The first step we took was to come up with the skeletal sketch of a gameplan. What needs to be done first , at what amount amount of time and in what detail. The initial decision was to do an extensive research on the properties/capabilities of clay and also on a field research on possible markets. The Ideation on the products were to be based on the research. Rather than a high variety of prototypes and choosing from it, we were thinking of choosing a select few from the ideation stage and putting the maximum effort into it to making it perfect.
Unfortuantely , nothing went as planned. We were advised to do the research alongside with the ideation due to apparent lack of time. Thus most of the initial ideas where based on the properties of clay we already knew, which ended up in us having only aesthetic innovations rather than functional design. And , in a even more sad turn of events, most of the functional designs we did come up with, were proved futile in later research!! So the first week felt more like blind ideation, and we were forced to shift focus a bit too much.
Another factor which forced us to limit ourselves a lot was the necessity to test the product in the five week period. A lot of the ideas required adequate amount of time to be executed, and because of the time clay products takes to be dried and burned, most of our rather more ambitious projects were nipped in the bud. Thus almost all of our final ideas had to be either small scale singular products or/and products based already existing products.
The lack of initial research on the market and also the proposed research on in-demand goods which could be (with some tweaks) made out of clay, we were going nowhere with the other half of our research which was to find a stable demand on a mass producible item which would give narayanpura people a stable source of income. Examples we could come up with was Door nobs made of clay, Shooting skits made of clay etc.
Seeing that the ideation part of it was going nowhere , because most of the products we were coming up with seemed to be using clay due to forcing rather than necessity, some of us went to popular design showrooms in Bangalore to get a feel of what is usually bought by the public.
Most of the more expensive and lucrative items did seem to be more of aesthetic value than functional and only common sense was needed to understand that this would be true for terracotta also. With its extreme brittleness and sad tensile strength, clay would be a horrible replacement for anything made out of plastic or metal if u r trying to better the functional value. Finally we came up on the decision to make Asthetic products base on the functional properties of clay. I.E For the gel wax candle we made with the clay idol inside, the ability of clay to resist heat and not change form is used. Also one other major advantage clay had over everything else was that it was cheap.
When we finally got into executing most of the procucts, we realised that clay had an even worse disadvantage: It had worse structural strength. Stuff you make out of clay is very suspectible to collapse if you don’t follow a lot of structural construction rules. It was not as versatile as plastic and metal. (now this was when we came to full realisation of how the decision to do research alongside was a big big mistake as it created humongous wastage of time.)
But thankfully some of the products did make it through this excessive screening process and we were also able to improvise on it. One aspect of terracotta we fully utilised was the ability to take heat. This made it a very cheap crockery material without compromising on functionality or looks. Also the water absorption qualities made it a good material for bathroom stuff like soap dishes, soap dispensers, also the texture and the colour gave it a nice earthy feel.
