Stone Soup

In the novel Stone Soup, by Marcia Brown, three soldiers come into town and plead for food.  Since none of the villagers were willing to cook meals for them, they started a soup consisting of only water and rocks.  They began asking people for simple ingredients, one by one, until the whole town had contributed to the delicious soup that everyone shared.  Though it was gone as soon as everyone had enjoyed some of their creation, the process of compiling ingredients brought a sense of camaraderie to the town.

Last week, we experienced our own form of the "stone soup" process.  While there was no food involved, we worked together with our group members to design a sculpture using materials that each person brought in.  At first, no one in our group was sure where to start.  We were all waiting for someone to initiate our project; shy about asserting our own ideas.  But once a few people voiced their ideas, we all started working on individual parts of the design and attaching them to the tree post we used as a base.  Slowly, our various ribbons, paper plates, and torn paper strips began to take shape as a unique sculpture.  Just like the soup in Brown's novel, it was only a temporary creation, an ephemeral project, that was not meant to last.  But while it was there, we all got to enjoy looking at it and appreciating what we all came together to create.

I really enjoyed this assignment.  While parts of it reminded me of doing craft projects in elementary school, I also learned some bigger lessons about the design process.  I think what stuck with me the most was the importance of collaborating with other people to come up with a design idea, rather than relying on one person to come up with an entire project alone.  This leads to final products that one person couldn't have completed without help from a team.