Hi, all! Reporting out from last week!
Echoing some of the thoughts from my fellow co-designers, I am so excited by the many directions in which this activity might grow. In doing some preliminary research (and through reading the introduction of Alex’s book), I’ve come to realize the role of symmetry in most things around us: nature and biology; art and architecture; textiles; poetry, language, and literature; music. In our playtest last week, @claudiahaines mentioned that she would love for her patrons to notice or discover “symmetry where they are” – my hope is that we can create a series of activity prompts that potentiates this process of discovery, creation, or simply “noticing.”
With this in mind, I’m starting to think about the different ways in which to engage symmetry: how do we understand what symmetry means? Through creating patterns, and then destroying them? Through found objects, and through photography? Alex’s Beautiful Symmetry encourages understanding through coloring, and I am wondering how we can carry that idea forward into other realms of creativity. Some thoughts from my initial brainstorm:
To highlight one discussion point from our playtest last week: we’ve been tasked with thinking about ways to integrate the terminology or nomenclature of different symmetry patterns (translation; glide and mirror reflections; rotations) into the activity we’re working towards. Typically, in PLIX activities, we try to avoid too much technical jargon, but knew that this nomenclature was something we’d like to incporproate into the learning and material design. We’ve begun to think about various ‘tools’ that facilitators or patrons can create to help understand what these terms mean. I thought about creating a ‘symmetry toolkit’ with various easy-to-make objects that help in identifying what type of symmetry an object or drawing contains.
Also, Alex has led online workshops in which participants use the Zoom annotation feature to collaboratively color pages from the book in a virtual setting! We got to try it out!
Would be curious to hear about how and when folks see symmetry around them as they go about their day! Looking forward to continuing this process of discovery over the next several weeks : )