The
DESIGN Perspective
On Beading and Jewelry Making
The DESIGN PERSPECTIVE is very focused on teaching
beaders and jewelry makers how to make choices. Choices
about what materials to include, and not to include. Choices
about strategies and techniques of construction. Choices
about mechanics. Choices about aesthetics. Choices about
how best to evoke emotions.
These
choices must also reflect an understanding of the bead and
its related components. How do all these pieces, in conjunction
with stringing materials, assert their needs? Their needs
for color, light and shadow. Their needs for durability,
flexibility, drape, movement and wearability. Their needs
for social or psychological or cultural or contextual appropriateness
-- an appropriateness that has to do with satisfaction,
beauty, fashion and style, as well as power and influence.
This DESIGN PERSPECTIVE contrasts with the more predominant
Craft Approach, where the beader or jewelry maker
merely follows a set of steps and ends up with something.
Here, in this step-by-step approach, all the choices have
been made for them.
And
this DESIGN PERSPECTIVE also contrasts with another widespread
approach to beading and jewelry making – the Art
Tradition – which focuses on achieving ideals
of beauty, whether the jewelry is worn or not. Here the
beader or jewelry maker learns to apply art theories learned
by painters and sculptors, and assumed to apply equally
to beads and jewelry, as well.
The
Craft Approach and the Art Tradition ignore
too much of the functional essence of jewelry. Because of
this, they often steer the beader and jewelry maker in the
wrong directions. Making the wrong choices. Exercising the
wrong judgments. Applying the wrong tradeoffs between aesthetics
and functionality.
The focus of the DESIGN PERSPECTIVE is strategic thinking.
At the core of this thinking are a series of design principles
and their skillful applications. These principles go beyond
a set of techniques. These principles and the strategies
for applying them provide the beader and jewelry maker with
some clarity in a muddled world.
The
belief here is that, since there are so many different kinds
of information to be learned and applied, it is impossible
to clearly integrate this information all at once. When
learned haphazardly or randomly, it becomes more difficult
or too confusing to successfully bring to bear all these
kinds of things the beader or jewelry maker needs to do
when designing and constructing a piece of jewelry. Thus,
the beader and jewelry maker best learn all this related
yet disparate information in a developmental order, based
on some coherent grammer or set of rules of design. By learning
within this organized structure and informational hierarchy,
the jewelry artist best sees how everything interrelates
and comes together. This is the DESIGN PERSPECTIVE.
So,
we begin with a Core set of skills and concepts, and how
these are interrelated and applied. Then we move on to a
Second Set of skills and concepts, their interrelationships
and applications, and identifying how they are related to
the Core. And onward again to a Third Set of skills and
concepts, their interrelationships and applications and
relationship to the Second Set and the Core, and so forth.
In the DESIGN PERSPECTIVE, “Jewelry” is understood
as Art, but is only Art as it is worn. It is not considered
Art when sitting on a mannequin or easel. Because of this,
the principles learned through Craft or Art are important,
but not sufficient for learning good jewelry design and
fashioning good jewelry.
Learning
good jewelry design creates its own challenges. All jewelry
functions in a 3-dimensional space, particularly sensitive
to position, volume and scale. Jewelry must stand on its
own as an object of art. But it must also exist as an object
of art which interacts with people (and a person’s
body), movement, personality, and quirks of the wearer,
and of the viewer, as well as the environment and context.
Jewelry serves many purposes, some aesthetic, some functional,
some social and cultural, some psychological.
The focus of the DESIGN PERSPECTIVE is on the parts. How
do you choose them? How should they be used, and not be
used? How do you assemble them and combine them in such
a way that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts?
How do you create and build in support systems within your
jewelry to enable that greater movement, more flexibility,
better draping, longer durability? How do you best use all
these parts, making them resonate and evoking that emotional
response from your audience to your style, vision and creative
hand that you so desire?
The beader and jewelry maker is seen as a multi-functional
professional, similar to an architect who builds houses
and an engineer who builds bridges. In all these cases,
the professional must bring a lot of very different kinds
of skills and abilities to bear, when constructing, whether
house or bridge or jewelry. The professional has to be able
to manage artistic design, functionality, and the interaction
of the object with the person and that person’s environment.
Read:
ABOUT
GOOD JEWELRY DESIGN: Principles of Composition