Project Progress
During these past two weeks, working on my in-depth has been a lot of fun. In my last blog post, I mentioned I wanted to set a meeting time each week with my mentor. I was able to talk to my mentor and we decided on having our meetings on Saturday’s from 2:00PM-4:00PM.
We met on February 20th and we built on our discussion from our previous meetings when we talked about flooring and my self-interview. During this meeting we covered a lot, from lines, to colour, to the process of designing the interior of a home. My mentor taught me some more about colour, building off what I learned in middle school. She also explained how to bring accent colours into a home and make flow nicely.
When we talked about lines, we discussed the differences between them, and how different lines bring different feelings to a room. The conversation about lines, lead us into a conversation about furniture and appliances. We talked about working from bigger aspects of a home to the smaller parts where you have more choice. For example, you should choose your flooring and cabinetry first and see how they work together because they play a large role in the design of a home. Then you add smaller decorations like plants and art. My mentor explained to me what bringing plants inside a house can do. What I took away from this discussion is that plants can be a great way to bring the outside in. I am a person who enjoys being outside, and if I were to have some plants inside the tiny home, I would be bringing some of that nature and outside world in.
At the end of our meeting, my mentor and I briefly talked about inspiration for the tiny home design. When she asked me “What is your inspiration?” I had no idea where to start. She asked me what I want the environment of the tiny home to feel like, and what I would “want to come home to after a long day at school?” This meeting set the ball in motion for our next meeting where we analyzed my inspiration picture.
How to Have a Beautiful Mind
For this in-depth post, I focused on two main topics form How to Have a Beautiful Mind. How to Be Interesting and How to Respond. This fit very well with my meetings with my mentor because we were analyzing some pictures and I could use many off the tips that Dr. Bono mentioned.
A great example of this was when I was working on the scope of services, and my mentor and I were talking about having a little deck off of the side of the tiny home. “what if we could extend the deck and make it like a kitchen extension?” this “what if” statement brought many new lines of thought. The deck could be used to cook, study, read, and relax outside. If I put up an umbrella, it would be like an outdoor living room where I could have friends and family over.
Now back to the inspiration pictures…
Coming to a conclusion on one inspiration picture was quite tricky. At the beginning of our meeting, I asked my mentor why it was important to have just one inspiration picture. She told me that it was important because “you need a jumping off point.” After some time, I finally came to a conclusion this inspiration picture below.
The first thing my mentor got me to do was to analyze this image. I did not know where to start. She guided me through the process of how she would analyze this image. At first we started out with surface level details like, “I like that high contrast” “that looks like luxury perfume” “the water is clear like glass, like a tinted bottle.” This was a great way to start because after a while, I went more in-depth and I noticed parts of the picture I did not notice before. My mentor made me realize, that you need to go deeper than only looking at the picture. You need to paint the picture around you and imagine actually being there. An example if this is when she said “this one to me seems busy, like people coming and going, and doing their thing. That buzz of the city.” I was amazed with her attention to detail. When she would describe what she saw in one of the images, I could picture myself in those surroundings.
She asked me what the pictures reminded me of. I told her the plane window reminds me of the time I was younger on a plane ride home from Edmonton. I could see an endless number of mountains that covered the ground below me. It was the coolest experience because all of the mountains were buried in snow and I saw them from a completely different perspective.
We used this inspiration picture to begin discussing the colour palette. I loved the high contrast in some of the pictures, like the crisp outline of the phone and the border around the airplane window. I told her how I also like navy blue, but it was not in the inspiration picture. She asked me “why couldn’t the contrast colour be navy blue? It doesn’t have to be black.” That really changed my mindset and reminded me that I have full creative control of this tiny home.
Other than the inspiration picture, we analyzed some room inspiration that I have saved on my Tiny Home Inspiration board on Pinterest. My mentor analyzed a picture of a desk to demonstrate what I should look for when analyzing a picture. Then I took the reins and tried to analyze these pictures of a bathroom.
I believe I analyzed this image very successfully. I found that after stepping back and really taking a second to look at these pictures, I noticed little details I would not have usually noticed. My mentor brought up a really good point about social media now days, and how there is always some form of input. If you take a moment to really look at something. You will notice tings you haven’t noticed before. “everything is constantly coming at you, when you have a moment you can focus and zoom into particular tings.” My sense of design definitely heightened after this meeting and it was so much fun breaking down different rooms and their designs. Now when I step into a room, I find myself looking at it in new ways than I did before.
Plan for Next Time
This weekend, my mentor and I are planning to meet on Saturday again. We have decided we are going to go over the scope of services that I made and look into the colour palette for the tiny home a bit more. We also want to get into really focusing on the space plan because I have just been playing around with a couple ideas so far. These past two weeks have been a ton of fun. Talking about colour, learning more about design, and analyzing some pictures. I am excited to see what the next two weeks of this project hold! I will be sure to post the progress I make on the space plan of the tiny home. My mentor has shown me a few of her examples and I am excited to how mine are going to look!