| THE GOAL-ORIENTED DESIGNER:
The Path To Resonance by Warren Feld, Designer
“Vestment”, Warren Feld, 2004, Miyuki cubes, seed beads and delicas, Austrian crystals, with 14KT, gold filled, sterling silver, and antiqued copper chain, clasps and other findings, lampwork bead by Lori Greenberg Abstract: Jewelry Designers want to be successful. But things can get a little muddled when thinking about how to get there. Our teachers, our friends, our colleagues often disagree on this point, and tell us to look for conflicting measures of success. We can often lose sight of what we want to end up with. The Goal-Oriented Jewelry Designer has but one guiding star: To achieve Resonance. Everything else is secondary. We achieve Resonance by gaining a comfort in communicating about design. This comfort, or disciplinary fluency, translates into all our composing, constructing and manipulating choices. This is empowering. Our pieces resonate. We achieve success. THE GOAL-ORIENTED DESIGNER: The Path To Resonance Jewelry Designers want to be successful. But things can get a little muddled when thinking about how to get there. Where should they start? What should they learn first? What materials should they accumulate? What techniques should they start with? Should they focus on the process of designing jewelry? Or moreso on making jewelry? Or still yet, on achieving certain target measures, such as numbers of pieces made, or numbers of sales, or numbers of venues in which their jewelry is sold? Are there qualitative things which are important to accumulate, such as self-satisfaction or customer-satisfaction? Or style? Or recognition? Acceptance? Understanding? Our teachers, our friends, our colleagues often disagree on how to get there, and tell us to look for“Vestment”, Warren Feld, 2004, Miyuki cubes, seed beads and delicas, Austrian crystals, with 14KT, gold filled, sterling silver, and antiqued copper chain, clasps and other findings, lampwork bead by Lori Greenberg Abstract: Jewelry Designers want to be successful. But things can get a little muddled when thinking about how to get there. Our teachers, our friends, our colleagues often disagree on this point, and tell us to look for conflicting measures of success. We can often lose sight of what we want to end up with. The Goal-Oriented Jewelry Designer has but one guiding star: To achieve Resonance. Everything else is secondary. We achieve Resonance by gaining a comfort in communicating about design. This comfort, or disciplinary fluency, translates into all our composing, constructing and manipulating choices. This is empowering. Our pieces resonate. We achieve success. THE GOAL-ORIENTED DESIGNER: The Path To Resonance Jewelry Designers want to be successful. But things can get a little muddled when thinking about how to get there. Where should they start? What should they learn first? What materials should they accumulate? What techniques should they start with? Should they focus on the process of designing jewelry? Or moreso on making jewelry? Or still yet, on achieving certain target measures, such as numbers of pieces made, or numbers of sales, or numbers of venues in which their jewelry is sold? Are there qualitative things which are important to accumulate, such as self-satisfaction or customer-satisfaction? Or style? Or recognition? Acceptance? Understanding? Our teachers, our friends, our colleagues often disagree on how to get there, and tell us to look for, what turn out to be in effect, conflicting measures of success. We can often lose sight of what we want to end up with. We get a lot of contradictory advice. How should we organize our creative work and our time? How should we select materials and techniques? How do we know when our piece is finished? How should we anticipate our client’s desires? How should we showcase our jewelry? How should we be judged and evaluated? We need to perform, we want to perform authentically, but how – how should we perform as a jewelry designer? The search for answers can be very frustrating, confusing, even demoralizing. But it shouldn’t be. Every jewelry designer should have but one guiding star – Resonance. If our jewelry does not have some degree of resonance, we keep working on it. If the process of creative exploration and design does not lead us in the direction of resonance, we change it. If the results we achieve – numbers of pieces made and numbers of pieces sold – is not synced tightly with resonance, we cannot call ourselves designers. The Goal-Oriented Jewelry Designer specifies those goals about performance which will lead to one primary outcome: To achieve Resonance. Everything else is secondary. Design elements are selected and applied with that idea of Resonance in mind. Principles of Composition, Construction and Manipulation are applied with that idea of Resonance in mind, with extra special attention paid to the Principle of Parsimony – knowing when enough is enough. People may approach the performance tasks in varied ways. For some this means getting very detailed on pathways, activities, and objectives. For others, they let the process of design emerge and see where it takes them. Whatever approach they take in their creative process, for all designers, a focus on one outcome – Resonance – frees them up to think through design without encumbrance. This singular focus becomes a framework within which to question everything and try to make sense of everything. Make sense of what the materials and techniques can allow them to do, and what they cannot. Make sense of what understandings other people – clients, sellers, buyers, students, colleagues, teachers – will bring to the situation, when exploring and evaluating their work. Make sense of why some things inspire you, and other things do not. Make sense of why you are a jewelry designer designing jewelry. Make sense of the fluency of your artistic expression, what works, how it works, why it works. We achieve Resonance by gaining a comfort and ease in communicating about design. This comfort and ease, or disciplinary fluency, has to do with how we translate our inspirations and aspirations into all our compositional, constructive and manipulative choices. It is empowering. Our pieces resonate. We achieve success. Resonance, communication, success, fluency – these are all words that stand in place for an intimacy between the designer and the materials, the designer and the techniques, the designer and inspiration. They reflect the designer’s aspirations. They reflect the shared understandings of everyone the designer’s jewelry is expected to touch. They reflect the designer’s managerial prowess in bringing all these things together. Resonance and disciplinary fluency result from a well-managed jewelry design process [3]. This process of creativity involves artist, audience and context. It is very interactional. Transactional. Integrative. Contingent. For the artist, this process functions on several, coordinated levels, including…
CONTEMPLATION: An Intimacy with Materials and Techniques Contemplation is a mystical theology. Beads have a mystique to them. You stare at a bead, and, ask what it is. You put some thread on a needle, then the bead on the needle, and ask what to do. You stitch a few beads together, and wonder what will become of this. You create a necklace, and, ask how it will be worn. And you stare at each bead again, and, think where do all these feelings welling up within you come from – curiosity, beauty, peace and calm, reflection, satisfaction, magic, appeal, a sensuousness and sexuality. Your brain and eye enter into this fantastic dance, a fugue of focusing, refocusing, gauging and re-gauging light, color, shadow, a shadow’s shadow, harmony, and discord. You don’t just bead and make jewelry. There’s a lot involved here. You have to buy (or fabricate) beads and findings and stringing materials, organize them, buy some extra parts, think about them, create with them, live with some failed creations, and go from there. If there wasn’t something special about how our materials translate light into color, shade and shadow, then jewelry making would simply be work. But it’s not. You have to put one piece next to another…and then another. And when you put two beads next to each other, or one on top of the other, you’re doing God’s work. There’s nothing as spectacular as painting and sculpting with light. This bead before you — why is it so enticing? Why do you beg it to let you be addicted? An object with a hole. How ridiculous its power. Some curving, some faceting, some coloration, some crevicing or texturing, some shadow, some bending of light. That’s all it is. Yet you’re drawn to it in a slap-silly sort of way. When you arrange many beads, the excitement explodes geometrically within your being. Two beads together are so much more than one. Four beads so much more than two. A hundred beads so much more than twenty-five times four. The pleasure is uncontainable. You feel so powerful. Creative. You can make more of what you have than with what you started. You need to select a method or strategy for arranging your beads. There are so many choices. Your organization should be appealing. It must enhance the power the bead has for you, then transcend as a power the bead has for others. It must be architecturally correct because this architecture determines the wear, drape and flow where the jewelry meets the person at the boundary between bead and body. And this assembling — another gift. String through the hole, pull, tug, align, and string through the hole, pull, tug, align, and string through the hole, pull, tug, align, and string through the hole, pull, tug, align. So meditative. Calming. How could beads be so stress-relieving, other-worldly-visiting, and creative-exciting at the same time? Contemplation. To contemplate the bead is to enter the deep reaches of your mind where emotion is one with geometry, and geometry is one with art, and art is one with physics, and beads are one with self. Designing jewelry is an authentic performance task. This involves a profound intimacy with the materials (and techniques) the artist relies on. This intimacy means understanding how to select them, how to leverage their strengths and minimize their weaknesses, and how to manage their ability to enhance or impede resonance. INSPIRATION: Becoming One with What Inspires You Inspirations are sacred revelations you want to share through art and design. The word inspiration comes from the Latin roots meaning “to breathe into.” But before you can breathe your inspiration into your jewelry, you need to become one with it. There are these wonderfully exciting, sensually terrific, incredibly fulfilling things that you find as you try to imagine the jewelry you will create. They come from many sources: ideas, nature, images, people, behaviors. They might be realistic or abstract. They may be the particular color or pattern or texture or the way the light hits it and casts a shadow. They may be a need for order over chaos. They may be points of view. They may flow from some inner imagination. For some reason, these inspirations take on a divine, sacred revelation for you – so meaningful that you want to incorporate them somehow into what you do. A fire in your soul. You want to translate these inspirations into colors, shapes, lines, patterns and textures. You want to impose an organization on them. You want to recapture their energy and power they have had over you. You feel compelled to bring these feelings into ideas. There are many challenges to inspiration. That which we call “inspiring” can often be somewhat fuzzy. It might be a feeling. It might be a piece of an idea, or a small spot on an image. You might feel inspired, but, cannot put the What or the Why into words or images. On the surface, it may seem important to you, but unimportant to others. You the artist may not feel in control of the inspiration in that it seems like it is something that is evoked, not necessarily directed, by you. When inspired, artists perceive new possibilities that transcend that which is ordinary around them. Too often, the artist feels passive in this process. This transcendence does not feel like a willfully generated idea. However, it needs to be. The successful artist – one who eventually can achieve a level of resonance – is one who is not only inspired by, but also inspired to. This all requires a great deal of metacognitive self-awareness. The artist must be able to perceive the intrinsic value of the inspiring object, and how to extend this value in design, where the piece of jewelry becomes its expression. Inspiration is motivating. Inspiration is not the source of creativity; creativity does not come from it. Inspiration, instead, should be viewed as a motivational response to creativity. It motivates the artist, through jewelry and its design, to connect this inspiration with others. It serves as a mediator between the self and the anticipated shared understandings of others. The jewelry encapsulates the artist’s ability to make this connection. When the connection is well-made, resonance follows. But finding inspirations is not only personal, but more importantly, it is an effort to influence others. It is an act of translating the emotions which resonate in you into some object of art which, in turn, will inspire and resonate with others. How does the inspiration occur to you, and how do you anticipate how this inspiration might occur to others? Too often we lose sight of the importance of inspiration to the authentic performance task of creating jewelry. We operate with the belief that anyone can be inspired by anything. There’s nothing more to it. Moreover, inspiration gets downplayed when put next to the discussion of the effort of making jewelry itself. But it should not. Inspiration is not less important than perspiration. It plays an equal role in the creative process. The artist’s clarity about why something is inspiring, and why this inspiration motivates the artist to respond, will be critical for achieving success, that is resonance. ASPIRATION: Translating Creativity into A Technical Product Design Aspiration motivates the artist to actualize inspiration. Aspiration is where the artist translates inspiration into a completed product design. The artist begins to control and regulate what happens next. This involves selecting Design Elements[1] and clustering them to formulate meaningful expressions. The artist then applies Principles of Composition, Construction and Manipulation[2] for organizing and arranging things into a more complete whole with more elaborated expressions. The greater value the artist places on resonance, the stronger the aspiration will be to achieve it. Aspiration is future-oriented. It requires a stick-to-it-ness. The artist must be sufficiently motivated to invest the time, energy and money into designing and making the jewelry that will not necessarily be finished, displayed or sold right away. It may require some additional learning and skills-development time. The artist may need to find a level of creativity within, and discover the kinds of skills, techniques and insights necessary for bringing this creativity to the aspired task at hand. Aspiration requires the calculus: Is it worth it? It adds a level of risk to the project. It forces the artist to pay attention to the world around her or him. This world presents dynamic clues – what I discuss below as shared understandings – about opportunities, constraints, risks, contingencies, consequences, strategies and goals, and likely successes. For some artists, motivation primarily is seen as instinctual. Think of seat-of-the-pants. Emergent, not controlled. A search for harmony, balance, rhythm, unity as something that feels right and looks right and seems right with the universe. Expressive, yes. Imaginative, yes. But not necessarily resonant. Achieving resonance, however, is, for the most part, more than instinctual. It has some deliberate quality to it. It is communicative. It requires a purposeful act on the part of the artist. It is a different type of motivation — intentional. The artist might want to convey a specific emotion. Or advocate for some change. Or illustrate a point of view. The artist may want to entertain or teach. Heal. Attract mates. Propagandize. Where a jewelry’s design is not reflective of an artist’s intent, there can be no resonance. ANTICIPATION: Shared Understandings[4] Shared understandings dictate opportunities, contingencies and constraints. The question of whether the audience correctly infers the presence of the artist’s inspiration, and the sense of how the artist’s hand comes into play within the design, remains. The answer revolves around a dynamic interaction between artist and audience, as they anticipate understandings they share, and ones they do not. Shared understandings should be enduring, transferable, big ideas at the heart of what we think of as good jewelry design. These shared understandings are things which spark meaningful connections between designer and materials, designer and techniques, and designer and client. We need, however, to recognize that the idea of understanding is very multidimensional and complicated. Understanding is not one achievement, but more the result of several loosely organized choices. Understanding is revealed through performance and evidence. Jewelry designers must perform effectively with knowledge, insight, wisdom and skill to convince us – the world at large and the client in particular — that they really understand what design is all about. This involves a big interpersonal component where the artist introduces their jewelry to a wider audience and subjects it to psychological, social, cultural, and economic assessment. Understanding is more than knowledge. The designer may be able to articulate what needs to be done to achieve something labeled good jewelry design, but, may not know how to apply it. Understanding is more than interpretation. The designer may be able to explain how a piece was constructed and conformed to ideas about good jewelry design, but this does not necessarily account for the significance of the results. Understanding is more than applying principles of construction. It is more than simply organizing a set of design elements into an arrangement. The designer must match knowledge and interpretation about good jewelry design to the context. Application is a context-dependent skill. Understanding is more than perspective. The designer works within a myriad of expectations and points of view about good jewelry design. The designer must dispassionately anticipate these various perspectives about design, and, bring some constructed point of view and knowledge of implications to bear within the design and design process. We do not design in a vacuum. The designer must have the ability to empathize with individuals and grasp their individual and group cultures. If selling their jewelry, the designer must have the ability to empathize with small and larger markets, as well. Empathy is not sympathy. Empathy is where we can feel what others feel, and see what others see. Last, understanding is self-knowledge, as well. The designer should have the self-knowledge, wisdom and insights to know how their own patterns of thought may inform, as well as prejudice, their understandings of good jewelry design. How the jewelry designer begins the process of creating a piece of jewelry is very revealing about the potential for success, and ultimately achieving a level of resonance. The designer should always begin the process by articulating the essential shared understandings against which their work will be evaluated and judged. For now, let’s refer to this as Backwards Design[5]. The designer starts with questions about assessment, and then allows this understanding to influence all other choices going forward. Some essential shared understandings for good jewelry design, I would posit, might include the following:
