Stone Soup

"Stone Soup" 

If someone had said this phrase to me a few weeks ago, I probably would have assumed it was some sort of poorly new-age recipe; however,  thanks to my design professor I now know it is the name of a very charming children's book by Marcia Brown.

The story follows three soldiers who arrive to a village with nothing more than a pot and without villagers offering any food. They begin making "stone soup", boiling water and dropping in a large stone. The villagers become curious about the peculiar soup and begin offering items of food: some carrots here, some spices there. Soon they have a large pot of delicious soup to share. 

Although we didn't make a giant pot of soup during class, we did incorporate the idea of sharing resources and working together into a design project. Separated into small groups, we were asked to bring whatever "ingredients" we could (cardboard, paint, string, etc) to add to our group's Stone Soup. 

As our group spilled outside we each tossed our supplies onto a very large, diverse pile and I could tell we had a lot to work with. I was instantly intrigued by a couple boxes of Christmas ornaments and I could see everyone else in my group examining the pieces that had immediately stuck out to them. And so we began throwing our ingredients into the pot of soup. With no real plan in mind we began creating small pieces of individual art and blending them together on our make-shift base.  

After coming to the consensus that our piece was complete, we stood up to take a look at ours and others. I was pleased to see how completely different the other groups' Stone Soups were. Starting from an entirely different set of materials and ideas had produced very different finished pieces, all extremely creative and interesting.

The exercise reminded us of the importance of working together in the design world. Every single designer has his or her own set of unique ideas and skills, but there are virtually no design projects that are done completely alone. We must learn to mesh our ideas together, create new ideas, use one another's skills to better the project as a whole, and end up with a finished product that we are each proud of, knowing that we couldn't have possibly done it all alone.