Accessories Project: Week One

On Friday 02/01/08... Got the team going right away with their sketchbooks. It was not originally in the plan, but the more I thought about keeping this job-skills driven, it was essential to incorporate keeping a sketchbook because it is one of the most important professional habits of a working artist or designer. A sketchbook is a designer's diary/journal/sourcebook of ideas and is an invaluable tool of record, at least in my opinion. Week One's focus was to create a mood board, so today was spent getting the apprentices familar with the purpose and content of a mood board. I had them make a mini-board without really explaining too much at first. After the critique was held, I then fully explained and showed examples of boards. I think this was a successful approach because it created a working knowledge (an experience) for the apprentices to then base the content I was giving them off of. We ended the day with coming up with some ideas of what we wanted to produce (they decided belts, bags, and shoes) and who we wanted to produce it for (their peers, basically). I was not at all surpised they chose to design for themselves, I was expecting it, though really I would have preferred them to go for a challenge, like baby items, or things that maybe their teachers would be interested in. Maybe next time I wouldn't let the group choose their target consumer and rather I would challege them with a pre-determined market. That would also solve the age-old issue of "designing for yourself"- which I can see this project heading in- not saying that is bad, but not as challenging as it could be. It would also reflect the real-world job situation more accurately.
On Saturday 02/02/08... The mood baords produced today were of real quality and it proved to me that the apprentices were actually paying attention, absorbing and understanding all of yesterday's information. That was so exciting to see! One thing that really struck me, was shortly after returning from the break (about 2 hrs. left) the energy level for several of the apprentices became extremely low... some of them kind of looked like they had a late night last night maybe? Maybe they were losing interest? Not sure, I'll have to see if this becomes a trend of if it was that they were just becoming bored. I also was impressed with how well everyone worked with each other and how strangely comfortable they already were with one another.