Our first studio class involved understanding the importance of words.Our faculty threw the word “Despicable” in front of the class and asked us what it exactly meant. Briefly I had an understanding that it means hateful, annoying, stubborn, mean, selfish, etc. We moved on to check the dictionary meaning and synonyms. When we dug deeper, I understood that this word holds much more significance than we knew.
Further, we discussed positive and negative connotations. I learnt that a word could be a negative connotation for me while a positive one for someone else so it depends on the emphasis one lays on the word. We also discussed the aspects that mould the person, for example, past experiences, childhood memories and incidents.
Our class group activity was to act out a word through a mime, without any talking. We got the word, “coherence”, meaning the quality of being consistent and logical. We learnt that the synonyms are: continuity, rationality, bond, unity, etc. We tried to depict the word using the synonyms and also the scientific meaning of the word which means the relationship between the phases of a wave. The origin of the word came from the latin language meaning, sticking together. So we used that as our key word and tried understanding how we could act that out.
We could not get the class to guess our word but this activity made me understand how important it is to understand any word to the core before conveying it. I also learnt the importance of filtering our language to avoid unpleasant consequences. Communication is one of the main keys to become a good designer and this studio class helped me understand that better through the interesting discussion on the importance of words.
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