The Stone Soup

       Stone Soup is an old folk story. In the story, there were three soldiers passing by a small town who were very hungry. They asked the people of the town for some food, but they couldn’t get any because the people were all afraid of them. However, in the end, the three brilliant soldiers tricked the people of the town to bring out their hidden food supply by cooking a soup with stones and asking if any one could just add a little of anything to the soup to make it taste better.    

       In our Design class, we also had a chance to make our stone soups with our classmates. However, with the same concept but different from the actual stone soup in the story, our stone soups were “design objects”. On the day of the stone soup project, we were assigned to bring our own materials, by which we could create like scissors and wrinkled paper etc., without knowing what we were going to make. 

       That day, I worked with seven other people and mentor Tyler together as a group to make whatever we could create with the materials we brought. Every one of the group added a little part to the object to make the “soup” taste better and contributed their creativity. As a result, I think we did a wonderful job. 

       Recalling what we did on that day, I think of the three steps of creative process as Lauer says in his book Design Basics - “Thinking”, “Looking”, and “Doing”. 

-Thinking-

       At first, we all had no idea about what to make. We thought for a long time looking at the materials and each other’s face. However, after a while, one of the people got inspiration from an old green t-shirt brought by one of our group members. She suggested to the group that it would be a cool idea if we could use the t-shirt as a basis to make a three dimensional human figure. 

-Looking-

       With the ideas we had in mind, we then looked at the materials we brought to search for the best objects to apply to our ideas. The ice broke, and people quickly followed with ideas of how to make a head, how to make two arms and feet, and so on with the limited resources we were given. That was our successful beginning of the project. 

-Doing-

       The most interesting part was the “doing” part that we saw our thoughts and ideas transform into reality. We made a big head using a plastic bag filled with paper. We added knitting wool as hair and eyebrows and a robber band as the mouth. We covered the t-shirt over a box by which we carried the materials to make the body. Then we connected two pieces of cardboard to make legs and arms. We also made two hands with popsicle sticks attached to it. After all, we were all surprised by the result and took some pictures with it, the design object; or perhaps not “it” but “him”, who professor Housefield named “Dessie”.

       After all, I feel that I really gained a precious lesson from this assignment. I never knew that design could be making things without even knowing what to make.