Making and More Making…in Art!

I had a couple of my design students ask me about making something for themselves that was wearable. It has stuck in my mind for a couple weeks, and so this week my senior Art students are going to be taking on a new challenge, something we've never done before.

I stumbled upon a massive category of things on Thingiverse a couple weeks ago, and was inspired to present this challenge to my students:

"How can we use 3D technology to design our own jewelry?" 

There are literally thousands of things on Thingiverse tagged with jewelry. It's amazing! I immediately downloaded an amazing Mayan inspired Lotus flower pendant and printed it. It was a big hit!

"Can we 3D print jewelry Mr. Nichol?" YES! New project idea! Mayan lotus pendant in true purple. Thingiverse thing 672250. #make #buildtothink

A photo posted by Jared Nichol (@nickelcachers) on Feb 26, 2015 at 3:04pm PST

Design Process in Art
On Monday I'm going to ask students the over arching essential question, and then I'll ask students, "So, what do we need to know and what do we need to do?" And the design process begins!

First step is for students to discover and explore the challenge. They will seek out inspiration, develop a plan to get started, define who might be a possible audience of their work, seek out a team of people to work with (provided by me, or sought out by students), and then come back to share what they know

Will they each want to design something unique, yet cohesive with each other's pieces? Will their pieces and their processes be different from each other, but will come back periodically to get feedback from each other, and help each other? At this point, I just don't know. I know that I will need to engineer some pre set opportunities for feedback and consultation

Connecting with Experts
For those of you that have read some of my blog posts before, you'll know that connecting to experts is essential to the design process. I'm very fortunate to have my cousin help us. He's a student and very accomplished jewelry designer. I've already been inspired by his work, and am excited to have my students look at how they are going to share and display their work. It might be through a photoshoot with media students and student models, or it might be through a product photo shoot with some student designed props.

We are going to be using the hashtags #clhsdesign, #clhsmake, #make and #buildtothink during this project. Follow our progress, tweet us back, and join our journey!