#team5enses

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Mid-Term Presentation

What a long but exciting and fun night!

We got a chance to share our project and progress with the other teams and enjoyed listening to what the other teams have been doing. Congratulations to all the other teams and good luck for the upcoming busy weeks ;)

Now we can go back to experimenting with senses and symbols! 

Team 5enses <3

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We are onto the next step in our project, distilling senses and symbols. Adding some structure to the abstract (;

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This is a map of my way to the city of Maastricht which I bike every day. I tried to represent the sensations I experience and what different places represent to me. I will explain some of them. 

My home is my resting place, which I perceive as a worm “shelter” which I am glad to reach especially during the cold and winter days. The way along the river is like my morning rainbow, my day can literally change when I choose to bike there instead of along the street. The compass represents the times I felt lost and I found my self again. 

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We’ve been drawing inspiration from the amazing work from Ferran Adrià. He is a  Catalan chef who, as the creative force behind the restaurant El Bulli (closed in 2011), pioneered the influential culinary trend known as molecular gastronomy, which uses precise scientific techniques to create inventive and evocative high-end cuisine. In the early 21st century many considered him the best chef in the world. Notes on Creativity focuses on Adrià’s consistent and radical approach to the sense of taste. It shows the important relation in his practice between sensory perception and the creative process.  Particularly interesting for our team is the series of pictograms developed by Marta Méndez Blaya in 2001 for elBulli’s General Catalogue. You can see come of these graphic icons for products used in the restaurant in the picture above.

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Visual sensorial maps 

Picture 1&2 / Saudi Arabia 

I outlined the shapes with a pen and went over it with water colours. The result represented the desert landscape I so often saw in Saudi. I learnt to draw those shapes from my family and since Saudi is where I grew up, family lessons have greatly influenced me in my choice of design. I thought the seashell-like shape was a great symbol for the history Saudi has 

with the ocean covering its lands and thus all the ocean fossils we would find scavenging through the sand when I was young. I remember returning to Belgium on vacation and telling people about what I had found among the dunes and meeting their surprise. These fossils, shells and shark teeth always felt like a secret that nobody really knew about unless they were there themselves with their hands wrist deep in the hot sand. <

Picture 3 / Alps

I used a scalpel craft knife to cut some undulating lines on a few pages back to back. This created an effect of depth perception and texture that reminds me of the view I experience when snowboarding off-piste in the winter mountains. I kept the paper as it was because it recalls the white monochrome nature of mountains covered in powder on a sweet snow day. The simplicity of this creation represents the perception I have when lost in the mountains and the birth of my zen state of mind surrounded by such a landscape.

Picture 4 / Belgium

I used to live abroad for 22 years. The page is split in three different sections referring to the three different times I used to visit Belgium annually during my time abroad. The colours represent the different seasons of the year I used to swing by. If I had to choose one colour to fog my memory, I remember winter as being blue, Spring as being red and summer as being green. I drew/painted using pen and water colours. I created the piece in two different sessions. The first session I drew and painted and the second session I went over the borders between the sections with paint to make the colour more vivid in those areas.

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A mind map about cringing. What are all the situations you associate with cringe? Here’s some!

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Map of Maastricht.

This is a brief sketch of how it's precieved by someone living on the Randwyck side of the city. The reds and oranges depict the places for meeting friends, socialization and the purple ones represent the shopping areas in brief. The connecting lanes show how Maastricht has a geography of interconnection. The next picture of legend shows what the different senses precieve while walking through these lanes.

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Behind the scenes

Hello everyone! We hope everyone is energised post the carnival break hangover. As our project is quite abstract, we would like to give you a behind-the-scene glimpse of how things work at team 5enses. To begin with the process of creating a visual symbolic language depicting exploration of senses, we first started to sensorially explore the world around us and in our memories. Our client was satisfied with our explorations and urged us to communicate about these with each other, to understand - Does everyone perceive things the same way that you do?

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Mind Map of Maastricht Vrijthof, walking around the route blindfolded and experiencing through the sense of smell and touch.

When I did the blindfold walk it was a little bit scary as it sounds. But I enjoyed the entire experience. I was able to make out the landmarks around me because of their aroma ( for example the sweets shops and the food places) and other attributes like hot air coming through the shops (as it was winter and some shops had heightened heating). Overall it was an eye opener and a fun activity.

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1 - We tried to synthesize peculiar aspects of simple sensorial experiences, like drinking a glass of water or walking in the wind into a symbolic language. Sometimes we can’t help but experience something, like the sun or the wind, we can’t block all of our senses. We can close our eyes and block the light to our sight but we can still fill the warmth of the sun on our skin. It is like the sensations are actively having an effect on us. For other experiences, we play a more active role, like when we touch, drink or eat something. It starts when we decide. 2 - A visual representation of different places drawn from memory through the lens of the senses.