The quarter is drawing to a close and last night I finished the final prototype for my prosthetic arm design. I am quite happy with how it turned out. As soon as I finish a process book to help explain the usage and features a little bit I think it will be my finest piece of design yet.
I am counting down the days until Rachel and I depart for Omaha, I am so excited to go on an adventure with my wife and to see my family for xmas. In the meantime, however, there is still much work to be done by thursday. Tonight I finished my experimental art project for my DXARTS class. Besides this blog, which really doesn't count, it is the first complete website I have ever built. Click on the photo below to check it out!
I have been learning Rhino 3D, a program designers use to create digital models of their ideas. These are just some fun exercises I have done in the last few weeks to get used to the tools:
I rode the bus today for the first time in a couple months....
Oh, how I've missed you freaky people...
Though, to you I am likely the freaky guy on the bus....
So, after the Astoria trip (and a sleepless week of school stuff), we met up with the Oregon crowd again this last weekend for some more adventure. Joanne's old business partner, Ed, has a printing shop at his house including an antique letterpress that we have decided to use for our wedding invites. It took something that I would really not care much about, as long as everybody knew where and when to be at the wedding, and transformed it into a really exciting and meaningful experience for me. We spent pretty much all day saturday setting type (mmmmm....Garamond) and are closing in on our final designs now.... I'm shopping for paper tomorrow..... I love shopping for paper..... We also attended Uncle George's 70th birthday party smackdown that night, it was a big crowd and tons of fun. Fran and George had a tremendous amount of food ready for everyone, as usual. I always eat so much over there that I have a favorite napping spot in their house for after meals coma.
OK, a little catching up to do, my patience is telling me that these are stories best told photographically, so it's a good thing I've taken a TON of pictures recently. Two weeks ago, Rachel, myself, Seaton, Joanne, Lisa and Rebecca all took a trip together down to Astoria, Oregon, just across the Columbia from where Rach and I are getting married this summer. We saw some sights, relaxed a bit, handled some wedding business, found the best place for B.M.s (bloody marys that is), tried some local breweries and ate dinner at the restaraunt we are going to have cater the wedding (It was so damn good). Click on the map below to go to the photo album:
I try to change little things about the way I eat every month or so. I don't go crazy I just pick one thing to try to cut out of my diet that is poisonous, toxic, disgusting or otherwise bad for me and then try my best to at least be aware of when I am ingesting it. It has led to some very positive changes in my lifestyle and I change so gradually that I barely miss some of the things I used to eat everyday. For example, my naturopath told me I was allergic to bananas. I used to eat bananas EVERY DAY! Turns out that they may have been contributing to some of the health issues I've had, so I stopped eating them, or rather, started generally avoiding them. Another thing that I have tried my best to cut out of my life is HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP, it sure is difficult thought, that crap is everywhere!!! It is in things you would never even think of like ketchup, dry cereal, worcestershire sauce, yogurt and most recently I found it in the Kikkoman teriyaki sauce I have always bought! WOW, what the crap?!? So, the whole point of this post is to introduce my new favorite sauce, Rach and I have totally fallen in love with this stuff... I think we have had it the last two nights on our chicken, it is thick, chunky, and much more robust than regular teriyaki and best of all, NO HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP!!! It does have a little more sugar per serving, but it's the good stuff and this sauce is so flavorful, you end up using less of it anyway. No preservatives, no poison, tons of flavor, all natural and if you haven't gathered from the name of the company, it's kosher! Seriously, pick up a bottle of this stuff and just drink a big glassful. I can't wait to marinate some chicken overnight in it with some pineapple chunks and fire up the barbeque grill on the first sunny day we have up here (it snowed last night). OK, well that's enough product placement for now, but you know I wouldn't rant and rave about something like this if it didn't truly melt my undies....
Tonight is probably the last time the participants of the Design Program in Rome 2008 will all have the chance to be together... The UW faculty club is hosting an exhibition of our photography and tonight is the reception for the show. On the announcement below, my photograph is the black and white "hotel" one...
Really? The UW school of art replaced the already wasteful coffee stirs in the cafe with obnoxiously wasteful INDIVIDUALLY wrapped coffee stirs! Really?!?
Rach came home last night and my desk was littered with red plastic cups that I had been using to develop a prototype spout for my spout design project. There were cups everywhere in various stages of destruction and I was busy putting music to a short video I made to "document" my process. She questions the actual usefulness of this, perhaps rightly so, but I've really been wanting to learn how to use video software, so I was just playin' around with it... some of my peers have used video to their advantage in presentations and I just want to add another tool to my toolbox...
Lena, our four year old friend, stayed at our house the last few nights. One day she was playing with some dominoes and something about the way she had laid them out caught my eye. So i snapped a few images...
I'm nearing my tenth hour of homework today, very productive though, I knocked out two projects! First I finished my presentation that I am giving on Monday about the Italian designer Ettore Sottsass, though I am still trying to figure exactly how to pronounce his name. Then I moved on to some creative work. Ahn is giving us a little more room for creativity in our work, this weekend we had to design a conceptual pair of goggles. I feel kind of in the zone right now and really like how these bumblebee eyes turned out.....
Wednesday was the first annual mousetrap race car competition at the University of Washington School of Art. It was a showdown between the Junior and Senior Industrial Design classes in three categories, speed, distance and style. One of our instructors, Magnus Feil proposed the challenge and mentioned that there would be press there to cover the event. I think most of us were thinking it would be the school newspaper, maybe the photography club, etc. We were all a little surprised when the two major seattle newspapers showed up and one of the local television stations! It really added to the excitement of the event and I have to hand it to Magnus for arranging this great publicity for our up and coming Industrial Design program. It's no secret that Western Washington University has had the better program in the state but I believe their days on top are numbered thanks to our outstanding faculty and the pure energy given by my fellow classmates who are pouring their heart and soul into every detail of every project.
I just finished up another long photoshop session. The assignments have become significantly more involved than the simple 3D shapes I posted here earlier this month. Tonight I was working on a rendering of a glue gun. It is past 3 AM now and I am totally exhausted. Just thought I would throw up a couple pictures of my recent work for anyone who wants to know what I'm up to, cuz this is it....school school school! Today was also our Trapster races where we had to build and race a dragster powered only by mousetraps. I'll post photos of my car later after I pull the images off my camera....
I stumbled on these two blogs today and thought they were fitting to be on my blogroll, turns out blogroll was severely hacked not too long ago and they are not allowing any users to access their accounts anymore, so here are the links anyway, I particularly enjoy the "mild" one, some very nice photography happening there:
A mild case of wanderlust
Back in school, this quarter is already shaping up to be a fine one. I have an Intermediate Industrial Design studio, a course on presentation for I.D. and a 3 credit seminar on Roman art and archaeology. I just finished up an assignment for the presentations class. We are going to learn how to create renderings of our products using Photoshop and illustrator. It is an interesting leap to make after spending last quarter concentrating on hand-renderings. This was a simple exercise but it opened my eyes to some of the capabilities of Photoshop that I just haven't gotten around to learning yet...
