Stone Soup

Regardless of their children based audiences, everyone - including adults - can learn valuable lessons through stories such as Marcia Brown's Stone Soup. In this old French tale, readers are introduced to three hungry soldiers whose big appetites scare the residents of a local village. However, after the soldiers request for a large pot to cook stone soup for everyone, the villagers began to cooperate, bringing out all the food they hid prior to the soldiers' arrival. As each person added his or her ingredients to the boiling stone water, they came closer and closer to creating a delicious soup, eventually providing both the villagers and the soldiers with a satisfying meal.

Aside from the sharing aspect of the story, the all encompassing moral is that the efforts of more than one person is necessary to create something extraordinary, whether it be soup or design.

The proof to this fact was seen on Tuesday, October 5^th, when students of Housefield’s Design 001 used materials they found to assemble their very own “Stone Soup” in groups. The process was as creative as it could get, bringing each designer back to the simple mindset of a kindergartener; instead of overthinking as to what to do, each group just let the the process take them to wherever it led them. In my group’s case, this freedom to create just about anything resulted with an extremely interesting piece of design.

Initially, my group did not know what to make out of our gathered materials. What we saw was merely a pack of turquoise paper, white pipe-cleaners, yarn, tape, an old boardgame, and a few plastic bottles. However, when someone pulled out a white body suit splattered with paint, it set us in motion; we began stuffing the suit with rolled up paper to make it more three dimensional. Soon, we discovered that the paint on the suit actually depicted a frightening face, sending us off on the idea of creating a monster hanging from the tree nearby. Slowly but surely, all the materials we brought, along with broken twigs, were used to make a “scene” telling a story of an evil puppeteer tormenting a “blue guy” through dreams. With all the attention we drew from the other groups, we proudly deemed our project a huge success.

Certainly, both the story and the activity of “Stone Soup” reveals to us potential designers that no successful designer in the world works solo. Although creativity is important, collaboration is even more so.

*Pictures taken by Clarice Kwok, Design 001