SPECIFICATION: Goal-Orientation It’s not just what you do…it’s how you get there. Jewelry designers are too quick to focus on the outcome, and too lax to focus on the process. It’s always things like getting it done. Getting it to the client on deadline. Ending up with something concrete to show someone. Too much concentration on outcome can lead to taking shortcuts. Shortsightedness. Inflexibility. A misunderstanding, perhaps illusion about, whether the piece is finished and successful. Artists more appropriately should focus on goals. Artists who are focused on goals tend to embrace process. It’s about all the smart choices regarding composition, construction and manipulation you made at each increment along the way. By specifying goals, the artist is encouraged to find connections, and be connected to and aware of shared understandings and their impact on perceived success. When problems arise, a goal-oriented focus allows the artist to be flexible and problem solve. The artist is present from contemplation to inspiration and through to aspiration, anticipation, specification and application. The goal-orientation prevents the artist from becoming lost or paralyzed with inaction. The jewelry artist pursues several goals at once. The jewelry should be both appealing and functional. It should evoke emotion, elicit response, and resonate. The piece should show both unity and variety. The piece should create opinions, validate status, and reconfirm a cultural and social identify. The piece should be reflective and communicative. It should be pleasurable to the maker, the wearer and the viewer alike. When specifying goals, it is important to remember that not all goals are alike. The goals I am discussing here are the essential elements related to effective performance. That effective performance results in a finished and successful piece of jewelry reflective of the artist’s hand and which resonates among a varied set of audiences. The artist needs to set goals which clarify what results need to be accomplished by the time any piece of jewelry is finished and showcased. Goals provide perspective. They are there to prevent the artist from achieving anything less than resonance. These goals relate to generating deep understandings and competence at performance. They are not results-specific per se; they are overarching. They serve as sign-posts to point to and highlight what jewelry designers need to engage with when thinking through and implementing design. The jewelry designer specifies goals as standards of professional performance, such as…
Within each generalized performance goal, the designer can further identify particular tasks, knowledges and skills required in order to accomplish them. Often, with too many choices about what to do, what to include, and how to proceed, priorities and timeframes will need to be set, as well. Resonance is more easily achieved when the designer approaches design as a process, an understanding of the myriad sets and levels of choices as made within a coherent system of creative thinking and activity, and with clear performance goals to guide the way. APPLICATION: Unity, Emotions, Resonance Think like an assessor[6]…find evidence related to desired results. What is the evidence we need to know for determining when a piece is finished and successful? What clear and appropriate criteria specify what we should look at? There are different opinions in craft, art and design about what are the most revealing and important aspects of the work, and which every authentic jewelry design performance must meet. The traditional criteria used in the art world are that the designer should achieve unity, variety and evoke emotions. These, I feel, may work well when applied to paintings or sculpture, but they are insufficient measures of success when applied to jewelry. Jewelry involves the creation of objects where both artistic appeal as well as practical considerations of use are essential. The artistry of jewelry cannot be distinguished from that jewelry as it is worn, and the context within which it is worn. So, when referencing any jewelry’s design, I prefer to use criteria of parsimony and resonance, instead. We know when a piece is finished and successful when the choices of the artist are deemed parsimonious, and the various audiences perceive the piece to resonate. Parsimony vs. Unity/Variety In art, the traditional measure of completion and success is a feeling or sense of “Unity.” Unity signifies how everything feels all right. All the Design Elements used, and how they were coordinated and placed, are very coherent, clear, balanced, harmonious and satisfying. I think the idea of unity begins to get at the place we want to end up. But this concept is not concrete enough for me. What bothers me the most is that you can have unity, but the piece still be seen as boring when there is no variety. Criteria provided from the art perspective recognizes this. But somehow tempering unity with variety starts to add some ambiguity to our measurements of finish and success. This ambiguity is unacceptable as a principled outcome of jewelry construction. Another concern I have, is that you can have unity with variety, but, from the art perspective, these assessments rely too much on universal, objective perceptions of design elements and their attributes (for example, the use of color schemes). Resonance is not about picking the correct color scheme. It is more about how that color scheme is used, manipulated, leveraged or violated within the piece. We must not leave the artist, the wearer, and the situation out of the equation. We must not minimize the artist’s hand – the artist’s intent, thinking, strategizing, arranging, pushing the boundaries, even violating the universal, objective rules. Jewelry creation usually demands a series of judgment calls and tradeoffs. Tradeoffs between aesthetics and functionality. Tradeoffs between artist goals and audience understandings and expectations. Tradeoffs between a full palette of colors-shapes-textures and a very limited one. Any measure of completeness and success needs to result from the forced choice decisions of the artist. It needs to account for the significance of the results, not just the organization of them. It needs to explain the Why, not just the What. For me, the more appropriate concept here is Parsimony. Parsimony is when you know enough is enough. When the finished and successful piece is parsimonious, the relationship of all the Design Elements and their expressed attributes will be so strong, that to add or remove any one thing would diminish, not just the design, but rather the significance of the design. Parsimony is sometimes referred to in art and design as Economy, but the idea of economy is reserved for the visual effects. The designer needs to be able to decide when enough is enough. For jewelry designers, we want that economy or parsimony to apply to functional and situational effects, as well.
Resonance vs. Evoking Emotions Finished and successful jewelry should not only evoke emotions, but, should resonate. Resonance is something more than emotion. It is some kind of additional energy we see, feel and otherwise experience. Emotion is very reactive. Resonance is intuitive, involving, identifying. Resonance is an empathetic response where artist and audience realize a shared (or contradictory) understanding without losing sight of whose views and feelings belong to whom. Resonance results from how the artist controls light, shadow, and their characteristics of warmth and cold, receding and approaching, bright and dull, light and dark. Resonance results from how the artist leverages the strengths of materials and techniques and minimizes their weaknesses. Resonance results from social, cultural and situational cues. Resonance results from how the artist takes us to the edge of universal, objective understandings, and pushes us every so slightly, but not too, too far, beyond that edge.
FLUENCY[7] AND EMPOWERMENT: Managing Choices In Expression Empowerment is about successfully making choices. These are choices about expressing one’s intent through art and design. These choices could be as simple as whether to follow through on some inspiration. They might involve selection of elements of design, or principled arrangements of beads, forms and components. The designer will make choices about how to draw someone’s attention to the piece, or, present the piece to a larger audience. The designer will make choices between aesthetics and functionality. She or he may decide to submit the piece to a magazine or contest. She or he may want to sell the piece and market it. The designer will make choices about how a piece might be worn, or who might wear it, or when it might be worn, in what context. The fluent designer will be adept at making these choices. The better designer is able to bring a high level of coherence and consistency to the process of managing all this – intent, shared understandings, knowledge and skills, evaluative review, and reflection and adjustment. This is called “fluency in design”. Fluency is the ability of the designer to select and connect Design Elements smoothly, in visually and functionally and situationally appropriate ways with understanding. The idea of understanding is broadly defined, to include the artist’s personal goals for expression, as well as the expectations of all the audiences – the wearer, the viewer, the buyer, the seller, the student, the master. The better designer achieves a level of disciplinary literacy where fluency becomes automatic, accurate, and rapidly applied. The better, more fluent jewelry designer is able to anticipate how others will come to understand these mechanisms and the implications for applying them in one way or another. For example, the better and more fluent designer would be able to select and combine design elements to appropriately differentiate jewelry that would best be worn at work, and jewelry that would best be worn, say, when someone was going to a night club for dancing and socializing. Lastly, fluency means that the designer has also been taught to look for, anticipate and incorporate context clues. Design does not occur in a vacuum. It has implications which become realized in a context. That context might be historical, cultural or situational.
RUBRIC[8] AS THINKING ROUTINE Designers need a simple map to all these ideas about literacy and fluency – something they can easily review and determine where their strengths and weaknesses are as they gain proficiency and fluency in design. One type of map is a rubric. A rubric is a table of criteria used to rate and rank understanding and performance. A rubric answers the question by what criteria performance should be judged. The rubric provides insightful clues for the kinds of evidence we need to make such assessments. The rubric helps us distinguish degrees of performance, from the sophisticated to the naïve. The rubric encapsulates what an authentic jewelry design performance would look like. Such a rubric is presented below for the artist to use as a thinking routine.[9] Here I have used one rubric to represent both (1) understanding and (2) performance, but, I could have easily created two separate rubrics toward this end. In this rubric table below, the rows represent contemplation, inspiration, aspiration, anticipation, application, and fluency and empowerment. The columns represent the degrees of understanding and performance along a continuum, from proficient on one end to not there yet on the other. By way of example, I use the rubric to assess my performance with a piece I created called Vestment (Feld, 2004).
The Rubric…
RUBRIC: How Proficient Am I In Achieving Resonance? The piece…
_________________________________________________________ WARREN FELD, Jewelry Designer 615-292-0610
For Warren Feld, Jewelry Designer, (www.warrenfeldjewelry.com), beading and jewelry making have been wonderful adventures. These adventures have taken Warren from the basics of bead stringing and bead weaving, to wire working and silver smithing, and onward to more complex jewelry designs which build on the strengths of a full range of technical skills and experiences. Warren leads a group of instructors at Be Dazzled Beads (www.bedazzledbeads.com). He teaches many of the bead-weaving, bead-stringing, jewelry design and business-oriented courses. He works with people just getting started with beading and jewelry making, as well as those with more experience. His pieces have appeared in beading and jewelry magazines and books. One piece is in the Swarovski museum in Innsbruck, Austria. He is probably best known for creating the international The Ugly Necklace Contest, where good jewelry designers attempt to overcome our pre-wired brains’ fear response for resisting anything Ugly. _________________________________________________________ FOOTNOTES [2] Feld, Warren. “Jewelry Design Principles: Composing, Constructing, Manipulating,” 4/25/2018 [3] Feld, Warren. “Jewelry Design: A Managed Process,” Klimt02, 2/2/18. https://klimt02.net/forum/articles/jewelry-design-managed-process-warren-feld [4]Shared Understandings. In another graduate education class, the major text reviewed the differences between understanding and knowledge. The question was how to teach understanding. Worth the read to gain many insights about how to structure teaching to get sufficient understanding to enrich learning. [8]Rubrics. |
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Archive for the ‘Learn To Bead’ Category
How-To advice and instructions; special insights for making jewelry
The Goal-Oriented Designer: The Path To Resonance
Posted by learntobead on May 18, 2018
Posted in Art or Craft?, art theory, beads, beadwork, design management, design theory, jewelry design, jewelry making, Learn To Bead, Stitch 'n Bitch | Tagged: art theory, beading, design process management, design theory, jewelry, jewelry design, resonance | Leave a Comment »
Jewelry Design Principles: Composing, Constructing, Manipulating
Posted by learntobead on April 24, 2018
JEWELRY DESIGN PRINCIPLES:
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Abstract:
It is not happenstance that some pieces of jewelry draw your attention, and others do not. It is the result of an artist fluent in design. That fluency begins with selecting Design Elements, but it comes to full fruition with the application of Principles of Composition, Construction and Manipulation. This is where the artist flourishes, shows a recognition of shared understandings about good design, and makes that cluster of jewelry design choices resulting in a piece that is seen as both finished and successful. These Principles represent different organizing schemes the artist might resort to. Jewelry artists translate these Principles a little differently than painters or sculptors, in that jewelry presents different demands and expectations on the artist. The better artist/designer achieves a level of disciplinary literacy – selecting Design Elements and applying Principles — where fluency becomes automatic, accurate, and rapidly applied.
JEWELRY DESIGN PRINCIPLES:
COMPOSING, CONSTRUCTING, MANIPULATING
Some pieces of jewelry draw your attention. Others do not.
This is not a matter of happenstance. It is the result of an artist fluent in design. That fluency begins with the selection of Design Elements – the smallest meaningful units of design. But it comes to full fulfillment with the application and manipulation of Principles of Composition, Construction and Manipulation. These “organizing schemes” reflect what the individual artist wants to express, and how the individual artist anticipates how others will understand and respond to this expression.
Design Elements, which I have discussed in an earlier article [1], are like building blocks and function a bit like the vowel and consonant letters of the alphabet. They have form. They have meaning. They can be assembled into different arrangements which extend their meaning and usefulness in expression. Examples: color, shape, texture, point/line/plane, movement, dimensionality, and the like. Each Design Element has a set of expressive attributes. Color can be expressed as a color scheme, or as proportions, or as simultaneity effects. Shape can be geometric or dimensional or recognizable or symbolic. And so forth.
Design Elements function like a vocabulary. They represent universally accepted expressive content. Visualize the analogy between design elements and vocabulary. Picture a “t”, perhaps combined with an “h”, and then with an “e”. Or, picture the difficulty in trying to combine a “th” with a “z”. Or, still yet, picture how the “c” in “cat” is pronounced differently than the “c” in “sense”, yet still recognized as a “c”. In similar ways, the artist might decide to use the design elements of “color” and “line,” and combine them to yield another design element of “movement.” Literacy begins with the ability to decode, and this ability centers on the selection and use of Design Elements.
Principles of Composition, Construction and Manipulation function more like a grammar. Given the Design Elements selected by the artist, Principles represent organizing strategies to which the artist resorts when attempting to achieve a piece that will be seen as both “finished” and “successful”, both by the artist, as well as that artist’s audience. The artist might arrange several design elements and their expressive attributes to yield a higher level organizing principle. For example, the artist might combine color(intensity)+line(direction)+
shape( geometry)+placement(symmetry)+balance+material” to yield a sense of “rhythm.”
To continue our analogy with vocabulary, grammar and literacy, picture our “t”, “h” and “e” put together to form a full word like ”thesaurus”, then expanded into an idea, like “teachers like to use a thesaurus”, and further expressed, in anticipation of a response, to something like “but students hate when the teacher asks them to use a thesaurus.”
Literacy goes beyond decoding; it includes a fluency in how the Design Elements are organized to evoke an emotional response. This involves an intuitive understanding of Principles of Composition, Construction and Manipulation, and how to apply them. While Design Elements are selected primarily based on shared, more universal understandings of what they express, often, Principles are applied in ways more reflective of artist’s hand, and its subjective expression.
The successful jewelry designer has developed a fluency in the Disciplinary Literacy of jewelry design. Fluency is the ability of the designer to select and connect Design Elements smoothly, in visually and functionally and situationally appropriate ways with understanding. The idea of understanding is broadly defined, to include the artist’s personal goals for expression, as well as the expectations of all the audiences – the wearer, the viewer, the buyer, the seller, the student, the master. The better designer achieves a level of disciplinary literacy where fluency becomes automatic, accurate, and rapidly applied.
This Disciplinary Literacy in jewelry design has a structure all its own. There are four main components to it:
1) Vocabulary: Design Elements As The Basis Of Composition
2) Grammar: Principles of Composition, Construction and Manipulation
3) Strategy: Project Management[2]
4) Context/Culture: Shared Understandings[3]
This article focuses on the second component – Principles.
