The toil of an ID student
@ Columbus College of
Art and Design
br>
|
|
| |
|
|
| |
This is where you stick random tidbits of information about yourself.
|
|
|
|
The Life of an Industrial Design Student
|
|
| |
Tuesday, January 20, 2004
...school resumed today.
here we all are in the main studio which i might add is amazingly clean and beautiful.
it was nice to be back and everyone seems ready for another go at the grind.
our first project is to design a clock in a specfic style assigned, i will scan the the project sheet in on thursday.
cheers...
6:21 PM
Thursday, November 06, 2003
...enough of the slacking, i solemly swear that i will update this reguraly and will start with an update right now.
so where we last left off...
the projects in industrial design school have become harder and harder as the semester has progressed....
when i last wrote in i was working on the cardboard chair project. I went through about 6 scale models built in 1/4 scale (quarter scale) to develop a general structural form that could be styled later. After building scale models for a while i reached a point where i couldn't go any further in development without realizing the form in real size. I then recived couragated cardboard in 8 foot by 4 foot sheet and cut out my design. I then tested the chair until structural failure at about 180 pounds. I then made design adjustments and rebult but the resulting stucture was rushed due to time constraints. The chair then held 230 pounds but still revealed some design concerns that i had not yet considered. I rebuilt again and the chair held to 290 pounds and i was able to make final refinements and build the final. now many schools do the cardboard chair project, however, ccad is othe only school that makes requirments on the amount of area of the cardboard that can contact the ground, and makes the student create a scale cadd drawing in Graphite (cadd program) in addition we also make an instuction booklet so that another student can assemble the chair and then test the chair for load bearing ability. anyway the final chair fourth genneration full scale was great held 300 pounds and was nicely styled (photos are to come).
after the chair project we have embarked on the on redesigning a hand tool i have chosen the sanding block/ sand paper holder. The first part of the project was to do a detailed task analysi of the tool including every movement involveed the use of the tool. we then had to develope tow analysis boards that document the proper use of the tool from reference and experience and measure the ergonomic use of the tool and the individuel (me) versus the 95% percentile of the population. We then also did a physical model of the use of the tools motion with wire to discribe in detail the right and left hands paths that are color coded to match the task analysis.
Thats where we are right now, working on blue foam sketch models to illustrate forms. we will eventually make our finals out of high density yellow foam and then cast them in RTV (room temprature vulcanizing) rubber and make resin versions for finals in model tech.
thats about it for now, more later...
11:07 PM
Tuesday, October 21, 2003
...well school has been not driving me crazy but has been taking up every single waking moment. i simply must take more time every day to blog and record my process... it's been ten days since i blogged a new record this year. i have lots to tell about and will start tomorrow with tales of the chair project...
7:22 PM
Friday, October 10, 2003
...where we last left off was in the crazy shuffle known as the weekend and at the moment i am right back at the same place. the chair project is going well and during the first week of testing my newer version chair that is le corbusier inspired lasted through the entire class up to the 230lb + weight limit. I also just received an assignment in model tech to design the housing for a zip drive. I am thinking a theme drive perhaps desjil or art nouveau or whatever i gotta do research since i don't use zips. the only idea i have at this point is to make as little of the zip as possible recess in to the housing as not to increase the amount of dust and dirt that has potential contact with the platter thus limiting the life of the disk...
6:43 AM
Friday, October 03, 2003
...well yesterday was the race to build a full size version of my scale model chair.
that leaves me with only having to figure out a back for the chair this weekend but all the work i don't have in studio for the chair is transfered to model tech. class on the toothbrush model that is due next thurs...
8:47 AM
Wednesday, October 01, 2003
...so here is what i consider to be the final prototype for the cardboard chair project. not only is this design strong, but i have so much material left over from the sheet that i was thinking of making an ottoman just for kicks and bragging rights. hopefully on thursday i will move to cardboard and test a full sized model.
by the way it's also my birthday, too bad i have three classes today and the last one till 9:45pm...
5:56 AM
Saturday, September 27, 2003
...thought i would post a few pictures. the first is of the my final on the card reader from a few weeks ago that i just managed to get back and the second is of the 1/4 scale chair i built holding 35 pounds on first attempt. other than that just spending the weekend doing homework night and day...
6:15 PM
Thursday, September 25, 2003
...here are the requirements for the new studio project we are working on i will post pictures later of the 1/4 scale model i built out of chip board earlier that held 35 pounds...
3:01 PM
Tuesday, September 23, 2003
...i have decided to post the research project i did this summer. below is the letter i wrote to CCAD students and staff discribing the my method of data collection and then excel database of information.
