Its not what is looks like...

Todays contemporary design culture class was something out of the ordinary for all of us, for the first time since starting college we collaborated with another class. A group from LSAD in Limerick made the journey out to UL to work on a project with us. The topic of the project? Trompe-l'œil! Or for those of you not so savvy in French - optical illusions. I have to say I had been eagerly anticipating this project since first year when I witnessed the second years at the time participating in it and I immediately was amazed by it.

We were split into groups, a mixture of LSAD students and students for our own class and began brainstorming ideas, after much consideration and debating amongst ourselves we decided to go with a kind of 3D step illusion. The project said we could use any space to produce our illusion so after collecting some material (silage tape) we set about finding a suitable and big enough spot as our one was going to take up quite a bit of room. We eventually decided on going for the main floor in the foundation building just outside the ticket office for the concert hall. We traced out the illusion on an acetate sheet and went onto the top floor of the foundation building, we then attached it to a makeshift tripod and we then split into two, half of us went down stairs to begin creating our masterpiece while the other half stayed upstairs and viewed the scene through the acetate and directed us on where to go. We marked it out with chalk first before then placing down the silage tape, it was a lot of fun to do and it was funny watching people walk passed staring at us wondering what on earth we were doing to the floor, even the security guard for the building came over and wasn't too happy until we explained the situation! After a lot of co-ordination and team work from above and below we managed to pull it off, and it really was a masterpiece!

I think this class was a great idea as it really required a lot of team work, it was very interesting to collaborate with the LSAD students and learn about their way of thinking as we are all used to each others way of thinking in our own group! It provided a fresh spin on things and it shows even in industry how two people with different thought processes can work together to successfully come up with something that works! It was also interesting to hear about their course and what exactly they have to do as well as explaining what we did and describing different projects we had carried out! As for the design part of things, I had a lot of fun! It is really amazing to think how optical illusions actually work and you never really get a sense of understanding until you carry one out yourself!