What Are Principles of Composition, Construction and Manipulation?
Jewelry Design is the strategic application of basic principles of organization and expression to achieve a piece which evokes emotion, resonates, and is appealing as it is worn. Traditionally the art and design worlds referred to these as “Principles of Composition.” Often artists and designers get tripped up on the word Principles, and jewelry designers get a bit confused or frustrated with the word Composition.
The use of the word “Principles” in art and design can be somewhat confusing. These Principles do not represent a set of universal, dependable and repeatable standards to strive for, which we might assume, at first.
A different meaning about “Principles” applies here. A Principle is an organizing scheme as a way to combine design elements into a more pleasing whole composition. The design elements include things which are visual effects; but, for jewelry designers, they also include things which functional, as well as things which are more social, psychological, cultural and situational. Principles inform artists in their expressive, authentic performances. Every artist is expected to apply these Principles, but only in ways the artist chooses. There might be better or worse ways to apply them, but no right or wrong ways.
Another aspect of confusion is the use of the word “Composition”. I’ve expanded the phrase, though somewhat awkwardly, to “Principles of Composition, Construction and Manipulation.” The traditional art and design idea of “composition” covers two very different types of jewelry design literacy skills under a single label, namely decoding (Design Elements) and fluency (Principles). The better jewelry designer needs to learn and apply both aspects of disciplinary literacy, but each involves different ways of thinking. As a teacher, both require different sets of strategies for training and educating jewelry designers.
Jewelry designers, by the nature of jewelry, have to deal equally with functional aspects of design, not just artistic composition. Traditional Principles of Composition need to be re-oriented for the jewelry artist to be more sensitive to the more architectural aspects of design. Design choices are also best understood at the boundary between the art of design and the body it adorns.
Limited to the idea of composition, jewelry might be judged successful as “art”, as if it was displayed on a mannequin or easel. But jewelry, in reality, can only be judged as a constructive, manipulated result situated at the boundary between art and body; that is, jewelry can only be judged as “art as it is worn.”
In this article, I focus on Principles of Composition, Construction and Manipulation. The Principles, as organizing schemes, are intertwined, and, the use of one will often depend on another. Movement might be achieved by the placement of lines, which might also establish a rhythm. Such placement of lines might be symmetrically balanced, with line thinness and thickness statistically distributed evenly through the piece.
These organizing and arranging schemes might include:
- the Positioning and/or Ordering of things (white/black/white/black vs. black/black/black/white)
- the Volume or Area the piece takes up (one row of beads vs. 3 rows of beads)
- the Scale and Size of the pieces (6mm 6mm 6mm vs. 10mm 10mm 10mm)
- the Colors, Textures and Patterns of individual pieces, and/or sets or groupings of pieces (matte/matte/shiny/matte/matte vs. shiny/shiny/matte/shiny/shiny)
- the Forms (identifiable sets of pieces, highly integrated)
- the Materials
- the interplay of Light, Dark, Shadow, Reflection and Refraction (dark/dark/transparent/dark/dark vs. transparent/transparent/dark/transparent/transparent)
- the clasp assembly and other supporting systems
Some of these design Principles are applied in similar ways to all art forms, such as painting and sculpture, no matter what the medium.
For other Principles, jewelry creates its own challenges, because all jewelry places some different demands and expectations on the artist than painting or sculpture does. Jewelry…
- functions in a 3-dimensional space, particularly sensitive to position, volume and scale
- must stand on its own as an object of art
- but must also exist as an object of art which interacts with the body, movement, personality, and quirks of the wearer
- serves many purposes, some aesthetic, some functional, some social, cultural or situational
- has a much more integrated and inter-dependent relationship of the center piece, strap, fringe, edge, bail and surface embellishment – an arrangement that traditional Art theory rejects. Art sees the center piece as the “art”, and these other things as supporting, not artistic details, like a frame for a painting or a pedestal for a sculpture.
Good jewelry should exude an energy. It should resonate. This energy results from how the artist applies these Principles to compose with, construct and manipulate light and shadow, and their characteristics of warmth and cold, receding and approaching, bright and dull, light and dark. The artist’s piece is judged on whether the resulting piece feels coherent, organized, controlled, and strategically designed, again, as the jewelry is worn. Successful application of these Principles results in a piece which feels finished and successful.
The Principles include,
- Rhythm
- Pointers
- Linear and Planar Relationships
- Interest
- Statistical Distribution
- Balance
- Forms, Their Proportions, Distributions and Dimensionality
- Temporal Extension: Time and Place
- Physical Extension: Functionality
- Parsimony (something similar to, but a little beyond harmony and unity)
TABLE OF PRINCIPLES
| Principles of Composition, Construction, and Manipulation
(Organizing Schemes) |
What the Principle is About | How Principle Might Get Expressed as Organizing Schema |
|
This is how the piece leads the viewer through sequences of steps. It is a measure of the degree the piece engages the viewer’s eye.
There is a continuance, a flow or a feeling of movement from one place of the piece to another. |
Repetition
Pattern Random Regular Alternating Flowing Progressive Vertical, Horizontal, Diagonal, Overlapping, Piercing Placement |
|
Pointers are places of emphasis, dominance or focus. Certain elements assume more importance than others within the same composition. | Isolating
Directional Contrast Anomaly Leading Convergence Size, Weight, Color Gradient Framing Focusing and Depth Absence Implied |
|
The degree the piece is not disorienting; obvious what is “up” and what is “down”.
Orienting and Directional |
Straight or Curved
2-D or 3D Violating, Crossing or Intersecting, Interpenetrating Parallel or Aligned Perpendicular Angular or Diagonal Vector Fixed, Directional, Infinite, or Disappearing Continuous, Broken or Perforated Radial At Edges or Within; Framed or Bound Thin or Thick Textured or Smooth Opaque or Transparent Moving, Rotating, Spinning, Darting, Flashing Silhouette |
|
The degree the artist has made the ordinary…”noteworthy” | Add variety
Give person an experience Vibrance, Intensity Unexpected use or positioning Surprise Sense of strength or fragility Symbolic meaning Perspective Inspirational Pattern Clash Juxtaposition Simultaneity effects |
|
How satisfying the numbers and sizes and measures of objects within the piece are | Equality, Equity, Equal Weight, Mass, Volume, Visual Effect (or the opposite of equality)
Randomness Color proportions Scale Measurements Numbers of |
|
How satisfying the placement of objects (and their attributes) is | Equilibrium in Weight, Mass, Volume, Visual Effect
Symmetry or Asymmetry Pattern or No Pattern Regular or Irregular Equalizing visual forces Scale Permanent, Illusory, Contingent Placement, Alignment, Proximity, Repetition Radial Identical or Similar |
|
Jewelry often can be structured in terms of segments, components or forms. How the pieces get interconnected or amassed is of concern. | Unique, Singular, Parallel/Symmetrical, Repeated, Multiple
Evolving Variety Segmentation 2-D or 3-D Realistic or Abstract Geometric or Organic Complete or Incomplete Layering, Overlapping Fringing, Surface Embellishment Continuity Coordinating Clashing, Off-putting |
|
Any piece of jewelry must be acceptable within a certain historical, social, cultural or situational context. | Visual Expectation
Materials Expectation Techniques/Technology Expectation Referents, Inscriptions, Images Symbolism Themes Rule-bound or not Revival style or Contemporized Traditional style Appropriateness/Relevance to situation or context Coordination with situation or context |
|
The degree the piece is designed so that it accommodates physical stresses when the piece is worn | Jointedness and Support (links, rivets, hinges, loops, unglued knots, and the like)
Drape, Flow, Movement (built-in features allowing adjustment to body shape or body movement) Length, Fit Adjustability Choices of stringing material or assembly strategy Clasp Assembly (how piece attached to clasp) Strap, Bail, Pendant, Fringe, Embellishment Stiffness, Looseness, Bending, Conforming Inclusion of technology Structural Integrity Application of architectural principles of construction Physical mechanics Weight-bearing |
|
There should be no nonessential elements; the addition or subtraction of one element or its attribute will make the piece less satisfying | Length, Volume, Mass, Weight, Visual Effects
Goodness of fit Sufficient balance between unity and variety to evoke an emotional response and resonance An economy in the use of resources A result which feels finished and successful, reflecting the artist’s hand, as well as an anticipation of shared understandings among all audiences – viewer, wearer, buyer, seller, student, master |
THE PRINCIPLES IN MORE DETAIL
1. Rhythm
Movement is the path our eyes follow when we look at a work of art, and it is generally very important to keep a viewer’s eyes engaged in the work. Without movement, artwork becomes stagnant. A few good strategies to evoke a sense of movement (among many others) are using diagonal lines, placing shapes so that the extend beyond the boundaries of the picture plane, and using changing values.
Rhythm is one Principle used to shape the viewer’s experience with the piece. Rhythm is how the piece leads the viewer through sequences of steps. It is a measure of the degree the piece engages the viewer’s eye.
There is a continuance, a flow or a feeling of movement from one place of the piece to another.
Repetition and pattern are key here. The artist might achieve a rhythm by varying or repeating colors, textures, sizes, forms. The rhythm might be slow, fast, predictable, random, staccato, measured, safe, edgy, and so forth. The intervals between repetitions and patterns can create a sense of rhythm in the viewer and a sense of movement. Repetitions and patterns can be random, regular, alternating, flowing, progressive – there are many directions the artist can go in establishing a rhythm.
When a piece has multiple and coordinated rhythms, we call this Symphonic Rhythm. For example, in a piece, there might be a clear rhythm set by the use of colors throughout the piece, as well as the positioning of definable forms, such as a series of beaded leaves or other shapes.
The Rhythm should assist the viewer in cognitively making a complete circle around the piece. You don’t want the viewer to lose interest, get bored, or fall flat, before the eye and brain can make that complete circle.
Example:
Black-o-Black-o-Black-o-White-o-Black-o-Black-o-Black-o-White-o
Or,
Black-o-White-o-Black-o-White-o-Black-o-White-o-Black-o-White-o
The better designer can empower the design, if using Rhythm in the right way.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
2. Pointers
Pointers are places of emphasis, dominance or focus. Certain elements assume more importance than others within the same composition.
Pointers guide the viewer to a specific place, or focal point. Cognitively, you want to create the place for the eye/brain to come to rest.
Examples:
- Something can be centered
- The color can be varied, say from dark to light, to serve as an “arrow” or “Pointer” to a section of the necklace
- The positioning of the clasp might serve as a pointer
- A dangling pendant might serve as a pointer
- The size of the beads can be varied, such as smallest to largest, to serve as an “arrow” or “Pointer”
- Coordinating the placement of Focal Point on jewelry with the pattern in the clothing upon which the piece will rest
- Something can be strategically off-centered.
The better designer is able to capture the viewer’s attention to more important parts of the piece.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
3. Linear and Planar Relationships
This is the degree the piece is not disorienting to the viewer, or particularly confusing in terms of what is up and what is down.
People always need to orient themselves to their surroundings, so that they know what is up and what is down. They usually do this by recognizing the horizontal planes of the floor and the ceiling of a room (ground and sky outside), and the vertical planes of the walls of a room (buildings, trees and the like outside).
Jewelry must assist, or at least not get in the way, of this natural orienting process. It accomplishes this in how its “lines” are arranged and organized. If a piece is very 3-dimensional, then how its “planes” are arranged and organized becomes important, as well.
Design elements we might use to achieve a satisfactory planar relationship within our piece:
– a strategic use of lines and planes
— shapes
— boundaries
– -silhouettes
— contours
– symmetry
– or, more difficult to achieve, a satisfying asymmetry
– a planar pattern in how each section of the piece relates to the other sections
– how sections of the piece interlock
– how we “draw and interrelate” parallel lines/planes, perpendicular lines/planes and curved lines/planes within the piece
Example:
How can a person truly pull off wearing only one earring? After all, visually, it pulls the person off to one side, thus violating the basic orienting planar relationships. What about the composition of the earring, allows this to work; what about the composition doesn’t?
Example:
Wearing a necklace, where the clasp is worn on the side, instead of the back. Again, what about the composition of the necklace, allows this to work; what about the composition doesn’t?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
4. Interest
“Interest” means the degree to which the artist makes the ordinary…noteworthy.
Here the artist demonstrates how to balance off and control “variety” with “unity” and “harmony”. Without unity and harmony, the piece becomes chaotic. Without variety, the piece becomes boring, monotonous and uninteresting.
Arranging and organizing Design Elements might involve:
– selection of materials and mix of materials
– selection of color combinations
– varying the sizes of things
– pushing the envelop on interrelating planar relationships among the sections of the jewelry
– playing with the rhythm
– clever use of a focal point
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
5. Statistical Distribution
The artist is always concerned with the number or size or scale or measurement of things. This principle focuses on these statistics. With this principle, we are not concerned with the placement or balance of things – just the numbers and measurements.
We ask: How pleasing and satisfying are the selection of the numbers, sizes, proportions, volumes/weights, and color/textures of objects the artist wants to use in the piece. The artist might, at this point, anticipate creating a pattern, or not.
Examples:
BIG-o-BIG-o-small-o-BIG-o-BIG-o-small-o-
PURPLE-o-PURPLE-o-PURPLE-o-YELLOW-o-PURPLE-o-YELLOW-o-
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
6. Balance
Balance has to do with placement. How pleasing or satisfying is the placement of objects (and their attributes) within a piece?
Usually, the designer is trying to achieve a feeling of equality in weight, attention or attraction of the various visual design elements. The design attributes would include such things as the positioning or relative positioning of the materials used, the colors, textures and patterns, the sizes and scales.
The artist might play with placement in terms of proximity, alignment or repetition.
There are different types of balance.
(1) symmetry: the use of identical compositional units on either side of a vertical axis
(2) approximate symmetry: the use of similarly balanced compositional units on either side of a vertical axis
(3) radial symmetry: an even, radiating out from a central point to all four quadrants (directions) of the shape’s plane (surface)
(4) asymmetry: even though the compositional units are not identical on either side of a vertical axis, there is a “felt” equilibrium of the total piece. Often, with jewelry, this equilibrium depends on what clothes or other jewelry the person is wearing, or something about that person’s body/body shape.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
7. Forms, Their Proportions, Distributions and Dimensionality
Jewelry often can be structured in terms of segments, components or forms. How are pieces interconnected or amassed? Is this achieved through optical effects or reality?
The designer is concerned with managing these structures in terms of proportions, distributions and/or dimensionality. The artist makes choices about how each part relates to the whole in terms of scale or relevance.
The artist might play with things like:
Layering
Surface embellishment
Fringing
Curvature
Overlapping planes
Balance
The better designer creates pieces where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
Example:
Flat loomed bracelet and a button clasp, that sits so high on the bracelet, that it detracts from the 2-dimensional reason-for-being of the piece.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
8. Temporal Extension: Time and Place
Any piece of jewelry must be acceptable within a certain historical, social, cultural or situational context.
For example, is a piece appropriate for a wedding also appropriate for office wear? Is a great University of Tennessee Orange Necklace as successful when worn to a Vanderbilt football game?