August 26, 2003
Faculty, Staff, and Students of CCAD industrial design
Hello Everyone,
As a part of my commitment to the improvement of the academic environment at CCAD, and in wake of the discussion about computers in ID with last year’s sophomore class, I have embarked on a small research project over the summer.
The aim of this project was to develop a sense of the role that computers play in ID and define what platform and programs design professionals are using. For this project I contacted by over 60 industrial design firms by phone. Of the 60 firms I called I was able to have lengthy conversations with 26. I spoke with designers, technicians, art directors, studio managers, and firm owners. These firms range in size from 1 employee in Michigan to multi-national strategic business units of hundreds in California. I encountered a cacophony of goods spanning house wares, satellites, consumer electronics, soft goods and model building.
The interviews covered the industrial design market as a whole but focused on technology as stated previously. My standard question pool consisted of company name, state of operation, contact name, platform, and 2 / 3D programs commonly used. These questions frequently spurred other conversations giving me the ability to probe educational background, work experience, and economic environmental influences. From these interviews I have learned a great deal and would be happy to share my findings with anyone interested.
The table on the reverse side is an index of the firm information I have collected. I hope it to be of use in future consideration of 3D modeling curriculum.
Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
ezra
5:40 PM
Monday, September 22, 2003
You're Most Like The Season Autumn ...
You're warm, and the most approachable. You have
that gentle prescence about you. People can
relate to you, and find you easy company.
However it's likely you've been hurt in the
past and it has left you scarred so things can
become rather chilly with you at times. Being
the third Season in, you're mature, trustworthy
and loyal to your friends but prone to
depression and negative thinking.
Well done... You're the shy and sensitive season :)
?? Which Season Are You ??
brought to you by Quizilla
3:34 PM
Saturday, September 20, 2003
...so much to post now that i have the files on the computer and the time to write. to start with i should tell you all that on top of being a student i volunteer teach at a vocational high school in the city that is dedicated to he arts. I basically hang out with a class and along the way teach interesting stuff about color, composition, and creative process. This seams to work well because i'm not as old as a real teacher and the kids think i'm hip and listen to me. so first off i thought i would post a photo of my new class...
for their first assignment i paired them up into random groups and gave each group a hand out from Rodger vonOechs "a whack on the side of the head" They are to read the hand out and plan a presentation 3-5 min about what was in their chapter and also make a "helpful hints" page for everyone in the class as a recap and future reference. so they have had a week to plan and the presentations will be on tuesday. i will get some photos from that and post them next week also....
next i want to post a picture of how messy my kitchen/work area was when i was in the thick of the insane hat project.
i know this isn't that bad but the photo is after i spent 10 minutes cleaning up and getting rid of scraps....
when i was building the prototype for the hat project that can be seen above i got a really bad migrain from the hot glue fumes which where not disapating fast enough even with windows open ect... so what a did was make the invention below by taking measurements off my window and constructing a box with hot glue and foamcore. basically what this is used for is to store th glue gun when i need to leave it on but want it to vent outside. the gun sits inside the box and the difference of air pressure from outside to inside holds the door (hanging down) shut. when i need it i pop the door open grab it, use it and throw it back in minimizing exposure to fumes. so here is a picture of the glue box...
the following photos are pictures of my final insane hat project and a shot outside when we where passing the ball from one hat to the next.
the project went well as stated and my evelator project worked both times around. The ball enters via the teacup and travels past the cards and goes in the rabbit hole. from there it then goes through the madd hatters top hat and down a ramp and into the queens castle where it actuates the elevator and travels up allmost 30 inches. it then wraps around the castle as it falls out a hole at the top... a quick shot around a terrace and down to the exit point.
other than that i have been doing homework all weekend mainly structural drawing and drafting...
3:35 PM
Thursday, September 18, 2003
...well the insane hat / pass the ball project is over. I got an A- and am ok with that. i learned sooo much about how to run a project. I learned to pick a single concept and explore it in depth in a quality manner. Next test it for results and adjust accordingly. Then incorparate the the results into the final. I did so much expiramentation in the development phase I thought i was going nuts. In ID there is not much room for hack and slash which is how i started the project. i just threw it together and thought i would figure out how to connect parts later... WRONG one must consider if things are even possible later if they will be connected in a different manner later. Luckily it all worked out, all said the total for this project comes to.
45 hours work
3 4'*8' sheets foam core
2 packages hot glue sticks
2 rolls of tape
2 migraines (Literally imitrex saved me)
2 pushed near insanity
1 rental of alice in wonderland from blockbuster
there will be photos on later and news of what i got on the card reader project after i go to model tech tonight...
