Brand New

Brand New

Is it true there is no such thing as a good idea? This brief is an exploration of that theory. 

There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages.
- Mark Twain

The idea that there are no new ideas is naturally a concerning one in the graphic design industry or in any creative industry when it comes down to it. In an age were the film industry is frequantly remaking old films (Footloose, The Italian Job and The Karate kid to name but a few) are we as designers just re-hashing old ideas. This can be true of anything - you can link almost everything back to something that existed before. For example, the vacuum cleaner was designed as an improvement of a carpet sweeper, and both came orginally from a simple twig broom. 

Orginally for this project I was going to dissprove everyone elses new design ideas. However, on contacting my fellow students nobody was keen to share their ideas with me (mis-placed fear I would steal them/pull them apart in the crit session) or hadnt come up with a new idea themselves. So I decided to look at the process of creating, how that has changed, and if advancements in techonolgy have made a difference. 

For the first part of my project I used Adobe Ideas in my ipad to draw out some of the most seminal inventions including birth control, the printing press, batterys and the microwave. I then arranged this together in a collage using Adobe Illustrator. This probably took around four hours.

 

I then went out and brought an embroidary wheel, some thread, a few needles and some calico fabric. My plan was to re-make the collage i'd created in Adobe Illustrator. I sketched out the images and then set about embroidaring them. It turns out that embroidary are hard. I spent around 18 hours doing this and I was making such slow progree. I decided to give in - there may not be any new ideas, only shifts in techonolgy, but sometimes these shifts can be benificial. The embroidary did look good, but not for the amount of time it was taking me.