Collaborated Design Boards...

Having collaborated on our conveniently overlaypping ideas, myself and Lucy further developed our designs by literally combining them with a process of laying them over one another and tracing new contours from the two merged shapes. This was a simple and effective way to produce a lot of designs, and brought about some very interesting results from which I selected these collections...

My own design boards...

From my concept I particularly drew from the theories on the blinds ability or inability to 'create', and therefore produced various designs using a blindfolded drawing process, of which these boards display the selected ones...

Concept Pages...

My concept boards represent the flow of thought throughout the process of this design project; as well as communicating in a very basic form the way in which our garment would work and interact wihtin it's environment.

Theories...

These are a few pieces of writing I found particularly fascinating written by or about the work of Viktor Lowenfeld, who looked alot at the blind's creative capabilities.

Drawing blindly...Creating Crude Shapes

In order to create initial shapes from which to adapt to the body as refined designs, I experimented with drawing blindly; imagining a garment and drawing it loosely with both my left and right hand. It was a really successful way to produce naive and almost crude contours. Having selected those drawings with potential, I began to apply them to the figure, rotating or flipping the shape to discover further variations. As alot of the shapes were so naively formed, as garments they would require a gusset within the sideseam to realise the 3D form.

Here are a couple of examples of the designs I came out with from this process...

When it came to working on collaborated designs, myself and Lucy had similar ideas and processes that we had both used with our individual designs (Lucy had been looking into the drawings of blind people or the visually impaired and taking from them the naive notion of shape and proportion). Therefore we continued to experiment within these processes by studying several of the sketches from Lucy's book of blind drawings and then recreating them blindly from memory; alternating from left hand to right hand for increased crudity. This is our sketch sheet from which we then selected our favourites to continue to work with.

Utilising our selected shapes, we then enlarged them to the proportions of a half scale pattern piece. Using two fabrics with opposing qualities in order to realise the effect of either drape or rigidity on the garments form (Muslin and Neoprene), we whipped up some toiles. From these it appeared that the simpler the shape, the more effective the aesthetic...

Mine and Lucy's next move was to literally merge our own design ideas by overlaying them using Photoshop, and retracing varying new contours using both silhouettes. This produced great results as the balanced contrast between the styles of eachothers designs were really complimentary. This is one result for example...

Our job is now to create our final piece...