FORM

Teapot inspired from Black carpenter ants

This was a classroom project which I did for the course “Nature and Form”.

Team

Tejas Pawar

Mentors

Snehal Joshi

Duration

4 weeks

Choosing the subject

I choose BLACK CARPENTER ANTS as the subject to study. We did several sketches and created wire model to understand the structure and get use to it’s form.

Selecting 2 views

Highlighting the important feature

Retaining the antness by removing lines and using less lines. I went by the process of removing lines and features that were not need, I want to get to the body features that makes an object an ant. by the image 3 antness was achieved but when i removed the antenna it was no longer an ant . Ants can be differentiated based on their mandibles, abdomen size, color,

Key Attributes

Exploration set 1 (Innocence)

To achieve innocence and blob more clearly, I tried going with the form which would be easy to understand, so I came up with doodle exploration. I chose doodle because they show innocence and naiveness, and used circle and oval because it represents soft and blob more clearly than any other basic shape.

When the form came to fig. 3 it was going more towards asymmetric and unstable.

by fig 4 the doodle was symmetric more toward the innocent, blob

Exploration set 2 (Hard+Innocence)

I tried experimenting and started exploring a section of the form and took hard as an attribute to pair with innocence. I converted the free-flowing form of the ant to a more geometric figure to show the from's hardness. The form consists of the basic features of the ant and abstracting it down to the basic level of geometric features one might need to draw an ant.

Now I have to achieve the innocence of the form by keeping it hard. To get the attribute of innocence(child-like, naive), I tried to reduce its sharpness first by introducing fillets.

What I was expecting from this exercise was to achieve a form that is both hard and innocent (maybe a toy-like), which could interest a child. I used bright yellow (the ant's hair is yellow in color) and made it less sharp. The fig.3 in my opinion is working well for the task.

Exploration set 3 (Typography)

I took innocence( soft, cute, childlike), and blob as primary attributes for this exploration and to make it more fun tried to have a constraint of using only alphabets to get the antness and the attributes.
I allotted each form of the ant with an alphabet.

Teapot Explorations

Ant Teapot

The working of the teapot is inspired by a Klein bottle and the form is inspired by carpenter ants. The attributes of innocence and blob are added to the product in order to amplify its playful quality.
As the function is quite puzzling so the form is kept simple. It is not a day-to-day use product, one may use it during a gathering to baffle their guest and laugh about it.