Temporal Extension may narrowly refer to one specific wearer in particular, or more broadly to group, situational, social or societal expectations.
Other examples:
- white pearls are associated with bridal jewelry
- using metalized plastic beads, where the plating chips off in a short period of time, should not be used in an heirloom bracelet
- making a matching set of earrings and necklace for jewelry that typically should be worn as a matching set
- gifting a carved jade pendant with an message-word carving inappropriate for the religion of the person receiving it
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
9. Physical Extension: Functionality
Any piece of jewelry must be functional when worn.
Functionality has to do with such things as movement, drape, comfort, flow and durability. The piece of jewelry needs to feel comfortable when worn, always look good on the wearer no matter what the wearer is doing, and be durable. This involves a lot of building in understandings of physical mechanics and architectural principles of construction.
When there is (or should be) movement in a piece, there should be clear evidence that the designer anticipated where the parts came from, and where they are going to. Jewelry is worn by people who move, so the design should be a natural physical extension to such movements, and the stress they put on the piece.
For example, in a necklace, the clasp should remain on the neck, even as the beadwork moves with the person, without the necklace turning around on the neck, or breaking.
Example: The dangle earring which has the dangle stuck in a 90 degree angle.
Example: The crimped bracelet which breaks at the crimp.
Example: The bracelet too tight when the design is turned into a circle placed around the wrist
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
10. Parsimony
(something similar to, but a little bit beyond harmony and unity)
At the point where the piece is judged to be finished and successful, there should be no nonessential elements. When the piece is finished and successful, it should evoke emotions and resonate.
The designer should achieve the maximal effect with the least effort or excess.
There is a tendency of beaders and jewelry makers to over-do:
– over-embellish the surface
– add too much fringe
– repeat themes and design elements too often
– use too many colors
Parsimony vs. Unity
In art, the traditional measure of completion and success was a feeling or sense of “Unity.” Unity signified how everything felt all right. All the Design Elements used, and how they were coordinated and placed, were very coherent, clear, harmonious and satisfying.
I think the idea of unity begins to get at the place we want to end up. But this concept is not concrete enough for me. You can have unity, but the piece still seen as boring when there is no variety. This condition is unacceptable as a principled outcome of jewelry construction. Finished and successful jewelry should evoke emotions and resonate. You can have unity, but the assessments rely too much on universal, objective perceptions of design elements and their attributes. The artist, the wearer, and the situation are too easily left out of the equation.
Jewelry creation usually demands a series of judgment calls and tradeoffs between aesthetics and functionality, artist goals and audience understandings and expectations, a full palette of colors, shapes and textures and a very limited one. A measure of completeness and success needs to result from the forced choice decisions of the artist. It needs to account for the significance of the results, not just the organization of them. It needs to explain the Why, not just the What.
For me, the more appropriate concept here is “Parsimony.” Parsimony is sometimes referred to in art and design as “Economy”, but the idea of economy is reserved for the visual effects. For jewelry designers, we want that economy or parsimony to apply to functional and situational effects, as well. When the finished and successful piece is parsimonious, the relationship of all the Design Elements and their expressed attributes will be so strong, that to add or remove any one thing would diminish, not just the design, but rather the significance of the design.
Parsimony…
– forces explanation; its forced-choice nature is most revealing about the artist’s understandings and intentions
– relies on evidence moreso than assumptions to get at criticality
– focuses examination of the few elements that make a difference
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
THINKING ROUTINE[4]: LOOK – SCORE – EXPLAIN
| LOOK:
CLASSICISM NECKLACE Warren Feld, 2001. |
Materials and Description:
Three strands, druk rondelles Czech glass, in matte amethyst, matte olivine, and matte topaz. Center, overlapping agate stones.
At the center, each of the three strands pass through a 3-hole separator bar, and through one of three thin sterling silver tubes. The centerpiece stones slide over the top and bottom tubes. The middle tube is sandwiched between the stones. These stones can spin around on the tubes, allowing them to adjust to body shape and movement, but the middle tube restricts the movement to maintain the general visual appearance as in the image. S-clasp in back. |
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| KEY DESIGN ELEMENTS:
(see key at bottom of table for list)
|
KEY ATTRIBUTES OF DESIGN ELEMENTS:
1a. Some Tonal quality and finish 1b. Split Complementary color scheme 1c. Gradation dark to light 2a. Symmetry 3a. Same size druk rondelles 4a. Strong lines core design feature 4b. Overlapping centerpiece stones establishes 2 planes; can move but restricted from violating planes 5a. Mixing glass, metal and gemstone 6a. Center stones allowed to spin on tubes 7a. Layering of center stones 8a. Unexpected connection of strap to centerpiece |
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| SCORE:
SCORE CARD ON PRINCIPLES:
EXPLAIN:
|
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| LOOK:
THE BLUE WATERFALL NECKLACE
Warren Feld, 2001. |
Materials and Description:
Mix of glass, crystal, and sterling silver beads.
Each segment of beads has a different number of bead, and different sizes/color/finish of beads within it.
The colors are not part of a color scheme, and would be seen to clash if compared one to one outside of their use in the bracelet. Example: sapphire blues and montana blues; golds and silvers; matte and glossy.
The segments nearer the clasp are shorter than those further from the clasp.
The sterling silver tubes are all curved.
There is no focal point per se.
The clasp is an adjustable hook and eye choker clasp. |
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| KEY DESIGN ELEMENTS:
(see key at bottom of table for list)
|
KEY ATTRIBUTES OF DESIGN ELEMENTS:
1a. No conformance to color scheme, though leans toward the monochromatic 2a. Simultaneity effects 3a. Feels balanced though there the distribution of sizes, numbers and segment lengths varies within each strand and between each strand 4a. Brings your eye down to a central place, but no specific focal point 4b. Curved lines distort the linearity 5a. Expresses feeling of moving water, but no moving parts 6a. Curved tubes key element 6b. Bead of different shapes 7a. Adjustable choker clasp allows wearer to adjust necklace to body, to achieve that optimum sense of balance and movement 8a. Consists of each length segments separating unequal length segments. 8b. Important that segments on both strands do not match up with each other, but feel staggered 8c. Important that no segment shows dominance or becomes a clear focal point. |
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| SCORE:
SCORE CARD ON PRINCIPLES:
EXPLAIN:
|
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FOOTNOTES
[1] Feld, Warren. “Jewelry Design Composition: Playing with Building Blocks Called Design Elements,” 3/17/2018
[2] Feld, Warren. “Jewelry Design: A Managed Process,” Klimt02, 2/2/18. https://klimt02.net/forum/articles/jewelry-design-managed-process-warren-feld
[3]Shared Understandings. In another graduate education class, the major text reviewed the differences between understanding and knowledge. The question was how to teach understanding. Worth the read to gain many insights about how to structure teaching to get sufficient understanding to enrich learning.
Understanding by Design by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, 2nd Edition, Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2005.
[4] Thinking Routines. I teach jewelry design. I find it useful to engage students with various ways of thinking out loud. They need to hear me think out loud about what choices I am making and what things I am considering when making those choices. They need to hear themselves think out loud so that they can develop strategies for getting more organized and strategic in dealing with information and making decisions. My inspiration here was based on the work done by Visible Thinking by Project Zero at Harvard Graduate School of Education .
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Posted in Art or Craft?, design management, jewelry design, jewelry making, Learn To Bead | Tagged: art, design, design management, jewelry construction, jewelry design, principles of composition | 2 Comments »
JEWELRY DESIGN COMPOSITION: Playing With Building Blocks Called Design Elements
Posted by learntobead on March 17, 2018
JEWELRY DESIGN COMPOSITION:
PLAYING WITH BUILDING BLOCKS
CALLED DESIGN ELEMENTS
by Warren Feld, Designer
Abstract:
Jewelry making is a constructive process of expression. The language of expression begins with the idea of Design Elements. Design Elements are the smallest, meaningful units of design. Design Elements
function in a similar way as vowels and consonants in a language. They have form. They have meaning. They have expression. Some can stand alone, and others are dependent and must be clustered together. Better jewelry designers are aware of and can decode these expressive aspects of design elements and how they are included within any piece. This is one part of learning a disciplinary
literacy in design. This literacy begins with a process of decoding and builds to an intuitive fluency in design. This article focuses on this process of decoding.
Jewelry making is a constructive process of expression.
The language of expression begins with the idea of Design Elements. Design Elements are like building blocks and function a bit like the vowel and consonant letters of the alphabet. They have form. They have meaning. They can be assembled into different arrangements which extend their meaning and usefulness in expression.
There is an underlying logic to this process – a vocabulary and grammar, so to speak. Recognizing how this vocabulary and grammar is structured and applied enables the jewelry designer to learn how to be fluent in design. Such recognition is critical in developing a coherent, consistent disciplinary literacy in jewelry design. Such disciplinary literacy is at the heart
of a professional identity for jewelry design artisans. This literacy structure in design has four main components to it:
1) Vocabulary: Design Elements As The Basis Of Composition
2) Grammar: Principles of Construction
3) Strategy: Project Management[1]
4) Context/Culture: Shared Understandings[2]
This article focuses on the first component – Design Elements.
It makes sense for the designer to begin with something like building blocks, which I call Design Elements. Design Elements, like building blocks, are tangible things. They can be visualized. They can be touched and moved around. They can be combined in different arrangements. They can be used to create many types of expressions. Design Elements include things like color, shape, movement, dimensionality, materials, use of space, and the like. Design Elements are the smallest, meaningful units of design.
Not every Design Element is alike. Color is different than Shape
is different than Texture. Movement is different than Balance is
different than Dimensionality. Learning about and understanding the
differentiation among Design Elements becomes very important if the jewelry designer is to have sufficient power and insight over consistency, variation, coherence and unity in their designs. This power and insight is called decoding. Every jewelry designer needs to learn how to decode, if they are to be successful in design.
Some Design Elements are syllabic meaning they are independent
and can stand alone. Others are non-syllabic, meaning they are dependent and cannot stand alone.
|
INDEPENDENT DESIGN ELEMENTS |
DEPENDENT DESIGN ELEMENTS |
|
Function like vowels in alphabet Many expressive variations Syllabic Can stand alone and be expressive Expressions sensitive to placement or context |
Function like consonants in alphabet Limited expressive variations if used alone and not in combination Non-syllabic Do not often stand alone and more usually require an assist from Expressions consistent, somewhat insensitive to placement or |
Design Elements have graphic representations. Graphic representations allow these elements to be recognized symbolically as a sort of short-hand.
Each Design Element also encompasses a range of acceptable meanings, which I call expressive variations. These expressive variations, while different among themselves, are still reflective of that Design Element. They have universal qualities in that people tend to share understandings about what these expressive variations mean and how they are to be used.
Color Schemes, for example, are objective, agreed-upon combinations of colors seen as coherent and unifying. Thus, any color scheme is an expressive variation on the element of Color.
The universal, expressive variations associated with each Design Element are, in effect, attributes of that Design Element. These attributes have an
objective quality to them in that there is general agreement among designer,
viewer, wearer, buyer and seller as to what they express and how they might be used. There is an expectation that whatever role a person plays relative to the piece of jewelry, the Design Elements and their attributes will be decoded in a similar way.
At this stage in the jewelry design process, the focus is on a simple vocabulary. The vocabulary is made up of Design Elements
and their expressive attributes. The vocabulary encapsulates a generally shared understanding of its meaning and how it is to be used. It is
at the point of grammar, thus manipulation and construction, that individual artists get to show their artistic hand in selecting and placing these elements into a finished piece of jewelry.
These Design Elements and their attributes can be arranged in different configurations I call clusters. Clusters may consist of independent Design
Elements alone, dependent Design Elements alone, or a mix of both. For example, we may use an arrangement of glossy and matte Color beads to
project Dimensionality. We may use different Colors of beads, rhythmically arranged, to project Movement.
Combinations of Design Elements into clusters can have different effects, from synergy, antagonism, blending, bounding, freeing and inflection.
Selecting Design Elements and clustering them does not occur in a vacuum.
The designer selects and arranges Design Elements in anticipation of how
these choices will be understood by others in a universal or objective sense.
This is a process which I call “Backwards Designing”.[3] The building blocks and their attributes are first selected in anticipation of these shared understandings. For instance, the designer might choose colors by anticipating how others will recognize the legitimacy and appeal of
certain clusters of colors – color schemes.
If the viewer, wearer, buyer or seller of a piece of jewelry cannot understand and relate to its Design Elements and how they are clustered within the piece, they will not understand it. They will not appreciate it. They will not see it as a legitimate piece of artistic expression. It will not
feel authentic. To others, if the piece lacks evidence of shared understandings, this will result in that jewelry (and by implication, the jewelry artisan) getting labeled, for example, as unsatisfying or boring or ugly or monotonous.
DESIGN ELEMENTS COMPRISE A VOCABULARY
OF BASIC ARTISTIC EXPRESSION
Working with Design Elements is not much different than working with an alphabet.
An alphabet is made up of different letters. Each letter has different
attributes – how it is written, how it sounds, how it is used. Configurations of letters result in more sounds and more meanings and more ways to be used.
A person working with an alphabet has to be able to decode the letters, sounds and meanings, as letters are used individually as well as in combination. As the speaker becomes better at decoding, she or he begins to build in understanding of implications for how any letter is used, again, individually or in combination.
This is exactly what the jewelry designer does with Design Elements. The
designer has to decode, that is, make sense of a series of elements and their attributes in light of our shared understandings about which Design Elements are appropriate, and how they should be legitimately expressed.
