creative thoughts - #2 - knolling
I have just got obsessed with prop maker Adam Savage and his tested.com site of amazingness. I have a feeling that there will be more technical terms for things I do when I make things than the one I have just found. As a prop maker and set builder I often make up my own adhoc solutions to design and technical problems, and I love to work freestyle, though am often on my own with the challenge. I am often unaware of the parallel behaviours I may replicate, and the same thing happens in my creative projects too, though here I am less constrained by the pressures of the deadline, or the expectations of the client etc. One thing I often do is to lay out everything that I am dealing with on the bench in front of me, whether it be the broken down components of a future rebuild, or simply everything in the project so far. I take a picture of ingredients, tools, or part finished elements of the project by instinct.
Now I know that this has a name, its 'knolling'. It originates from the assistant to the architect Frank Geary, who would, after each day working for the famous mid-century furniture designer, Florence Knoll, spread out all the day's endeavours for inspection each evening. Of course model makers do it too, so do mechanics, and I often lay out all the tools I may need for a job, and certainly everything to pack on a hiking expedition, but I didn't realise that it was such a prominent feature of props and model making, or how it fits so well into my own creative process. As I have described before, I love taking apart some of the more complicated plastic objects I find in order to rediscover hidden inner parts, and I love to lay out everything to get a record. I like to see the piece in three stages: before, during and after, or original, parts and the mutated result. Now I have technical terms for stage two.