Compounds - Word and Image

Perception, creativity and imagination are important cornerstones and starting points for any design-oriented or artistic activity. Creativity does not come out of thin air. It needs a playing field and a container of building blocks, from which to derive, rearrange and compose ideas. There is no doubt that the architect, when designing, mainly uses (seen or internalised) graphic fragments, images or set pieces of these, which are caused to interrelate in new ways. Such design components are predominantly graphic marks that are depictive, abstract or suggestive of reality, but most are directly derived from our visual environment. This course, however, was about the fact that language and its syntax can also be useful for creative approaches to design. The starting point of the course was a possibility offered by the field of linguistics: that of combining individual words to form a new word, thus also creating a new meaning. This word-forming technique, resulting in so-called compounds, is particularly prominent in the German language, but this way of forming words is also seen in the English language and was to be used here for an experimental approach to design.

In the first part of the course, the students compiled several structured word lists, consisting of single words (nouns or adjectives) that describe or are related to our natural or built environment. The next task was to pair individual words at random, thus forming fictitious word combinations that had unclear meanings and of which there were no direct examples in our cultural sphere. Afterwards, the students were asked to visually interpret a selection of these fictitious word creations, first approaching this via freehand sketches and subsequently using technical drawing, model making or montage for final representation of the objects. Based on the professional digital representation techniques taught in the course, the last task was to visualise the utopian constructs as convincingly as possible, translating them into seemingly real existing objects.