Proposal Update: Elan Vital (a.k.a. the beastly Wheel of Fortune)

elan vital: the creative force within an organism that is responsible for growth, change, and necessary or desirable adaptations.

Currently I am working on a physical tool that can be used by creatives to bring to light unimagined beasts. In the creative world we're seeing a lot of recycled ideas, but I'm hoping that this tool can bring about animals, aliens, etc. that the user would not have imagined, but it fully satisfied with. This could be used as a supplement to illustrations, comics, creative writing, or even rpg gaming (Dungeons and Dragon, Pathfinder, etc.) to come up with something new and exciting.

The format is a wheel, beginning in the center with the base elements and branching out further into specifics. The point of the wheel is to give let the user see every option at once so their possibilities are no inhibited. The goal is not to go as far to the edge as you can, but rather to highlight points on the wheel that you would like to use. Maybe staying vague will allow the user to put their own spin on an idea, or maybe they would rather get right to specifics and chase a line down to the very edge so they know exactly what they want.

The goal of this tool is to allow for practically infinite possibilities.

Working...

Currently plugging away at this tree. The end goal is to be able to organize all of this information on a wheel, but first I want to expand as much as possible to create hundreds of possibilities for idea generation.

Card Types

To give this game some structure, I decided to categorize them into: Earth, Fire, Water, Air, Magic, Tech, Space, and Plant (names subject to change).

My overarching thought for the gameplay would be that a player would draw a category card (that lists only the category) and on the table there would the cards with the creature pieces face down with the category symbols and colors on the back. The player would take a random card from the element and would have to make it work with the creature they are already creating.

Below are some sketches for element symbols, mainly for Earth and Fire:

Monster Cards & Boxes

At the mention of cards last week, this method of creation stewed in my head. In a final product these cards would be transparent aside from the artwork which will be black line illustrations (possibly screen printed). This will allow potentially infinite layering without loss of line quality. The material that the cards would be made (ex. acetate, cellulose, etc.) of may also allow from dry or wet erase coloring in order to further customize the created beast.
 

Box Doodles

Flip Book Examples

Flip books are used to create random, yet workable results when used. While they are a good tool to look at for my project I'm still looking for something that will go a little more in depth so I can add specific things like senses, attributes, perhaps even inner anatomy.

Exquisite Corpses

Sensing Emotion

Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions

After reading the short handout from "The History of Love" I connected the question of what these fictional sensors could pick up and how the narrator was feeling things such as loss and nostalgia in different parts of their body. If sensors could read or feel specific emotions I think that would not only add to the underlying narrative that could be written into that power in the future, but be a good opportunity to research emotion and figure out how emotions work and what human responses come with the corresponding emotions.


Extra: Style Study and Clay Sketch

Photoshop - Pen Tool

Studies and Body Parts

Here includes a few studies of current creatures, images of old Hellbat concepts that retain a lot of the current design, a small study of tardigrade anatomy, and documentation on six of the creature's respective tails, ears, eyes, appendages, and mouths.

Appendages pt.1

Appendages pt.2 and Creature Studies

Ears

Tongues

Eyes and Tails

Mouths

First Hellbat Concept

Most Recent Hellbat Concept

Tardigrade Study

Beginnings of "Rat King" Concept

Midscape Short Stories

Short Story: Valdi

Short(er) Story: Oum

Creature Factory

I will be creating a tool to allow others to create beasts with any features, outward or in, of the user's choice. The format of this concept has yet to be determined, but right now I am looking at other creature creators such as Spore (a video game) and physical objects like books. I am considering printing features on acetate, a clear and printable paper, so that I could layer them over each other without losing any quality of the prints beneath.

preliminaries

1

All seminar projects should have a title (always subject to change), and a 140-character (tweet length) summary (also may be changed). Optional: three or four #tags, possibly worked into that tweet-length summary, that help orient the work to larger (social, thematic, political etc) concerns.

For Tuesday: Have titles and 140-character summaries; do the readings; discuss current movements in your projects/initiatives.

This post is tagged with everyone's tag (or "label"), so you can see your name in the "posts by" list on main blog page, right column.

2

The two readings I assigned are these

Cameron Tonkinwise
design thinking, yet again, because, maybe, it could actually be useful, perhaps even necessary, given every thing
June 12, 2017

Christina Wodtke
How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Design Thinking
August 26, 2017

Cameron Tonkinwise is a smart, energetic and prolific writer about design (sustainability design, transition design). I monitor his writing and links to others' writing via @camerontw.
he is also at academia.edu.