I’ve been here in Detroit for five months now, and being in Detroit for five months means I’ve been spending a lot of time staring at rear ends of cars. Recently I started mentally critiquing them while waiting in traffic. The panel around the license plate might be set too deep, the silver bar above the trunk latch might be floating off in space, and my god why would you even take the tail lights that far in. (For the record, I think newer Audis and VWs get it mostly right).
It occurred to me just a few days ago that in a small way, my ceramics classes are making me more sensitive to the aesthetics of automobiles asses (and physical objects in general). That as one learns to speak in curves and negative space, weight and proportion, semi-solid physics and glaze chemistry, one becomes more aware of the designed world. I’ve never felt a perceptual shift quite like it, not from designing websites or apps, or even books. I mean, they were flat rectangles, after all; I could never turn them over in my hands in quite the same way.
Week 8: A majority of my pieces still haven’t been fired yet so I’m going to save the show and tell for next week. Here though, already in use, is the first one that was good enough to take home(!):