2:52 PM
Tuesday, September 16, 2003
...more of the same but at least i love what i'm doing...even if they are excercises to see if you can think under pressure and preform. Only a few more days of this untill the crazy hat project is due. i can't wait till tomorrow when i'm done so i can post photos. I'm really scattered and definatley feel for the folks who can't time manage. this is when i'm at my best in the throng, obsessed and overflowing with life...
10:55 PM
...what a crazy weekend i spent 20 hours on one project alone and then spent all yesterday doing the rest of my homework. talk about being in the thick of it. i will write more later with details...
6:53 AM
Thursday, September 11, 2003
...well where we last left off. tonight i turn in the card reader project and have been working on another project for studio class. this project is to build a hat out of hot glue, foamcore and masking tape that can transport a racketball 45.75 inches, and acomplish one one a set of specific tasks such as launch a projectile, make a noise, travel up an elevator, acutuate a whirle-gig or proform a loop de loop. i was assigned a elevator. the hat must also have a recognizable theme. I chose alice in wonderland. here is a photo of the prototype i built today literally to just make a model that works without any aestic.
also i wanted to post a photo of tom williamson from advanced structural drawing. here he is explaining the function of drawing in industrial design. he is my favorite teacher...
4:22 PM
Sunday, September 07, 2003
... after the discussion of about our foam models in tech. class on thursday night we received our next assignment. Everyone was given a piece of hard board with two notches cut out of the end of it. this is to be our card and our assignment due next week is to make a "card reader." the criteria for the reader is that we must be able to insert the card into the reader and the reader must hold the card while it is shaken/ turned upside down. the structure must now have any part of the mechanisms on the exterior and should well constructed and water tight. the reader should be able to hold the card for at least ten seconds and have an eject lever/ button. Most of the kids at school where kind of freaked out about only having a week to complete it. i was itching to get started but needed to do my other homework so i kept it in the back of my mind for about it for two days while i did my non id assignments. then last night the strangest thing happened...in my sleep i started thinking about my homework and consciously building models. after what seamed to be a little while i had a working model and woke up. it was about four am and i woke my wife up and told her that i had just finished my studio homework. she said good and went back to sleep. Later in the morning around nine i got up and went to loews hardware to get a piece of sheet metal since i could find no substitute in my vast stacks of art supplies. i then proceeded to build the model from my dream studio work session and completed an excellent working project in under one hour.
here are a couple of pictures of the project before it was finished. i will post another tomorrow when the batteries for my camera are charged...
4:58 PM
Friday, September 05, 2003
...it's only the second week of school and i feel like i've learned a lot allready. I came to model tech. class with a sketch book full of ideas. on paper every idea seams like a good one, things are quite different when it comes to making solid models.
this is what our class came up with after 2 hours of sketching in blue foam. our first model project was to design a toothbrush.
other than that the week went well. Alex and I got an A on our ten minute presentation about limiting creativity through specialization in the work place and drafting by hand is tedious...
6:03 AM
Monday, September 01, 2003
...I first encountered Roger von Oech's " A Whack on the Side of the Head" in 1998 when i was 19. i was online looking up isbn numbers for a set of rare books by an american author Carlton Wagner. Wagner, an esoteric designer turned maven of color psychology with emphasis of it's use in industrial design had been intriguing me for sometime. He had poured over the treatises of Itten and Birren and scribed two easily digestible text's and a color swatch work set in english. Both of the texts and the set of color swatches had gone out of print. The few i managed to pin down where closely guarded by the college repositories i had phoned as far away as Ohio University. As a last stitch effort i went to the computer and contacted Cody's Books, the United States largest reseller and locator of used books based in San Francisco. i must have waited on hold for 20 minutes while the Cody's staff searched the stacks and their data base. During this time i schlepped around on line looking for creative and architecture book location services. As i scrutinized the results that WebCrawler (it was 1998) brought back, a link titled "Creative Whack Pack, become more creative" caught my eye. Become more creative i thought, huh... this is sounds interesting. i selected the link and the catalyst that caused my personality to coalesce began.
More than anything else "AWotSotH" furnished elements that developed my personality and served as an actualizer. It showed me that there where other people like me that where enamored with the happenings of the world and that they get paid to investigate and create things. "AWotsotH" changed me from being a passive observer and information collector to an active urban investigator and recorder. i remember thinking after reading "AWotSotH" the first time "this is my tribe" and feeling i finally had a clear cut idea of what i wanted to do. Suddenly all the capricious junk that i had committed to memory like the wavelengths in nanometers of the primary colors and the history of caissons became incredibly valuable rather than encumbering.