Let’s examine a set of jewelry Design Elements in more detail and elaboration.
|
DESIGN ELEMENT Independent |
GRAPHIC REPRESENTATION |
EXPRESSIVE VARIATIONS |
EXPRESSIVE VARIATIONS |
EXPRESSIVE VARIATIONS |
|
Color |
|
Schemes Hue and Saturation |
Simultaneity Effects |
Values and Intensity Temperature Receding or Projecting |
|
Shape |
|
Recognizable Focused Distinct Blended Abstract Filled or Empty |
Delimited, fixed, geometric Infinite, extending Distorted or overlapped |
Masculine or feminine Organic or mechanical Background, foreground, middle ground |
|
Texture and |
|
Regular, Predictable, Statistical Repeated or singular |
Random, Non-Statistical Feel or look |
Layered or Non-layered Smooth or Rough |
|
Point, Line, |
|
2-Dimensional 3-Dimensional Conform or violate |
Connected or Unconnected Span and distance Actual or implied Thickness |
Silhouette Focused or unfocused Bounded or unbounded geometric or curved
|
|
Material |
|
Natural or Man-Made Soft or solid Heavy or light |
Single or mixed media |
Light refraction, reflection, absorption |
|
Technique and |
|
Bead Weaving, Bead Stringing, Wire Working, |
With or without application of heat and/or |
Fabricated or Machine Made Pattern or freeform |
|
DESIGN ELEMENT
Dependent
|
GRAPHIC
|
EXPRESSIVE VARIATIONS
|
EXPRESSIVE VARIATIONS
|
EXPRESSIVE VARIATIONS
|
|
Dimensionality
|
|
2-dimensional
|
3-dimensional (relief, low relief, high relief)
Interior and Exterior Contours
|
Frontal or in-the-round
Open or closed forms
Static or dynamic forms
|
|
Movement
|
|
Passive
Direction
Linear or wave
|
Physical
Stable or erratic
|
Mechanical
|
|
Color Blending
|
|
Simultaneity effects
|
Value and intensity
Saturation and vibrance
|
Distinct or blurred
Dominant or recessive
|
|
Theme, Symbols
|
|
Surface or interpreted meaning(s) or
Power, position, protection, identification
|
Clear or abstract referents
Object as whole, or parts of object
|
Repetition or not
Individual, group, cultural, societal,
|
|
Beauty and
|
|
Sensually pleasing: visual, touch, auditory,
|
Objective or emotional
|
Coherence, harmony and unity
Fashion, style, timeliness, timelessness
|
|
Structure and
|
|
Stiff or flexible
Flow and drape
Linkage, connectivity
|
Wearability
Display
Organization
|
Articulation
Autonomy vs. Temporariness
Interactive with wearer, or not
|
|
Craftsmanship
|
|
Inspiration
Skill and dexterity
With tools, or not
|
Design acumen
|
Personality and preferences
|
|
Form, Segmentation,
|
|
Shape with Volume
Whole or divided
Organized or chaotic
|
Perspective
2-dimensional or 3-dimensional
Alignment
|
Shading
Positioning or spacing
Simple or Complex
|
|
Balance and
|
|
Symmetrical (By size, color, or shape)
Visual weight
Visual size
|
Asymmetrical (By size, color, or shape)
Radial
Visual placement
|
Random
Stable or unstable
Directed or undirected
|
|
Referents to specific
|
|
Vintage Revival
Direct or implied
|
Contemporary
Literal or figurative
|
Symbolic
|
|
Context,
|
|
Economic, social, psychological, cultural,
|
Complicit artist, or not
|
Derived meaning, or objective meaning
|
|
Negative and
|
|
Figure or ground
Form or no form
Shading
Perspective
|
Depth
Use of space around an object
|
Interpenetration of space
Illusion or reality
Placement
|
|
Light and
|
|
Suggestive
Gradient
Perspective
|
Shading
Illumination
Solid or Cast
|
Dimensionality
Moon
|
The Japanese Fragrance Garden Bracelet
“Japanese Fragrance Garden Bracelet”, by Warren Feld, March 2018, photography by Warren Feld
For example, this is the kind of building blocks thinking I did when designing my Japanese Fragrance Garden Bracelet.
This bracelet has a foundation base. The finishes of these beads in the
base are either a luster finish or a dichroic finish. Off the base, I created flower stalks that were 4-6 seed beads tall, and topped with a slightly
larger and more brightly colored seed bead. The colors of the beads in the stalks vary from dark (near the base) to light (near the flower tip). Between
each bed of flowers is a “moon bridge” – the kind you might expect when
meandering through a Japanese garden.
See how I clustered independent and dependent Design Elements to achieve a particular expression.
What I Wanted To Achieve
Design Elements I Thought About
Movement
with flower stalks where they would retain their verticality
(thus not flop over) after the piece was worn.
Technique: Fringing technique
Technology: Use of One-G beading thread which, unlike
all other beading threads, has a springy quality to it. When the fringe is pulled out during
wearing, the thread helps spring it back into place
Color: To mimic how moving
colors will be perceived, I varied color in flower stalks from dark at the
bottom to medium to light at the top, just under the flower, and then used
bright colors for the flowers topping off each stalk
Point, Line: Easy for viewer to perceive and follow
movement of points and lines, which are key elements in the piece
Dimensionality
where the piece would not be seen as flat
Point, Line: Visually, the flower stalks lead the eye from the foundation
base, up the stalks, and to the bright flower colors on top of the
stalks.
Color: I use a reflective foundation base of two types of bead
finishes, (a) luster, and (b) dichroic.
Both have a mirroring effect, making it difficult for the eye to see
the “bottom”, and at the same time reflecting the colors sitting above them.
Color Blending
where as the eye moves up and down any flower stalk, or moves
across the piece from end to end, everything feels coherent and unified
Color: I make a wide use of simultaneity effects, where the placement
of one color affects the perception of the color next to it. This fools the brain into blending colors, which in reality, you cannot do easily with
beads (as opposed to paints).
Shape/Points/Line/Pattern: There is a consistent repetition of shapes, points and lines, and pattern, leading the viewer to be able to predict what should happen next along the bracelet, and again, fooling the brain into doing some color blending perceptual tricks of its own.
How Do You Teach Designers A Vocabulary of Design?
Most designers most likely start theirjewelry making careers taking craft-oriented classes and following instructions in how-to books or online in how-to videos. They learn to repeat a set of steps and end up with something like what is pictured. The whole jewelry making approach assumes that jewelry making is a natural process. Surround the budding artist with patterns, books and videos, and they will somehow become great jewelry designers.
Yet, although the artisans follow a set of steps over and over again, they never learn how to make choices or evaluate implications or get any experience making judgement calls and tradeoffs when designing something that must look good and wear well at the same time. Jewelry making is not a natural skill that is learned automatically. Jewelry designers need to be taught to design.
Towards this end, I think it is much more useful to build an educational curriculum and program around the idea of disciplinary literacy. We need to teach designers to explicitly and systematically think design. Designers need to be able to recognize the elements that make up a piece, how they were used, and how this leads to more or less success in evoking an expression or an emotional response.
Disciplinary Literacy, means, in part, that the designer is aware of the “codes” which were selected for a piece of jewelry. The designer is able to segment the piece and identify its Design Elements. The designer is also able to put Design Elements together and blend them to achieve a desired expression. The better designer is very aware of all the codes, or Design Elements. The better designer is very aware of how the codes, or Design Elements, were selected, combined, blended and expressed. And the designer is very aware of how and why clusters of Design Elements may sometimes get bounded; that is, may be unfortunately stuck within some
indeterminant meaning or expression.
Towards this end, this means first teaching designers how to decode. It means figuring out what universally accepted Design Elements should be used in a piece. It also means recognizing how these elements can vary, and how such variation can change the artistic or design expression
of the piece. Designers need to learn how Design Elements get clustered and constructed to convey certain expressions, and which cannot.
At this stage, we are training the designer to have some comfort recognizing and applying objective, shared understandings about what certain Design Elements mean, and the variations in how they might get expressed within a piece.
As the designer’s education progresses, we would gradually reduce the student’s involvement with decoding, and increase the involvement with tasks involving fluency. This involves more in-depth learning about
manipulation and construction. Here the designer is taught how to define a personal style and approach, and implement it. The designer is guided from creating the merely appealing, to the more resounding resonant. The designer is also taught to look for, anticipate and incorporate context clues. All this gets into the areas of grammar and process management, which I discuss in other articles.[1,2]
_________________________________________________________
WARREN FELD, Jewelry Designer
warren@warrenfeldjewelry.com
615-292-0610
For Warren Feld, Jewelry Designer, (www.warrenfeldjewelry.com), beading and jewelry making have been wonderful adventures. These adventures have taken Warren from the basics of bead stringing and bead weaving, to wire working and silver smithing, and onward to more complex jewelry designs which build on the strengths of a full range of technical skills and experiences.
Warren leads a group of instructors at Be Dazzled Beads (www.bedazzledbeads.com). He teaches many of the bead-weaving, bead-stringing, jewelry design and business-oriented courses. He works with people just getting started with beading and jewelry making, as well as those with more experience.
His pieces have appeared in beading and jewelry magazines and books. One piece is in the Swarovski museum in Innsbruck, Austria.
He is probably best known for creating the international The Ugly Necklace Contest, where good jewelry designers attempt to overcome our pre-wired brains’ fear response for resisting anything Ugly.
Footnotes
[1] Read my article Jewelry Design: A Managed Process, Klimt02.net Forum, https://klimt02.net/forum/articles/jewelry-design-managed-process-warren-feld
[2] I discuss a little about shared understandings in a yet unpublished article I wrote about Contemporary Design. From that article…
“Shared understandings should be enduring, transferable, big ideas at the heart of what we think of as contemporary jewelry. These shared understandings are things which spark meaningful connections between designer and materials, designer and techniques, and designer and client. We need, however, to recognize that the idea of understanding is very multidimensional and complicated.
Understanding is not one achievement, but more the result of several loosely organized choices. Understanding is revealed through performance and evidence. Jewelry designers must perform effectively with knowledge, insight, wisdom and skill to convince us – the world at large and the client in particular — that they really understand what design, and with our case here, contemporary design, is all about. This involves a big interpersonal component where the artist introduces their jewelry to a wider audience and subjects it to psychological, social, cultural, and economic assessment.
Understanding is more than knowledge. The designer may be able to
articulate what needs to be done to achieve something labeled contemporary, but
may not know how to apply it.
Understanding is more than interpretation. The designer may be able to explain how a piece was constructed and conformed to ideas about contemporary, but this does not necessarily account for the significance of the results.
Understanding is more than applying principles of construction. It is more
than simply organizing a set of Design Elements into an arrangement. The designer must match knowledge and interpretation about contemporary to
the context. Application is a context-dependent skill.
Understanding is more than perspective. The designer works within
a myriad of expectations and points of view about contemporary jewelry. The designer must dispassionately anticipate these various perspectives about contemporary design, and, bring some constructed point of view and knowledge of implications to bear within the design and design process.
We do not design in a vacuum. The designer must have the ability to
empathize with individuals and grasp their individual and group cultures. If selling their jewelry, the designer must have the ability to empathize with small and larger markets, as well. Empathy is not sympathy. Empathy is where we can feel what others feel, and see what others see.
Last, understanding is self-knowledge, as well. The designer should have the
self-knowledge, wisdom and insights to know how their own patterns of thought
may inform, as well as prejudice, their understandings of contemporary
design.
How the jewelry designer begins the process of creating a contemporary piece of jewelry is very revealing about the potential for success. The designer
should always begin the process by articulating the essential shared understandings against which their work will be evaluated and judged. For now, let’s refer to this as Backwards Design[4]. The designer starts with questions about assessment, and then allows this understanding to influence all other choices going forward.”
[3] Backwards Design. I had taken two graduate education courses in Literacy and one in Planning that were very influential in
my approach to disciplinary literacy. One of the big take-aways from
Understanding by Design by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe,
2nd Edition, Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development,
2005, was the idea they introduced of “backwards design”. Their point is that you can better teach understanding if you anticipate the evidence others will use in their assessments of what you are trying to do.
When coupled with ideas about teaching literacy and fluency (see
Literacy:Helping Students Construct Meaning by J. David Cooper, M. Robinson, J.A. Slansky and N. Kiger, 9th Edition, Cengage Learning, 2015), you can begin to introduce ideas about managing the design process in a coherent and alignable way.
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Contemporary Jewelry Is Not A “Look” — It’s A Way Of “Thinking”
Posted by learntobead on February 15, 2018
CONTEMPORARY JEWELRY IS NOT A “LOOK” —
IT’S A WAY OF “THINKING”
by Warren Feld, Jewelry Artisan
warren@warrenfeldjewelry.com
718 Thompson Lane, Ste 123, Nashville, TN 37204
615-292-0610
“Canyon Sunrise”, Warren Feld, designer, 2004, Austrian crystal, glass seed beads, 14KT gold chain and constructed clasp, fireline cable thread, photographer Warren Feld
Abstract:
Contemporary Jewelry represents a specific approach for thinking through design. Making jewelry is, in essence, an authentic performance task. The jewelry artisan applies knowledge, skill and awareness within the anticipation of the influence and constraints of a set of shared understandings. Shared understandings relate to composition, construction and performance. These understandings are enduring, transferable, big ideas at the heart of what we think of as “contemporary jewelry”. They are things which spark meaningful connections between designer and materials, designer and techniques, and designer and client. Managing these connections is what we call “fluency in design”.
Jewelry Design is a professional discipline. Every legitimately defined profession has at its core a discipline-specific way of thinking. This includes core concepts, core rules, and core beliefs. And it includes professional routines and strategies for applying, manipulating and managing these. The good designer is fluent in how to think through design, and the good contemporary designer is fluent in how to think through design which earns the label “contemporary”.
But, the jewelry designer can only wonder at this with crossed eyes and bewilderment. As a profession, jewelry design balances a series of contradictions, most notably to what extent the practice is craft, art or design. This works against professional legitimacy.
Jewelry Design, as a discipline, is not always clear and consistent about its own literacy – that is, what it means to be fluent in design. Its core concepts, rules and beliefs are not well-defined, and often break down by medium, by operational location – (visualize museum, gallery, studio, store, factory, workshop, class, home), and by the degree of involvement and commitment to the profession of the jewelry designer him- or herself. The diversity of materials, approaches, styles and the like make it difficult to delineate any unifying principles or professional image.
As designers, we see, feel and experience the evolving dynamics of an occupation in search of a profession. But our profession is still in search of a coherent identify. Perhaps we see this most often in debates over how we come to recognize what jewelry we think should be labeled “contemporary” and what jewelry should not.
On the one hand, the idea of contemporary can be very elucidating. On the other, however, we are not sure what contemporary involves, how the label should be applied, and what the label represents. Yet, our sense-making search for its meaning is at the forefront of the professionalization of jewelry design. Our persistent questioning about “What is contemporary jewelry?” opens up thinking and possibilities for every jewelry designer, working across many styles and with many materials, both experienced and novice alike.
The term “contemporary” is defined as something occurring in our time, and that can be very confusing for the jewelry designer. We get caught in a major Identity Crisis for lack of a clear, agreed-upon definition of contemporary. How we resolve this Identity Crisis around a common understanding of “contemporary jewelry” can go a long way, I believe, towards developing a coherent disciplinary literacy and professional identity for all jewelry designers. Resolution can be very unifying.
Many conceptual questions about contemporary jewelry arise. We need to be very cognizant of how we think through our responses.
Does the label apply to every piece of jewelry made today? We see all kinds of styles, shapes, silhouettes, materials, techniques, fashions all around us. There appears to be no common denominator except that they all have been created in our time.
Should the label be applied to all this variation?
Could it?
Why would we want it to?
Does the label apply to a certain timeframe, with the expectation that it will be supplanted by another label sometime in the future?
What is contemporary jewelry?
“Contemporary” Is A Specific Approach For Thinking Through Design
I suggest that contemporary jewelry is not a specific thing. But rather it is a way of thinking through the design process. It is a type of thinking routine[1] which underlays the universal core of contemporary jewelry design.
Contemporary jewelry is not every piece of jewelry made in our time. It is, instead, jewelry designed and crafted with certain shared understandings in mind – understandings about composition, construction and performance.
Contemporary jewelry is not associated with any particular color or pattern or texture. It is, instead, a strategy for selecting colors, patterns and textures.
Contemporary jewelry is not something that only a few people would make or wear, whether boring or outlandish. It is, instead, something most people recognize as wearable with some level of appeal.
