Terri Lee

Flow

Engaging in the Vignelli workshop, my intent was to challenge my design thinking and process. For food and immersive designs, designs are elaborate. The idea is to ﬁll the environment to create a fully immersive environment where layers of delight and engagement create surprises from all angles. The goal is to overwhelm the senses.

Learning about the Vignelli’s philosophy and design belief, I took the prompt for the workshop and reﬂected on the idea of timelessness and focused on the subtractive process. As Massimo Vignelli stated, “Styles come and go. Good design is a language, not a style.”

My process followed what I learned from the Vignelli cannon and I focused from the inside out following the belief that, “The correct shape is the shape of the object’s meaning.” What is a vase? A vessel? What is it intended to contain that deﬁnes the essence of a vase?

My design focus started with basic geometry. How does a simple geometric form embrace nature? I considered a mix of a square, cylinder and triangle and various combinations of these basic forms. Applying the Vignelli subtractive process, I found myself left with a square. A basic form emerging from a grid felt like the right solution. The stems of the ﬂower or branch can gather and nest in the corners and move and take shape as the stem ﬁnds its resting place. Reﬂecting on geometry and structure in nature and the golden circle, I chose to create a trilogy. Three vessels, three heights with three levels of translucency in white or grey to create layer and shadow that reﬂects the way sun and nature play with one another. I was as much interested in the individual forms as the way light would travel through the vessel and create a shadow on the surface it rests upon. Between the placement of the vessels, the angle of the light and the opacity of the hue, the design form and language shifts within the structured grid.

Once we arrived in Corning and began working with the Glass Lab, it became apparent that the process of creating blown glass does not create a perfect square as I initially envisioned and ultimately creates the light and shadow I intended. Focusing back on the object’s meaning, and the process of glass production, I chose to shift my form to a cylinder and create three widths with three different heights.

The cylinders as a unit seem to function independent of the ﬂowers or stems. The form itself reﬂects the core lifeline in nature– the vessel. The three cylinders are designed not to be ﬁlled in its entirety. They work as a unit to support and reﬂect what is or isn’t there. Does the vessel hold the stem? Or does the stem activate and reiterate the vessels’ core form? In the end, the cylinder feels much more true to the Vignelli belief that the correct shape reﬂects the object’s meaning.