your presentations lighter in Libre Office and thus making them easy to share over Internet.
In Microsoft Powerpoint, there is an option where you can “compress” images in the presentation and save the lighter version. But, Libre Office does the same thing in different way.
In Libre Office they call it “Presentation Minimizer”. This tool can be located under “Tools > Minimize Presentation”. A wizard opens (image below) which does much more than Microsoft PowerPoint’s “Compress” tool. It doesn’t only let you reduce and decide the quality of images, delete cropped areas, but it also provides you a summary where you can compare the size of presentation before and after compression.
Presentation Minimizer
Try it. 🙂
If you are an architect or architecture student, and have always being worried about your poor sketching skills, this post is about you, and me.
I have always wondered “Do architects really need to be good at sketching, to become a ‘good’ architect?” Again, it is debatable and subjective, what ‘good sketching’ means. I think, architectural sketching is way different from ‘fine-arts’ sketching. And, that is the reason it shall not be taught as fine-arts sketching.
Look at the following sketch by Frank Gehry, published in the book; Gehry Draws by MIT Press
I am sure, except Gehry nobody else would be able to make out what the sketch means. I have tried showing this sketch to many students and have asked them “What do they see in this sketch?” And of course I receive all sorts of answers ranging from “shoes” to “Bath tub”.
One can go on and on with examples.
Essentially architecture students have to deal with three type of sketches:
1. Sketches by observation: The ability to draw the sketch of a building, product or object by looking at it.
2. Memory Drawing: The ability to draw from memory. The subject has been seen / viewed / experienced in past.
3. Visualisation: This is most important and more and more effort in my view shall be put in this area. The ability of drawing something which is going to exist in future, something which has been conceived in designer’s mind or sketching of an idea which till now did not exist.
In schools, more stress is being given to observation drawing. I do not deny the essence of it, rather to be able to draw one must start with observation drawing. What I don’t agree to is the process of learning sketching stopping there itself. Eventually more and more emphasis shall be given to memory drawing and drawing by visualization, as architects have to spend their lives sketching something that doesn’t exist.
I have thought of a simple exercise for second year students:
Draw a view of a room which contains: a study table, a chair besides it, a book shelf, a window, pen stand, laptop /computer, ceiling fan and a two seat-er sofa.
Objects in above exercise may vary but one learns not only to draw lines of all sorts but also to draw different objects in proportion to each other.
OR, the submission of first three designs shall only be in the form of sketches and no scale drawings.
What do you think. Let me know.
[This is draft post, changes would be made to language and formatting but the subject will remain same.]
Designers often don’t find time for their own design identity. Same is with me. It took a lot of patience and will to achieve the minimalistic solution for my own identity: advanirajesh. I tried hard, not to over do it and here is the final outcome, let me know what you think.
This I think will be printed on recycled textured paper, still unsure about it. Will have to try out various options, before I call it DONE.