Stone Soup

Stone Soup is so valuable as a story, an activity, and experience, a moral. What a concept! Pooling resources for the common good. A very simple idea yet I feel like the brilliance of this concept is no longer obvious. For many, life seems to be spent in a subtle and perhaps unconscious competition and more often than not we are concerned with succeeding as individuals rather than as a community.

Perhaps it is just because many lack the experience of strong community, group work, common vision/goals. Without this, it is hard to see the benefit of dealing with more opinions, ideas, concerns than just your own.

Because of this loss of connection with positive experience in cooperation, we NEED stone soup... in any shape or form we can have it.

The University can be an extremely competitive environment because ultimately, each individual graduates alone, and is permitted to do so after judgement is passed solely on the work they completed and the grades they received. However, no on truly reaches that point alone. We thrive off of ad grow from observation and interaction with others.

The stone soup activity in our Design class certainly planted a seed, or at least reawakened  something out of dormancy. The tinkering, creative, curious and experimental child within each one of us was finally encouraged and actually instructed to come forth.

In a large lecture hall with hundreds of students so focused on capturing every word and date in our notebooks, we hardly allow time to look at those around us and get to understand their best qualities.
By going outside, sharing odd found items, and attempting to use those to create something worthwhile, we were able to learn a little about each other as designers and benefit from each others examples.  

Working with a group assures you will have most everything you could need. I brought many wild items (bodysuit, cape, shield) but didn’t even think to grab glue, tape, pipe cleaners, scissors....all very necessary items.
Our group worked together seamlessly. Building off of one item, a large painted bodysuit, we began to just create in smaller groups without worrying too much what the ultimate goal was, creating a story as we went. Some people began tying sticks together for hair, others adhering the body to the tree, others creating faces and inventing personalities for the characters.

Seconds before the time was up, the story came together.

The little blue paper/plastic boy had close family members who recently passed away. (They are the gnomes in the picture he’s holding). The sheer grief caused him to lose his mind and create an alternate reality where he lost control of his own body some wild flying man (the creature in the tree) was puppeteering him from the sky.

I love the story, and the calm playtime. Hopefully this experience set off a spark of creativity inside everyone and reminded us to find community and share resources to make this huge and unfamiliar place feel richer and more intimate from cooperation.