Contemporary jewelry is not restricted to the use of unusual or unexpected materials or techniques. It is, instead, something which leverages the strengths or minimizes the weaknesses of any and all materials and/or techniques used in a project.
Contemporary jewelry is not a specific silhouette, or line, or shape, or form, or theme, but, instead, something which shows the artist’s control over how these can be manipulated, used, played off of, and, even, violated.
Contemporary jewelry is an integral part of our culture. We wear jewelry to tell ourselves and to tell others we are OK. It is reflective of the sum of all our choices about how we think through our place among others, our relative value among others, our behaviors among others, our preferred ways to interact, challenge, conform, question, organize and arrange.
The contemporary jewelry designer is especially positioned to serve at the nexus of all this culture. The designer’s ability to think through and define what contemporary means becomes instrumental for everyone wearing their jewelry to successfully negotiate the day-to-day cultural demands of the community they live in. Designers have a unique ability to dignify and make people feel valued, respected, honored and seen.
Think of all that power!
Each person stands at that precipice of acceptance or not, relevance or not. The jewelry designer has the power to push someone in one direction, or another.
If only we had the established profession and a disciplinary literacy to help us be smart about this.
FLUENCY[2] IN DESIGN: Managing The Contemporary Design Process
Jewelry design is, in effect, an authentic performance task.
The jewelry designer demonstrates their knowledge, awareness and abilities to:
1. Work within our shared understandings about contemporary jewelry.
2. Apply key knowledge and skills to achieve the desired result – a contemporary piece of jewelry.
3. Anticipate how their work will be reviewed, judged and evaluated by criteria reflective of these same shared understandings.
4. Step back, reflect, and validate all their thinking to reject any misunderstandings, and make adjustments accordingly.
The better designer is able to bring a high level of coherence and consistency to the process of managing all this – shared understandings, knowledge and skills, evaluative review, and reflection and adjustment.
This is called “fluency in design”.
Shared Understandings[3]
Shared understandings should be enduring, transferable, big ideas at the heart of what we think of as contemporary jewelry. These shared understandings are things which spark meaningful connections between designer and materials, designer and techniques, and designer and client. We need, however, to recognize that the idea of understanding is very multidimensional and complicated.
Understanding is not one achievement, but more the result of several loosely organized choices. Understanding is revealed through performance and evidence. Jewelry designers must perform effectively with knowledge, insight, wisdom and skill to convince us – the world at large and the client in particular — that they really understand what design, and with our case here, contemporary design, is all about. This involves a big interpersonal component where the artist introduces their jewelry to a wider audience and subjects it to psychological, social, cultural, and economic assessment.
Understanding is more than knowledge. The designer may be able to articulate what needs to be done to achieve something labeled contemporary, but may not know how to apply it.
Understanding is more than interpretation. The designer may be able to explain how a piece was constructed and conformed to ideas about contemporary, but this does not necessarily account for the significance of the results.
Understanding is more than applying principles of construction. It is more than simply organizing a set of design elements into an arrangement. The designer must match knowledge and interpretation about contemporary to the context. Application is a context-dependent skill.
Understanding is more than perspective. The designer works within a myriad of expectations and points of view about contemporary jewelry. The designer must dispassionately anticipate these various perspectives about contemporary design, and, bring some constructed point of view and knowledge of implications to bear within the design and design process.
We do not design in a vacuum. The designer must have the ability to empathize with individuals and grasp their individual and group cultures. If selling their jewelry, the designer must have the ability to empathize with small and larger markets, as well. Empathy is not sympathy. Empathy is where we can feel what others feel, and see what others see.
Last, understanding is self-knowledge, as well. The designer should have the self-knowledge, wisdom and insights to know how their own patterns of thought may inform, as well as prejudice, their understandings of contemporary design.
How the jewelry designer begins the process of creating a contemporary piece of jewelry is very revealing about the potential for success. The designer should always begin the process by articulating the essential shared understandings against which their work will be evaluated and judged. For now, let’s refer to this as Backwards Design[4]. The designer starts with questions about assessment, and then allows this understanding to influence all other choices going forward.
When designing contemporary jewelry, the designer will push for shared understandings about what it means to be worthy of the label “contemporary.” I propose the following five shared understandings as a place to start, and hopefully, to generate more discussion and debate.
These are,
1. Fixed Frameworks and Rules should not pre-determine what designers do.
Rules do exist, such as color schemes or rules for achieving balance or rhythm. But rules may be challenged or serve as guidelines for the designer. In fact, the designer may develop and implement rules of their own.
Designers do not learn understanding if they are only able to answer a question if framed in one particular way. How the designer invents and applies rules for managing design as a process become of primary importance because they reveal design fluency and thinking. And this allows for a variety of approaches as well as an escape from any dominant definitions. Nothing is sacred.
2. Jewelry should extend, rework, and play with, or even push, the boundaries of materials, techniques and technologies.
Contemporary designers are meant to ask questions, evaluate different options and experiment widely. They do this in order to leverage the strengths and minimize the weaknesses of materials, techniques and technologies used. Their jewelry should reflect this.
3. Jewelry should evoke emotions.
The audience is an integral part of the success of contemporary jewelry. The viewer/wearer recognizes things in the piece and is allowed to, (in fact, expected to), react and interpret. The designer’s goal is to achieve a level of resonance.
4. Jewelry should connect people with culture.
Contemporary jewelry is not made for art’s sake alone. Contemporary jewelry is made to connect to the world around us. It is meant to assist a person in recognizing how they want to live their lives, and how they want to introduce their view of themselves into the broader community or communities they live in.
5. Successful jewelry designs should only be judged as the jewelry is worn.
Jewelry is not designed in isolation from the human body. Its design should anticipate requirements for movement, drape and flow. Its design should anticipate the implications of the context in which the jewelry is worn. The implications for all jewelry design choices are most apparent at the boundary between jewelry and person.
Given that the designer “backward-designs [4],” he or she begins the process by anticipating those understandings about how their work will be assessed. The designer then is equipped to make three types of informed choices:
A. Choices about composition
B. Choices about construction
C. Choices about performance
The designer determines (a) what design elements to include in the piece, and then (b) rules for manipulating them. The contemporary designer (c) measures these against our shared understandings about contemporary design. These measures are a continuum – degrees of contemporary, not either/or’s or absolutes. In any given piece of jewelry, some design elements may be very contemporary, and others might not.
GOOD COMPOSITION:
Selecting and Articulating Upon Design Elements and Their Attributes
Jewelry making is a constructive process. It makes sense for the designer to begin with something like building blocks, which I call design elements. Design elements include things like color, movement, dimensionality, materials, use of space, and the like.
Each design element, in turn, encompasses a range of acceptable meanings, yet still reflective of that design element, and which are called attributes.
These design elements can be arranged in different configurations.
The combination of any two or more design elements can have synergistic effects.
Working with design elements is not much different than working with an alphabet. An alphabet is made up of different letters. Each letter has different attributes – how it is written, how it sounds, how it is used. Configurations of letters result in more sounds and more meanings and more ways to be used.
A person working with an alphabet has to be able to decode the letters, sounds and meanings, as letters are used individually as well as in combination. As the speaker becomes better at decoding, she or he begins to build in understanding of implications for how any letter is used, again, individually or in combination.
This is exactly what the jewelry designer does with design elements. The designer has to decode, that is, make sense of a series of elements and their attributes in light of our shared understandings about jewelry design. The contemporary designer decodes in light of our further shared understandings about contemporary jewelry design.
The designer might, for example, want to select from this list of design elements I have generated below. I have arranged these design elements into what is called a thinking routine[1]. The designer uses the routine to determine how each element might be incorporated into the piece, and how the desired attributes of each element relate to contemporary design. They might also use the routine to look for issues of true and false. They might use the routine to rate each element as to importance and uncertainty.
| DESIGN ELEMENT | LESS CONTEMPORARY | MORE CONTEMPORARY |
| Dimensionality | Flat; Width/Length focus | Not Flat; Noticeable Width/Length/Height focus |
| Movement, Moving Elements | Little or no movement, either from the movement of actual components, or from how colors or patterns are used | Great sense of movement, either from the movement of components, or from how colors or patterns are used |
| Color, Color Blending | Follows color rules, resistant to violate them | Pushes color rules to the edge, or violates them |
| Light and Shadow | Little sense artist attempted to control light and shadow in a strategic sense | Great sense artist attempted to control light and shadow, strategically |
| Negative and Positive Spaces | Little sense artist attempted to control negative and positive spaces in a strategic sense | Great sense artist attempted to control negative and positive spaces strategically |
| Point, Line, Plane, Shape, Form | Conforms to expectations; comfortable working within basic parameters | Violates expectations; challenges basic parameters |
| Theme, Symbols | If used, themes and symbols are simplistic and readily identified | If used, themes and symbols have a complex relationship to form and structure, and stimulate debate and discussion to fully make sense of them |
| Beauty and Appeal | Primary goal of piece | Synergistic relationship between beauty and function to achieve designer’s ends |
| Structure and Support | Little concern with movement, drape and flow; unwilling to sacrifice appeal for function | Considerable concern with movement, drape and flow, and a willingness to make tradeoffs between appeal and function |
| Materials | Materials are selected for how they look | Materials are selected for how they function; designer leverages strengths and minimizes weaknesses |
| Craftsmanship | Disconnect from Artist as if Artist was anonymous | Shows Artist’s Hand |
| Context, Situation, Culture | Pieces created for the sake of making something, or for the sake of beauty and appeal only | Pieces created in anticipation of shared understandings about contemporary jewelry |
| Balance, Distribution | Conforms to expectations; comfortable working within basic parameters | Violates expectations; challenges basic parameters |
| Technique(s) | Selected without questioning implications of how technique affects boundary between jewelry and person | Selected after questioning implications of how technique affects boundary between jewelry and person |
| Texture, Pattern | Conforms to expectations; comfortable working within basic parameters | Violates expectations; challenges basic parameters |
| Reference and Reinforce an Idea, Style | May or may not reference and/or reinforce symbolic meanings; if so, usually does so in a linear fashion, such as mimicking or repeating them | May or may not reference and/or reinforce symbolic meanings; if so, learns from them, and then, based on this learning, takes the references to another level |
Example of some choices I made using the routine when creating my piece Canyon Sunrise:
Canyon Sunrise, Warren Feld, 2004
 |
 |
| Dimensionality | Two layers of beadwork. The top layer overlapping the bottom layer, where the first row of the bottom layer is attached to the 2nd row of the top layer, forcing a curvature along the top. The pendant sits on top of bottom layer and in line with top layer. |
| Moving Elements | The two layers are only connected at their tops. As the wearer moves, each layer can move somewhat independently of the other. |
| Color, Color Blending | The piece uses a 5-color scheme, but increases the natural proportions of one color relative to the others. There are many gaps of light between all the beads which calls for a color blending strategy(ies). The piece relies heavily on simultaneity effects, as well as the overlapping effects of transparent and translucent beads. |
| Technique(s) | The bead woven strips are allowed to fan out from the top, thus better accommodating the wearer’s body. |
GOOD CONSTRUCTION:
Applying Knowledge, Skills, Competencies for Manipulating Design Elements
Design elements need to be selected, organized and implemented in some kind of satisfying design. Towards this end, the artist, consciously or not, anticipates our shared understandings in order to make these kinds of choices.
These are the most visible choices the artist makes. We can see the finished piece of jewelry. We interact with it. We question it. We get a sense of whether we want to emotionally respond to it. We either feel its resonance, or we don’t.
Most artists manage intuitively, learning to make good choices as they receive feedback and assessment, and adjust their decisions accordingly. The better jewelry designers, however, show “metacognitive awareness” of all the things they have thought of, anticipated, structured, and accomplished during the design process as these relate to larger shared understandings about contemporary jewelry.
Let’s return, for a minute, to the analogy with building blocks and the alphabet. The design elements are building blocks. I compared them to the letters of the alphabet. Building blocks have attributes, and letters have attributes. Attributes further define them and give them purpose.
The novice designer learns to decode these building blocks and their attributes. With more experience, the blocks, just like letters, get combined and constructed into words and phrases and larger, meaningful ideas and expressions.
In essence, the finished piece of jewelry is an exemplar of the jewelry artisan’s vocabulary and grammar of design. The fluency in how the artist uses this vocabulary and grammar in designing their piece should be, I would think, especially correlated with the success and resonance of the piece.
Often, artists implement their design element choices with attention and recognition to Principles of Construction. Principles of Construction are the rules or grammar for using design elements in a piece. Given the artist’s goals for beauty and function, the artist is free to apply the rules in any way she or he sees fit. However, we expect to find this grammar underlaying all pieces of jewelry, whether the piece is contemporary or otherwise.
When we want to apply the label “contemporary,” however, we search for the choices and logic the artist has used for constructing design elements into a contemporary whole, and in anticipation of our shared understandings.
I suggest these 10 Principles of Construction. All Principles need to be applied, yet each is different from and somewhat independent of the others. For example, the colors may be well chosen, but proportions or placement not right.
| Principle of Construction | What the Principle is About |
| Rhythm | How the piece engages the viewer and directs their eye |
| Pointers | How the piece directs the viewer to a certain place or focal point |
| Planar Relationships | The degree the piece is not disorienting; obvious what is “up” and what is “down” |
| Interest | The degree the artist has made the ordinary…”noteworthy” |
| Statistical Distribution | How satisfying the numbers and sizes of objects within the piece are |
| Balance | How satisfying the placement of objects (and their attributes) is |
| Dimensionality | The degree to which the piece is flat or 3-dimensional, how satisfying this dimensionality is to the piece |
| Temporal Extension | How well the parts are integrated into the whole in anticipation of how, where and when the jewelry is to be worn; the whole should be more than the sum of its parts |
| Physical Extension/Finishing | The degree the piece is designed so that it accommodates physical stresses when the piece is worn |
| Parsimony | There should be no nonessential elements; the addition or subtraction of one element or its attribute will make the piece less satisfying |
GOOD PERFORMANCE:
Seeking Continual Feedback and Evaluation About Choices and Results
The jewelry designer brings perspective. The designer shows they can rise above the passions, inclinations and dominant opinions of the moment to do what their feelings, thoughts and reflections reveal to be best. And, at the same time, the designer shows that they can strive for a rapport, a sharing of values, an empathetic response, a type of respect deemed contemporary.
If we return to our alphabet metaphor, it is necessary, but not sufficient, for the artist to assemble a palette of building blocks, thus, design elements. It is necessary, but not sufficient, for the artist to apply a vocabulary and grammar for arranging these building blocks, thus for constructing a piece of jewelry.
Most importantly, however, it is both necessary and sufficient for the artist to anticipate how the piece of jewelry will be assessed prior to making any choice about design element or construction. The more coherent and aligned each aspect of this process is, the better managed. To the extent the artist can strategically manage this whole “backwards” design process, the more fluent in design that artist is. The more fluent in design, the more the finished piece reveals the artist’s hand and resonates.
