Nature and Form
Rishiraj Ghosh
2nd year Industrial Design
National Institute of Design, Andhra Pradesh
‘Nature is the one touchstone all human beings relate and respond to’- Maggie Macnab
In this course, we tried to understand and observe nature, how they speak to us, how they work among themselves, how they do their daily chores, why they do, how they do and what they do. We studied how they communicate with us, what form they have and realised how nature can be the ultimate source of inspiration.
Nature has its own way of doing things, with which we have a subconscious connection, by knowing it or not, we respond to nature in a certain way, there are rarely times when some natural processes felt ‘wrong’ to us, because being a part of the nature, it always feels right, pleasing and comfortable, the way nature does it.
Keeping this faith in mind, I dived into the process of our course of Nature and Form.
The module started with analysing surrounding objects with a form perspective.
Then the task was to choose a creature from nature, which we will continue to study for Four weeks.
Running through the internet and some old kindergarten animal books, I finally kneeled before a creature, with which I was in touch, from my very childhood. And that is a fish, Barramundi( or we call it bhetki in Bengali).
It started with some primary research on the organism, its lifecycle, shape, habitats and movements.
one interesting thing I found, barramundis are protandrous, that is they all are born male and changes to female after few years of adulthood.
It then followed by a detailed drawing of the creature,
The next step was to try to communicate forms of the creature with 3d
in this paper model, I focussed more on the flexible aspect of the fish body.
The next phase was Abstraction.
I tried to eliminate details and chipping off the form into a minimalist one, where it would just contain the essence of the barramundi.
The goal was to achieve abstraction and also notice existing abstractions from surroundings.
And then followed by some 3d abstractions-
By this long way of abstraction, in pursuit of the essence of Barramundi, few attributes came up which are communicated through its form-
- Dynamic
- Streamline
- Speed
- Flexibility
- Tension
- Strength
- Feminine
The next job was to find the abstraction of barramundi from existing products. I looked into designs, architectures, art, culture etc. I was quite intrigued by the resemblance of the fish with airships and choppers, and how even dance forms and yoga imitate fishes.
This was followed by identifying and choosing a concept from the abstractions above and work on it in isolation.
I chose the concept of ‘STRETCHED’ because of the form barramundi creates when it jumps above the water with high tension and energetic motion.
I tried to break the concept into smaller attributes, which will make relating to the larger concept, easier.
constituent attributes of Stretched-
- Thrust
- Tension
- Potential
- Energy
- Attack
- Aggression
- Flowy
after this we tried to explore and ideate the concept, moving on from the creature to grasp a larger understanding of it. I made some 3d sculptures defining Stretched
In the final phase, we started organising all the abstractions, made by us and discovered them from the web. I made an affinity map to observe all the previous works done and fine form-function connect.
and our next job was to develop product concepts from the form pool.
After discussions and feedbacks, the vacuum cleaner concept was chosen and thus refined,
Reasons to choose this concept-
- Form inspired by Barramundi
- Function inspired from its aquatic respirations
- texture inspired from its scales
Refinements like vents and handle textures were added in the process of ideations.
while modelling it in 3d, I again went through a wonderful journey of ideations and abstractions.
even, I made an animated abstraction, to express the beautiful and seamless movement of the fish body.
Followed by further ideation and rendering, the final form of the product I reached,
I did a few brand visualisations and named this concept ‘Vakketki’, derived from vacuum and bhetki.
of the concept with context
Despite being open for improvements till the infinite future, I am pausing this journey here for now.
Thank You