UW Design Show 2010

If you're in Seattle, stop on by, if not, fly up here and then stop on by!

A breakthrough?

Between some of the help Ahn has been giving me in class and some sweet online tutorials at idsketching.com I have been working toward a new technique of sketching. It is a much more loose, emotional and dynamic style, important for an industrial designer. It is also much less focused on the details and mechanics of the object in question. I have been plagued by this need to make super detailed drawings that make sense mechanically and from a manufacturing standpoint but have lacked a certain shimmer, if you know what I mean. This drawing is the first of the new style. It is for our upcoming mousetrap car competition. I still have a long way to go, but it is so different from what I've done in the past that I felt I had to share it with the interwebs.

A guiding quote

Rachel and I did some exploring up near the Canadian border this weekend. We visited an amazing museum in Bellingham called Mindport that focuses on interactive art and exhibits ($2 entry fee, if you're there, it is a must see). On one of the walls of the museum I found a framed piece of 8.5 x 11 with the following written in an unassuming 12 point italic:

"The first enslaving illusion is the idea that people are born to be consumers and that they can attain any of their goals by purchasing goods and services."

"What people do or make but will not or cannot put up for sale is as immeasurable and as invaluable for the economy as the oxygen they breathe."

Ivan Illich

Toward a History of Needs

Prosthetic Arm Final Model

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.

Prosthetic Arm Project rough model

After nearly a month of sketching, researching, sketching, researching, I am finally on to the model building phase. It is going well, the picture below is the first iteration of my prosthetic arm concept...

Things I'm doing besides ignoring my blog....

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:

working hard?

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...

Flight of the bumblebee

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.....

Mighty mousetraps!

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.

First, a couple photos of my trapster, I was trying for speed:

 

Here's the article from the Seattle PI:

And finally, I just found this today, here is a little video compilation from the Seattle Times, watch for my car at about 0:39, it was a very close race, but I lost...

late nights...

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 have to leave for school in five hours.... time to get some shut-eye!

Baby steps...

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...

The Junior ID Studio

I don't know if I mentioned yet how excited I am that we have our very own studio in the art building this year. It is such a great workspace and has been well broken in already. Many of my classmates have pulled all-nighters in here, most recently for our final drawing project. Next week we begin the model building portion of the class which means we get to spend a lot of time in the wood shop! Is school really supposed to be this much fun?!?!?

MY 200th post!!!

This is the 200th post on A bad case of wanderlust (I just mistyped it as wanderslut.. heh heh), seems like a lot. I still look through the book that Joanne made for me last year and am considering making volume II. I already have so many great memories recorded here and am looking forward to many more....

In one of my classes this quarter we get to take weekly field trips to various manufacturers to familiarize ourselves with various manufacturing techniques. It has so far proven to be a very effective way to learn. The trips remind me a lot of the show "How it's made" on the Discovery Channel, especially last week's trip. We visited the Fluke injection molding facility where some of the plastic parts used to make Fluke multimeters are manufactured. My favorite machine was the one that makes the red and black test leads you see on all Fluke multimeters. It has 14 stations and is entirely automated, manned by only one employee. It was designed and built in house and is really, really cool.... kind of like a giant Rube Goldberg device. This video is of the station that wraps the test leads and drops them on the conveyor...

What is Industrial Design?

Inevitably when I meet new people they ask "What do you do?" I respond and inevitably they ask "What is industrial design?" as they have images of me wearing a hard hat, onsite at some industrial complex with a rolled up set of blue prints tucked under my arm. Then I have to make sure to say "Not industrial engineering" Because I know that is what they are thinking. I have not yet thought of a short, thorough answer to this question but found a few long, complicated answers I like:

• Industrial design (ID) is the professional service of creating and developing concepts and specifications that optimize the function, value and appearance of products and systems for the mutual benefit of both user and manufacturer.  (FROM IDSA)
• Industrial Design is concerned with all the human aspects of machine-made products and their relationship to people and the environment. The designer is responsible for these products and their impact on society and nature. The designer accounts for the product's human factors engineering, safety, form, color, maintenance and cost. Industrial design deals with consumer products as well as industrial products. In order to achieve these ends, designers must be involved in four major design and research activities: human behavior, the human-machine interface, the environment, and the product itself. Areas of design investigation include furniture, housewares, appliances, transportation, tools, farm equipment, medical/electronic instruments, human interface, and recreational support equipment.
  
• Industrial design is an applied art whereby the aesthetics and usability of mass-produced products may be improved for marketability and production. The role of an Industrial Designer is to create and execute design solutions towards problems of form, usability, user ergonomics, engineering, marketing, brand development and sales.