Stone Soup

(http://www.healthykidsideas.com/march-2010-beyond-stone-soup/)

On Tuesday’s Design 1 class, we participated in an activity called Stone Soup. Prior to the activity, Professor Housefield had a talk about the origin of Stone Soup, which is an old tale in children’s book that inspirits the idea of creating out of nothing but with collaborative work. Following the activity, everyone was asked to bring any objects that are recyclable for our Stone Soup’s materials.  

In the beginning of this activity, our group sat in a circle and our mentor Catalina asked us to throw out everything we had brought to the middle of the circle. There were varieties of items: plastic bottles, magazine, wrapping papers, cardboard boxes, fake moss, tapes, and acrylic paints. After gathered all the things we brought, we did a quick brainstorming. Then, we shared different ideas with each other on what can be created and started to combine each other’s ideas together. Finally, we agreed upon our first decision, which was to use cardboard boxes as the base of our design, and a few ideas to follow up with.

During the Stone Soup activity, my group members and I learned to respect different opinions from each individual and cooperate with others to achieve an ultimate goal. Furthermore, we also learned to created things with limited resources and spontaneous thoughts during the process of adding objects on to the cardboard little by little. In part of the design, we painted the paper plates by using acrylic paints to make the plates look like petals. Then, we wrinkled up pieces of wrapping paper in to balls to mimic the looks of pistils. At the same time, we learned not only to create but also to compromise for secondary materials when we lack the primary materials. For example, when we ran out of tape, we used iron wires as a bonding material.
Basically, in this activity, we learned how to cooperate, shared ideas and create. And most importantly, we learned how to find inspiration out of ourselves; we tried to find our inspiration from the recyclable materials.   Although putting ideas together at the beginning was tough, it was worth the time. As each of the team members’ ideas combined to gradually shaped out the final piece, we all felt a sense of accomplishment. With no rules and pressures, but with loads of ideas, we finally created a spectacular art piece consists of combined creativities from each individual.