Water bottles - Admission assignment for Designs School Kolding

The year I was granted admission to Design School Kolding (2011), the admission assignment had "Water" as its' theme. That's what it said on the front page, and then it gave us some facts about water, like: “A bagillion percent of Earths surface is covered in water." And "Human beings have to drink at least one quadrillion litres of water every year in order to not shrink up and die.” I might be paraphrasing... But that was it. No guidance... no: “If you wanna be a rock’n’roll fashion designer show us at least ten sketches of clothing”, or “If you want to be an industrial designer, you have to at least, build your own model of a watermill”.

This confused me the first two years, I applied (in 2005 and in 2007). But in 2011, I had taken an AP degree in fashion from TEKO, and I decided to solve the assignment the way I would have at TEKO. Therefore you will see an assignment very focused on technical drawings and the end product. Half the assignment was end product and half was sketching. I chose to put the final product first in the assignment, because I felt it was the important thing. I didn’t feel that the process was all too important (shows what I knew).

This is the text I wrote in the assignment. It was close to the only text in the entire assignment, apart from the descriptions of the final designs:

"In this assignment, I have chosen to work with the inspiration of water bottles. I have chosen this from the inspiration of water with the thought of designing a collection of evening gowns, showing my style, my abilities and my way of working. The thought behind water bottles sprang from the idea that only 1% of the water in the world is available to the human kind. When that is said – where do we get that water from?

Through my thoughts came both shower heads and faucets, drinking glasses and last but not least: water bottles. The idea was to find a solid subject, that already consisted in several shapes and designs, with a solid shape I could work with.

The development of the different designs has to happen with a base in one of the five bottles seen on the first page, by processing the shape through the sketching techniques: not looking, cubic, abstract, child like, mosaic, geometric, no contour, only shadow, exaggeration and flat. Through these techniques I will look at the shapes through different eyes and thereafter sketch different dresses from every bottle (sketches are to be found in the last part of the assignment) – in the end developed into 10 clear designs."

"Beauty inspired by the everyday obviousness"

If I had to do it all again, I would change a lot of things. I would make the assignment more tactile. I would have dwelled more in the process. I would have sketched and brainstormed a lot more. I would have put the end result in the back for a nice build up etc…  

But maybe not doing all these things is what got me in. Maybe they saw potential. Maybe they saw someone who did things differently. Whatever I did, made them notice me in the stack of 600 applicants so I guess it worked out just fine in the end.