This project, which I feel was by far the most difficult, started when we began reading Brave New World. This process took several weeks, and after this time had gone by, our class conducted a Socratic Seminar which was about the drug 'Soma', and how it creates false happiness within the book. After reading the book we then proceeded to collect piles of evidence that would be used in our happiness essays. This project also required that we created an art piece, to represent our knowledge of happiness and also to use creativity to produce a piece of art understandable and easy to depict by the public. The purpose of this project, in all authenticity, was to not only teach us about the fundamentals of happiness, but to hopefully provide us with the knowledge we need to help future generations.
While collecting evidence for my Happiness Essay, I came across a TED Talk conducted by Malcolm Gladwell. The title of the TED Talk was “Choice, Happiness and Spaghetti Sauce”. Not only did this speak to me, but it tickled my fancy and I thought how good it would be to use metaphors on a dish of spaghetti sauce and pasta. And that is PRECISELY what I did! As you can see, this poster is really a summary of my learning experience thus far. The ideas that I created were directly used from the essay I had written, yet one of my peers introduced the idea of a fly, which represents appreciation for your happiness. This idea also really spoke to me, and now, as you can see, it is on my poster. Meaning was what I connected directly to the pasta. The pasta is a foundation of the dish, as meaning is. Every metaphor I used made sense, and so after creating the poster I was able to fully understand what Malcolm Gladwell was stating in his TED Talk; that happiness can be SO simple, and yet at the same time so very complex. My art piece represents Happiness in a nutshell, and not only was it a good reflection, and allowed me to look back at the ideas introduced through this project, but it gave me an opportunity to use much more creativity and create the metaphors that I did. Below is the art piece I have created!