So, there is a very dynamic performance component to design. The contemporary jewelry designer needs to think about what criteria their client and the general culture and market will use as acceptable evidence of “contemporary” and “good contemporary design”, when the piece is introduced. The artist needs to think about things like connection, emotion, resonance, integrity, market.
The designer needs answers to several questions at this point.
What is the designer’s process and routine for thinking about shared understandings and evidence of authentic performance?
How well have they anticipated these criteria of evaluation?
Has the designer created a continual feedback loop so that acceptable evidence is introduced throughout the full process of design?
To what extent will the eventual evaluation of the contemporary jewelry designer and their work be fair, valid, reliable, and a sufficient measure of their results?
_________________________________________________________
WARREN FELD, Jewelry Designer
warren@warrenfeldjewelry.com
615-292-0610
For Warren Feld, Jewelry Designer, (www.warrenfeldjewelry.com), beading and jewelry making have been wonderful adventures. These adventures have taken Warren from the basics of bead stringing and bead weaving, to wire working and silver smithing, and onward to more complex jewelry designs which build on the strengths of a full range of technical skills and experiences.
Warren leads a group of instructors at Be Dazzled Beads (www.bedazzledbeads.com). He teaches many of the bead-weaving, bead-stringing, jewelry design and business-oriented courses. He works with people just getting started with beading and jewelry making, as well as those with more experience.
His pieces have appeared in beading and jewelry magazines and books. One piece is in the Swarovski museum in Innsbruck, Austria.
He is probably best known for creating the international The Ugly Necklace Contest, where good jewelry designers attempt to overcome our pre-wired brains’ fear response for resisting anything Ugly.
_________________________________________________________
FOOTNOTES
1 Thinking Routines. I teach jewelry design. I find it useful to engage students with various ways of thinking out loud. They need to hear me think out loud about what choices I am making and what things I am considering when making those choices. They need to hear themselves think out loud so that they can develop strategies for getting more organized and strategic in dealing with information and making decisions. My inspiration here was based on the work done by Visible Thinking by Project Zero at Harvard Graduate School of Education .
2 Fluency. I took two graduate education courses in Literacy. The primary text we used was Literacy: Helping Students Construct Meaning by J. David Cooper, M. Robinson, J.A. Slansky and N. Kiger, 9th Edition, Cengage Learning, 2015. Even though the text was not about jewelry designing per se, it provides an excellent framework for understanding what fluency is all about, and how fluency with language develops over a period of years. I have relied on many of the ideas in the text to develop my own ideas about a disciplinary literacy for jewelry design.
3 Shared Understandings. In another graduate education class, the major text reviewed the differences between understanding and knowledge. The question was how to teach understanding. Worth the read to gain many insights about how to structure teaching to get sufficient understanding to enrich learning. Understanding by Design by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, 2nd Edition, Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2005.
4 Backwards Design. One of the big take-aways from Understanding by Design (see footnote 2) was the idea they introduced of “backwards design”. Their point is that you can better teach understanding if you anticipate the evidence others will use in their assessments of what you are trying to do. When coupled with ideas about teaching literacy and fluency (see footnote 1), you can begin to introduce ideas about managing the design process in a coherent and alignable way.
Posted in design management, jewelry design, jewelry making, Learn To Bead, Stitch 'n Bitch | Tagged: art, beading, craft, design, jewelry, jewelry design, jewelry making | 3 Comments »
JEWELRY DESIGN: A Managed Process
Posted by learntobead on January 4, 2018
“Jewelry is art, but only art as it is worn.”
That’s a powerful idea, — “as it is worn” — but, when making jewelry, we somewhat ignore it. We bury it somewhere in the back of our brains, so it doesn’t get in the way of what we are trying to do. We relegate it to a phrase on the last page of a book we have promised ourselves to read sometime, so it doesn’t put any road blocks in front of our process of creation.
We like to follow steps, and are thrilled when a lot of the thinking has been done for us. We like to make beautiful things. But, we do not want to have to make a lot of choices. We don’t want anything to disrupt our creative process.
We do not want to worry about and think about and agonize over jewelry “as it is to be worn.” Let’s not deal with those movement, architectural, engineering, context, interpersonal and behavioral stuff. We just want to make things.
To most artisans, making jewelry should never be work. It should always be fun.
Making jewelry should be putting a lot of things on a table in front of you, and going for it.
Making jewelry just is. It is not something we have to worry about managing.
It is easy to make, copy or mimic jewelry someone else has designed, either through kits or through imitation.
Making jewelry is doing. Not thinking.
Creating. Not managing.
We prefer to make jewelry distinct from any context in which it might be worn or sold. We don’t want someone looking over our shoulder, while we create. We don’t want to adjust any design choice we make because the client won’t like it, or, perhaps, it is out of fashion or color-shaded with colors not everyone likes. Perhaps our design choices at-the-moment do not fit with the necessities associated with how we need to market our wares to sell them. Our pieces might somehow be off-brand.
All too often, we avoid having to think about the difficult choices and tradeoffs we need to make, when searching for balance. That is balance among aesthetics, functionality, context, materials and technique. And balance between our needs as designers and the wearer’s needs, as well. So, too, we shy aware from making any extra effort to please “others” or “them”. Even though this hardly makes sense if we want these “others” or “them” to wear our jewelry or buy our jewelry creations.
Everything comes down to a series of difficult choices. We are resistant to making many of them. So we ignore them. We pretend they are choices better left to other people, though never fully sure who those other people are. We yearn to be artists, but resign ourselves to be craftspersons. We dabble with art, but avoid design.
We hate to make trade-offs between art and function; that is, allow something to be a little less beautiful so that it won’t break or not drape and move well when worn. We hate to make things in colors or silhouettes we don’t like. We hate to make the same design over and over again, even though it might be popular or sell well.
But make these kinds of choices we must! Your jewelry is a reflection of the sum of these choices. It is a reflection of you. You as an artist. You as a crafter. You as architect and engineer. You as social scientist. You as a business person. You as a designer.
So, the more we can anticipate what kinds of choices we need to make, and the more experience we have to successfully manage and maneuver within these choices, the more enjoyable and successful our jewelry designs become … and the more satisfying for the people for whom we make them.
JEWELRY DESIGN IS A MANAGEMENT PROCESS
Designers who are able to re-interpret the steps she or he go through and see them in “process” terms, that is, with organization and purpose, have the advantage.
There are many different kinds of choices to be made, but they are interdependent and connected. Recognizing interdependency and connectedness makes it easier to learn about, visualize and execute these choices as part of an organized, deliberate and managed jewelry design process.
I am going to get on my soap box here. We tend to teach students to very mechanically follow a series of steps. We need, instead, to teach them “Process”. Strategy. Insight. Connectedness. Contingency. Dependency. Construction. Context. Problem-Solving. Consequences.
Good jewelry design must answer questions and teach practitioners about managing the processes of anticipating the audience, selecting materials, implementing techniques, and constructing the piece from one end to the other. Again, this is not a mechanical process. Often, it is not a linear step-by-step pathway. There is a lot of iteration – that is, the next choice made will limit some things and make more relevant other things which are to happen next.
A “process” is something to be managed, from beginning to end, as the designer’s knowledge, techniques and skills are put to the test. That test could be very small-scale and simple, such as creating a piece of jewelry to give to someone as a gift. Or creating a visual for a customer. Or when you need to know the costs. Or, that test could be very large-scale and more complex, such as convincing a sales agent to represent your jewelry in their showroom.
Better Jewelry Designers smartly manage their design processes at the boundary between jewelry and person. It is at this boundary where all the interdependencies of all the various types of choices we designers make are clearest and have the most consequence.
WELL-DESIGNED JEWELRY MUST BE MANAGED
AT THE BOUNDARY BETWEEN JEWELRY AND PERSON
What exactly does it mean to “manage design at the boundary between jewelry and person?” What kinds of things happen at that boundary?
A person breathes. She moves. She sits at a desk, perhaps fidgeting with her jewelry. She might make sudden turns. She gracefully transitions from one space to another. She has shape, actually many shapes.
Her jewelry serves many purposes. It signifies her as someone or something. It expresses her feelings. Or status. Or future intentions. Or past history. It ties her to people and places, events and times. It suggests power, or lack thereof. It hides faults, and amplifies strengths. It implies whether she fits with the situation.
Jewelry attracts. It attracts seekers of the wearer’s attention. It wards off denigrators. It orients people to the world around them. It tells them a story with enough symbol, clue and information to allow people to decide whether to flee or approach, run away or walk toward, hide or shine.
Jewelry has a feel and sparkle to it. It reminds us that we are real. It empowers a sensuality and a sexuality. It elevates our esteem. Sometimes uncomfortable or scratchy. Sometimes not. Sometimes reflective of our moods. Othertimes not.
Jewelry is a shared experience. It helps similar people find one another. It signals what level of respect will be demanded. It entices. It repels. It offers themes both desirable and otherwise.
Jewelry has shape, form and mechanics. All the components must self-adjust to forces of movement, yet at the same time, not lose shape or form or maneuverability. If a piece is designed to visually display in a particular way, forces cannot be allowed to disrupt its presentation. Jewelry should take the shape of the body and move with the body. It should not make a mockery of the body, or resist the body as it wants to express itself.
Jewelry defines a silhouette. It draws a line on the body, often demarcating what to look at and what to look away from. What to touch, and what to avoid. What is important, and what is less so.
Managing here at the boundary between jewelry and person means understanding what wearing jewelry involves and is all about. There is an especially high level of clarity at this boundary because it is here where the implications of any choice matters.
The choice of stringing material anticipates durability, movement, drape. The choices of color and shape and silhouette anticipate aesthetics, tensions between light and shadow, context, the viewer’s needs or personality or preferences at the moment. The choice of technique anticipates how best to coordinate choices about materials with purpose and objective. The choice of price determines marketability, and where it’s out there, and whether it’s out there.
You choose Fireline cable thread and this choice means your piece will be stiffer, might hold a shape better, might resist the abrasion of beads, but also might mean less comfort or adaptability.
You choose cable wire and this choice means that your piece might not lay right or comfortably. A necklace will be more likely to turn around on the neck. It might make the wearer look clownish. At the same time, it might make the stringing process go more quickly. Efficiency translates into less money charged, and perhaps more sales.
You choose to mix opaque glass with gemstone beads, mixing media which do not necessarily interact with the eye and brain in the same way. This may make interacting with the piece seem more like work or annoying.
The ends of your wirework will not keep from bending or unraveling, so you solder them. Visually this disrupts the dance you achieve with wire bending and cheapens it.
You choose gray-toned beads to intersperse among your brightly colored ones. The grays pick up the colors around them, adding vibrancy and resonance to your piece. The gaps of light between each bead more easily fade away as the brain is tricked into filling them in with color.
You mix metalized plastic beads in with your Austrian crystal beads. In a fortnight, the finish has chipped off all the plastic beads.
You construct a loom bracelet, flat, lacking depth or a sense of movement. Your piece may be seen as pretty, but out of step with contemporary ideas of fashion, style, and design.
If we pretend our management choices here do not matter, we fool ourselves into thinking we are greater artists and designers than we really are.
JEWELRY DESIGN MANAGEMENT:
BUILDING A STRUCTURE AND ORGANIZATION FOR THINKING THROUGH DESIGN
Design management is multi-faceted. We intuitively know that proper preparation prevents piss poor performance. So let’s properly prepare. This means…
- PROJECT
Defining what I do as a “Project To Be Managed” — My Project is seen as a “system”, not merely a set of steps. The “system” encompasses everything it takes that enables creativity and leads it to success. These include things related to art, architecture, engineering, management, behavioral and context analysis, problem-solving, and innovation. For some designers, these also include things related to business, marketing, branding, selling and cost-accounting. - INSPIRATION
Documenting, through image, writing or both, the kinds of things that are inspiring me and influencing my design
- PURPOSE
Elaborating on the purpose or mission of my Project – why am I doing this Project as it applies to me, and as it applies to others? - SITUATION
Measuring the context and situation as these will/might/could impact my Project
- STRATEGY
Developing a strategy for designing my piece — outlining everything that needs to come together to successfully work through my Project from beginning to end - SKILLS
Verifying, Learning or Re-Learning the necessary techniques and skills - SUPPLIES
Securing my supply chain to get all our materials, tools and supplies needed when I need them - CONSTRUCTION
Applying design principles of composition, form and structure. Paying careful attention to building in architectural pre-requisites, particularly those involved with support, jointedness and movement. - SHOWCASE
Introducing my Jewelry Design to a wider audience. This might involve sharing, show-casing, or marketing and selling - REPLICATION
Anticipating all that it will take to replicate the piece, if it is not a one-off, especially if I am developing kits or selling my pieces - REFLECTION
Evaluating whether I could repeat this or a similar Project with any greater efficiency or effectiveness – The better jewelry artist is one who is more reflective.
DESIGN THINKING
Designing jewelry demands that we both do and think. Create and manage. Experience and reflect.
The better Jewelry Designer sees any Project as a system of things, activities and outcomes. These are interconnected and mutually dependent. Things are sometimes linear, but most often iterative – a lot of back and forth and readjustments.
The better Jewelry Designer is very reflective. She or he thinks about every detail, plays mental exercises of what-if analyses, monitors and evaluates all throughout the Project’s management. She or he thinks through the implications of each choice made. The Designer does not blindly follow a set of instructions without questioning them.
At the end of the day, your jewelry is the result of the decisions you made.
Something to think about.
HOW DO WE TEACH JEWELRY DESIGN THINKING
AS A MANAGEMENT PROCESS
We should teach students to design jewelry, not craft it. Rather than have students merely follow a set of steps, we need to do what is called “Guided Thinking”.
For example, we might encourage students to construct and feel and touch similar pieces made with different materials, beads and techniques, and have them tell us what differences they perceive. We should guide them in thinking through the implications for these differences. When teaching a stitch, I typically have students make samples using two different beads – say a cylinder bead and a seed bead, and try two different stringing materials, say Fireline and Nymo threads.
We also should guide them in thinking through all the management and control issues they were experiencing. Very often beginning students have difficulty finding a comfortable way to hold their pieces while working them. I let them work a little on a project, stop them, and then ask them to explain what was difficult and what was not. I suggest some alternative solutions – but do not impose a one-best-way – and have them try these solutions. Then we discuss them, fine-tuning our thinking.
I link our developing discussions to some goals. We want good thread management for a bead woven piece. We want the beads to lay correctly within the piece. We want the piece to feel fluid. We return to Guided Thinking. I summarize all the choices we have made in order to begin the project: type of bead, size of bead, shape of bead, type of thread, strategy for holding the piece while working it, strategy for bringing the new bead to the work in progress. I ask the students what ideas are emerging in their minds about how to bring all they have done so far together.
At this point, I usually would interject a Mini-Lesson, where I demonstrate, given the discussions, the smarter way to begin the Project. In the Mini-Lesson, I “Think Aloud” so that my students can see and hear how I am approaching our Project.
And then I continue with Guided Thinking as we work through various sections of the Project towards completion. Whatever we do – select materials, select and apply techniques, set goals, anticipate how we want the Project to end up – is shown as resulting from a managed process of thinking through our design.
