Design Overload!!!

April 19, 2010
Yesterday we missed the bus and waited 30 minutes for the bus to take us to church so pretty much we sat in the hall with no translation and tried not to fall asleep. We were supposed to meet up with the rest of the group after church but since it was raining and we were all exhausted we decided to skip out on that. Apparently there was a volcano that erupted a while ago.....as a result many designers couldn't make it to the design fair due to the ash in the air and a lot of flights being grounded. So there were not as many designers as usual. I don't know how many are usually there, but there was a lot already.
Design Week is finishing up; today is the last day. As much as I've loved seeing all of the cool designs, it's been exhausting and every part of my body hurts. In fact I had a dream that I woke up crying and thrashing in bed because my back hurt. Then the next day my roommate asked how I slept and said that I woke up crying that my back hurt really bad. Guess it wasn't a dream. Plus these beds that they have at the hotel and not comfortable.
I'm still blown away and in awe at all the amazing designs that I saw. Today we had group presentations (which did not go over well) about all the different things that we saw. We are designing Prefab Retail Spaces for the 2015 World Expo which will be held in Milan in the same place as the Design Fair. It was nice to be able to see where our stores would be and how things would work within the building. We talked about the different things that caught our attention and drew us into the different exhibits. There were a lot of sustainable materials that were used. One company used cedar wood to make furniture. It smelled SO good, it was really hard to leave the exhibit. They also had a student exhibit that had some interesting things. One exhibit was a table and chairs but the table was just a long piece of metal with branch like pieces going to where all the chairs were and the chairs were not even a foot wide. We started talking about how you could eat at the table but you couldn't sit in the chairs and the head instructor of the project asked if we liked and he explained that it was for anorexic people because all they eat is lemonade! The design project was called "Design in a Crisis!" The school was from the Middle East somewhere......
Today was midterms. Yea already. Don't worry I did not study and spent the bus ride to school studying and then almost missed the stop! Thankfully all we had to do was write a one page essay paper about 2 different specific topics. I compared the Italian and American Constitution. Pretty sure I made no sense at all. For the other one I talked about the Design Fair. 9 AM is too early for writing papers. After that we had our Commercial Design class and a ton of stuff was due. I had a presentation that since I prepared everything on my PC and the presentation classroom only has a damn Mac it didn't work and I somehow pissed me teacher off, again. Then when she came around to each of us to see our projects and got to mine, despite the fact that I was one of the few students with everything done, she ripped mine apart and was not helpful in the least bit. So instead of sitting through 2 hours of ridiculous Italian Language class we went for Gelatto and I got as much freaking chocolate as I could. I'm gonna miss the gelatto. Maybe I can take some more home with me?