This exercise more or less turned into 'making-words-with-sticks'. Which more or less evolved into 'making-words-with-sticks-and-putting-them-back-up-trees'. Which, in essence, is still in keeping with the notion of a compliment. A compliment being something that you give. It is often encouraging, uplifting, insightful, positive, purposeful or personal.
As such, who would benefit or be complimented by a bunch of sticks more than the tree itself?
It is a way of 'giving back' part of what you have taken, of saying 'thanks'. (?) Not only that, it also speaks of the balance between consumption and production - a concept that is so heavily ingrained in my current thinking that it keeps manifesting itself through everything I do. It is this balance between 'having' and 'doing', 'using' and 'replenishing', 'taking' and 'giving'. I think we all need to be more aware of these consuming energies in our lives, or at least that's what I was personally reminded of whilst doing this exercise.
The act of a twig-making-compliment meant that it became a type of 'reflective conversation with the situation'(1), where the results appeared to 'talk-back' and a dialogue between medium and message became the focus of the inquiry. One could not ignore what the situation of 'making' was saying about the materials being used, and what the materials alone, were saying about the situation.
As the essence of this inquiry is to look precisely at how we look, how we find and how we use information and knowledge in and through the design process; my thinking has to be both backwards and forward moving in the same moment. Being both productive and reflective in equal amounts. In this case, it was the notion of 'taking' and 'giving' that informed the reflective theories generated from the twig-making-compliment exercise.
I use the word 'rekindling' to illustrate this process:
The sticks were discarded from the tree.
The sticks were taken from the environment directly surrounding.
Their natural structure then became the medium in which letters were generated, a simple re-purposing.
Letters were joined to form the greater context of a word, being smaller parts of a bigger whole.
The words in this same way, collaborated to form a sentence.
The medium we are still working with is language, words, linguistics, common symbols, shapes that can be read. The sticks are the tangible material of this language. And so the exercise becomes less about the words and more about what the words mean when they come in the form of another object. What the material, in itself, is saying.
This is the essence of a metaphor: using the qualities of something else to describe or gain insight into a more intangible concept. Using metaphor as a way of entering a subject.
The sticks were items 'taken' from the world.
A compliment is something you 'give'.
To give back something you have taken,
except in a different state from what it was originally, is design.
The twigs were then left in the tree, re-kindled and re-purposed.
Hey this is beautiful! As is the video above. I love your blog and everything about it. I have been reading a lot about Zen and this is expressing a lot of similar philosophical notions. It seems to express in the way of a haiku.
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