In “Guided Thinking”, I would prompt my students to try to explain what is/is not going on, what is/is not working as desired, where the student hopes to end up, what seems to be enhancing/impeding getting there.
With guidance, demonstration and repetition, it is my hope that such thinking becomes a series of Thinking Routines my students resort to when starting a new project. As students develop and internalize more Thinking Routines, they develop greater Fluency with design.
And that should be our primary goal as teachers: developing our students’ Fluency with design.
Posted in Art or Craft?, bead weaving, beads, beadwork, business of craft, design management, jewelry design, jewelry making, Learn To Bead | Tagged: beading, design management, jewelry design, jewelry design theory | Leave a Comment »
Knowing What To Know
Posted by learntobead on April 12, 2014
ORIENTATION
“Knowing what to know”
http://www.landofodds.com/store/kitsorientation.htm
There were always beaders. There were always jewelry makers. But if you wanted to gain an understanding of the beads and jewelry findings and stringing materials and tools, their qualities, and what happens to them when they age, you would need to start with a little bit of the history of beads and jewelry making. And then progress into some more in-depth information about these materials, how you choose which ones to use, and what happens to all this stuff over time.
Only in this way, would you be able to prepare yourself for the judgments and trade-offs and choices you will need to make as a jewelry designer. Choices about How? And When? And What? to use and not to use, given your particular project, your design goals, …(and if you’re selling your pieces, your marketing goals, as well). Moreover, how do you know how to assemble and link everything up into a finished piece?
But often in this world, you don’t know where to start. You don’t necessarily know where to find answers, or whose answers to trust.
QUESTION FOR GROUP:
When you began to make jewelry and bead, how did you know what to know?
How did you initially get an Orientation?
More on Orientation….
I’ve posted an extensive series (18 videos, 5 ½ hours worth of materials) of Orientation information on the Land of Odds website for you to take advantage of.
http://www.landofodds.com/store/kitsorientation.htm
These are also posted on YouTube.
Continuing from an article I wrote….
You need to prepare yourself for the multi-faceted world of beading and jewelry. It’s all about choices. You need an Orientation to what you need to know, and to the kinds of choices you will need to make. The world of beads can often be a jungle, dense with colors, shapes, and styles, intermingled irrationally, spilled relentlessly, collapsing around you with dumps and crashes and screeches and rings. Your eyes become useless in this heart of darkness. The presence of so many beads and so many strangely shaped and curiously articulated metal pieces may make the idea of creating jewelry and beadwork utterly meaningless. At least for the moment.
But you can sense something more. It’s tactile. It’s visual. It has some kind of taste and smell which steers you. It’s orienting. It seems full of significance. And in this dark silence – so noisy with details, so hushed with confusion – you realize why it’s important that you need to know a lot of things.
– You need to know how to step around quality differences among glass beads made in the Czech Republic, in Japan, in China and in India. How long will these beads last? Will they break? If they chip, what color will they be on the inside? Is the patterning in the glass a coating, a decal or some artistic placement of shards and stringers of glass? How sharp are the holes? How consistent are the beads from bead to bead on the strand?
– You need to know when to demand 14KT gold fused to brass (gold-filled), or 14KT gold plate over silver (vermeil), or Hamilton Gold Plate over brass. How long does the shine and color last? Do these beads and pieces break or crumble or bend or dent?
– You need to know how what came before you will be an important influence on you today. How have the Oglala Sioux, the Pope, Zulu tribes, the French, Italian, Czech, Dutch, African, the shoe and upholstery industries, and North American Indians affected beads and jewelry today?
Most people don’t orient themselves when they get started. They either don’t see the need, or don’t think they have the time, or think there’s not that much to learn about. Anyone can put some beads on a string and make themselves a bracelet, they assume. They take any class that they can find, often taking more advanced classes, before having taken beginner classes. All they want to do is make a pretty piece to wear. The learning to design is secondary – or non-existent. They buy any book, try to reproduce any pattern, try to copy any picture they see in a magazine, and try to figure things out by themselves without any outside feedback, evaluation and validation. They overly-rely on the advice of the first people they talk with, and don’t question it.
What happens is often very sad, indeed. You end up using inappropriate stringing materials and supplies. You end up finishing off your pieces incorrectly. You never learn how to best attach a clasp. You never learn how to control the tension of beads within your pieces. You mix pieces which are dysfunctional when used together. You end up taking the wrong classes, not questioning the advice of friends or instructors, and buying the wrong parts, given what you are trying to do. You end up making ill-informed choices.
You need an Orientation, and you need to be sure you get one.
In an Orientation, you’ll discover the order of things. There’s an arrangement to beading and jewelry design. Pieces have purposes and functions. They have a history of use and wear. They have an underlying vocabulary and grammar of construction – that is, they have rules for how things should get combined and assembled, and how they should not.
An Orientation grounds you. It shows you the map, the pathways, the bi-ways, the highways along which you can travel in your development as a fine craftsperson, artist and jewelry designer. It gives you a sense of your surroundings, your context, and a lot of substance and meaning.
At first, when you get oriented, you marvel at the details and the possibilities – the myriad types of beads and findings and stringing materials, the wide variations in how they work and function, the multitude of choices which seem overwhelming. Pinks become fuchsias become reds become oxbloods become garnets. Peridots become mints become olivines, both green and brown, become green lusters become jades become dark kellys and smaragds. Metalized Plastics become nickels become brasses become pewters become sterlings and argentiums and fine silvers and platinums. Threads become bead cords become cable threads become cable wires become hard wires. Jewelry is clasped or clasp-less, strung or woven, wire-worked or wire-wrapped, singular or multiplexed, fixed or adjustable, singular- or multi-media.
But then, something else strikes you. You come to know that, while there’s always been a fundamental sense of design across time and cultures, this sense has often been understated. You find indifference, not indignation. You find an absence, a void, a vacuum of intellectual introspection about jewelry and its design. It’s all around you. That something missing. You feel the lacking. And when you begin to have this sense, you should feel a little superior, in that you are now on your way towards understanding design. You’ve got the hunger. You’ve got the passion. You want to know the place of design in jewelry, and your place in the design world with that jewelry you create. That jewelry you construct. That jewelry that you put forth into the world. That jewelry which reflects who you are as an artist, to your inner most thoughts.
Orienting Myself
I never had an orientation. I was never oriented. I sank or swam.
There was no real internet, when I started. Nor any beading magazines. Never met people in Nashville who made jewelry. Except for my partner, James, who made beautiful things with whatever parts and beads and stones he could find. But he couldn’t articulate exactly what he was doing. He was “Creating”.
The act of “creating,” did not result in unbreakable pieces, or a mix of pieces which endured the ravages of wear equally, or clasp assemblies which never came undone. The act of “Creating” gave few clues about hole sizes and hole sharpness and stringing material flexibility, and what led to good drape. The act of “Creating” merely resulted in beautiful things – wearable, drape-able, moveable, durable, or not.
During the first two years I made jewelry, things broke. The finishes of beads rubbed off. The beads did not necessarily lay right. Many pieces were too stiff – lacked good ease. The pieces kept selling, so what did I care?
But at some point, I did begin to care. I was irritated by the number of repairs I had to do on my own pieces.
At one point, I began taking in repairs of other jewelry artists’ work. This was my education. I saw where things broke. I saw the choices other people made in determining how to construct their pieces from end to end. I could talk to the customers and find out a lot of the things leading up to their jewelry breaking.
I began to ask more questions of my suppliers. I began to ask more questions about myself and my choices. I began formulating hypotheses about why some things worked or endured better than others. And I had many opportunities, now that I was doing a lot of repairs, to test out these hypotheses.
But it would have been much better had I had a more formalized, organized, intelligent orientation when I first got started.
Posted in bead weaving, beadwork, jewelry making, Learn To Bead, Resources | Tagged: orientation to beads and jewelry findings | Leave a Comment »
New Column Posted to “How To Bead A Rogue Elephant”
Posted by learntobead on September 2, 2011
New Column Posted
“How To Bead A Rogue Elephant”
Getting Started in Beading and Jewelry Making
Excerpts from this book on the following topics…
Click here
– Catching the “Bead-Bug”
– What Can You Do With Beads
– Getting Started
– Finding Inspirations
– Shopping for Beads
– What To Look For In A Bead
– How Not To Shop
– Be A Good Customer
– Buyer Beware
– Tips for Buying Beads At A Bead Show
– What Should I Create?
– Planning Your Necklace
– Anatomy of a Necklace
– Measurements You Need to Know
– Working from a Palette
– How Do You Learn?
– The Types of Things You Need to Learn
– On My Own, Through Books, or Through Classes?
– Reading Patterns and Instructions
– Self-Esteem — Making Choices
– Selling vs. Keeping
– Beading Aphorisms
Posted in bead weaving, beads, beadwork, jewelry design, Learn To Bead | 2 Comments »
Beading For Children Focuses The Mind
Posted by learntobead on January 3, 2011
Beading for Children Focuses The Mind
Cherly McMahan of the Icenhower Intermediate School, Mansifield ISD, in Arlington, Texas, shared this article she recently wrote. The article was about Instructions for children’s beading projects for use in project based learning and therapy for children with autism.
http://knol.google.com/k/cheryl-mcmahan/just-bead-it/1bvwxgiggyj0d/25#view
I thought you would enjoy reading it.
Posted in bead weaving, Learn To Bead | Tagged: autism, bead projects for children, beading with children | Leave a Comment »
The “Educated” Beader
Posted by learntobead on July 17, 2009
The EDUCATED Beader
What Do We Mean By This?
What does it mean to be an “Educated” beader? Exactly what would it have been that you would have learned or learned to do, to earn the label “educated”?
What would be expected of this “Educated” beader?
What kinds of choices would be expect this “Educated” beader to be able to make?
If we do a Google search online for our educated beader, what would we find?
Educate you about the essential tools and techniques
– Bead Unique Magazine
promote socially responsible retailing
– South African cooperative MonkeyBiz
educate more people about the art of beading
– Wikipedia
We educate our customers from the very first purchase and continue to do so as needs and level of experience progress.
– Calebs Lighthouse
inform and educate beaders of the beauty and versatility of beads
– beadingtimes.com
Educate yourself about bead finishes and types
– the Illustrated Bead Bible
We get a lot of generalities and platitudes, but we don’t get a more specific, detailed, enlightened idea of who we want to called an “educated beader” and who we do not.
Is it someone who beads a lot? Learned specific skills? Can do specific things? Has knowledge of certain terms?
Is the beader who has taken 15 beading classes more educated than the beader who has only taken 3?
Is the beader who can do peyote more educated than the beader who can do right angle weave?
Is the person who knows the differences between lobster claws, toggle clasps, slide clasps and doorknocker clasps more educated than the person who cannot?
We need answers to questions like these, if we are to be able to define what we should teach and how we should teach it.
What do you think? Please add your comments to the discussion.
Posted in Learn To Bead | Tagged: bead classes, bead education, bead schools, beadwork, how-to, jewelry making, learn, learning crafts, training | Leave a Comment »
What’s Happening at CBJA
Posted by learntobead on February 28, 2009
THE CENTER FOR
BEADWORK & JEWELRY ARTS
If you want to add your email address to receive our Spring and Fall Designer Gazettes, email us at
oddsian@landofodds.com
type DESIGNER GAZETTE in the subject line
BEAD STUDY
TOPIC: Dimensional Shapes in Beadwork
We will be using Diane Fitzgerald's new book on dimensional shapes as a study guide. The book is entitled "Shaped Beadwork: Dimensional Jewelry with Peyote Stitch". We have copies for sale in the shop.
We will probably stick with this topic for the next 12 months.
We will organize the studies into 5 units:
(1) Making basic polygons
(2) Making donut polygons
(3) 3-Dimensional Shapes
(4) "Shape" as a design element
"Dimensionality" as a design element
(5) Other Geometrics from other artists, like Julia Pretl, Jean Powers, Judith Walker, Laura McCabe
BEAD WEAVING WORKSHOPS
Laura McCabe – May 1-3, 2009
(1 places remaining)
Friday, 5/1/2009
Geo-Floral Beaded Bead (Registration fee, $125.00)
Kits available for purchase from instructor – cost $45.00.
LOOK N’ SEE:
www.landofodds.com/beadschool/images/laura-mccabe-geo-floral-beaded-bead.jpg
(4 places remaining)
Saturday/Sunday, 5/2-3/2009
Dahlia Garland Necklace (Registration fee, $250.00)
Kits available for purchase from instructor – cost $110.00.
LOOK N’ SEE:
www.landofodds.com/beadschool/images/laura-mccabe-dahlia-garland-necklace.jpg
Cynthia Rutledge – October 9-11, 2009
Cynthia Rutledge – October 9-11, 2009
(12 places remaining)
Friday, 10/9/2009
A Chain Reaction (Registration fee, $125.00; optional kit, $70.00 (4 palettes available)
LOOK N' SEE:
http://www.cynthiarutledge.net/workshops/b-chain-reaction.htm
(10 places remaining)
Saturday and Sunday, 10/10-11/2009
Intermezzo Necklace (Registration fee, $250.00, optional kit, price to be announced (2 palettes to be available)
LOOK N' SEE:
http://www.cynthiarutledge.net/workshops/n-intermezzo.htm
Dallas Lovett – April 16-18, 2010
Workshop topics to be announced
Marcia DeCoster – September 10-12th, 2010
Workshop topics to be announced
Sherry Serafini – August 26-28, 2011
Workshop Topics to be announced
SILVERSMITHING WORKSHOPS BY DON NORRIS
There is a limit to 10 registrants per workshop. His workshops fill quickly.
(8 slots available)
Monday, April 6th, 9am-6pm, (1-day) Beginner Silversmithing Workshop
$200.00 fee includes instruction, all materials and tools
Emphasis on learning how to solder with a hand held torch, and creating a setting for a stone
PMC and WIREWORK EARRINGS WORKSHOP
EARRINGS, EARRINGS, EARRINGS
Sat, 6/27, 10am-4pm
Instructor: Elesa Phares
$130.00 fee plus $35.00 materials charge
(8 slots available)
COME STUDY JEWELRY DESIGN WITH US IN TUSCANY, ITALY
“Contemporizing Traditional Etruscan Jewelry”
TBA, 2010
Toscana Americana has invited us to lead an 8-day workshop in Cortona, Italy in Tuscany and near Florence. The workshop – Contemporizing Traditional Etruscan Jewelry – teaches some bead stringing and bead weaving techniques, introduces you to some in-depth jewelry design concepts and theories, and guides you in the creation of 2 or 3 contemporized pieces of jewelry. More information on-line:
www.landofodds.com/store/toscananarrativesynopsis.htm
Posted in bead weaving, beads, beadwork, jewelry design, jewelry making, Learn To Bead, Travel Opportunities, Workshops, Classes, Exhibits | Tagged: bead weaving, beadwork, dimensional beadwork, jewelry design, learn study, shapes in beadwork, workshops | Leave a Comment »