Tthe other useful aspect of "AWotSotH" is von Oechs ability to speak openly about creative process. The book breaks the immense subject of creativity into bite sized chapters in popular culture language that is easy to understand. There is no pretentiousness and von Oech succeeds in making you feel excited about adventuring though everyday. Until reading this book i had, had the exact opposite experience in art. Growing up in the "Art World" i was familiar with the creative communities apprehension to discuss process. This is not to say that everyone is that way within the community but there is a propensity to keep things secret and not discuss ideas. "AWotSotH" broke me out of this world and said lets talk about what you think. i didn't know where people came up with so many ideas, and assumed it was mostly creative intuition. After reading "AWotSotH" I ascertained the information i had in my head where ideas in raw form and that i could use my creativity to interpret and apply them. Thus began my love affair with industrial design....
1:44 PM
Saturday, August 30, 2003
...i spent the entire day driving around getting supplies and figuring
out how to keep organized this year. i'm pick up my new camera
tomorrow. i will have better picture quality and be able to
host video files from critique, lecture ect... i am to iffy about
carrying around my Nikon D1x, so i'm going with a cheapo 3.2
cannon powershot 300. it's a catagory killer in performance and
price so we will see how that goes...
5:13 PM
Friday, August 29, 2003
... everyone files in for the first studio class.
Mr. Kier mid sentance gleefully explaining the criteria + syllabus
for ID studio II.
Kier is way to excited to be talking about class i bet he is
laughing because he knows we have no idea about
how much work we have ahead of us...
11:33 AM
Thursday, August 28, 2003
...here is the first official photo from industrial design school.
thank the gods for no more foundation studies!
at least not as many as last year.
this is CADD class and much to everyones dismay we have
5 weeks of drafting by hand before we learn graphite 6.4.
so we spent an hour lettering, i blasted though due to
previous experience. later today i have my first studio class
and model tech...
6:54 AM
Wednesday, August 27, 2003
...I kept really busy over this summer. i took two classes, one in marketing and one
in Lit. intro to film. i also tested for my brown belt in aikido and took it on myself to learn Rhino.
I wanted to do this for several reasons. One, i have a surplus of sketches in my sketch
books and wanted to be able to export them to a different media and get a feel about how
they might really look. I also wanted to learn a cad program with less architectural relevance
and more product focus than the Form Z they teach at our school. below are some jpegs
of from two projects i played with this summer. both are by no means done. the first is
some purely exploratory sinage development that i did for my aikido dojo when i knew
about 5 rhino comands. the second is a calculator i sketched years ago and thought it
would be an easy item.
2.tif
1:22 PM
Tuesday, August 26, 2003
...what a break it has been since i last wrote. almost five months, the school year and summer
are over and school resumes tomorrow, so i thought i would continue my blog and this time
be able to document an entire year of school. i got a new digital camera and will be able to
take pictures of all my projects and get them on the web. thats about it i have some stuff to
do to get ready for class...
7:15 AM
Wednesday, June 25, 2003
...this has been the longest pause i have taken in writting here since i started this blog. so much has happend, my father got surgry done on the knee that he hurt a few weeks back, we hosted our first seminar at the dojo which went well i think, i spent a good part of the weekend at my fathers house taking care of him and making sure he got his meds at the right times and helping him up the stairs ect. i also got lots of home work done this weekend on friday here and sat. at my dads, i'm still not in the clear by far, but definatly on track if i keep going through this heap. several more design ideas lately, as i have said before it feels good to be thinking as a designer again...
2:31 PM
Monday, April 07, 2003
...spring break means two things for art student, 1 everyone gets a haircut
, 2 everyone gets new shoes. all is well in school ...
8:52 PM
Tuesday, April 01, 2003
...what a day, not only did i win the student body election for industrial
design, but we also looked at the apartment next door and it rocks,
they will let us get a dog...
8:09 PM
Monday, March 31, 2003
...enough allready, it took five tries just to access this page to add to my
blog. i guess pyra is working on their servers or somthing. Anyway i
spent the evening mounting 6 of th e7 projects over break and know i'm
tired and have a head ache from the spray fix and rubber cement...
9:24 PM
Sunday, March 30, 2003
...well now that my spring break is over i guess i should continue
writting in this here blog. since i don't have class on fridays my
spring break was a total of 10 days. of those 10 days i did homework
for a majority of the day 6 days. so i feel i got a good amount done.
i still have to mount all the projects i did so that should take an
entire evening. i will prolly do that tomorrow night. on a side note, the bust
of ianna turned out great and now i have to figure out how to resolve all
my pieces for glass so they are presentable...
6:57 PM
Friday, March 21, 2003
...today was the beginning of spring break and i basically went to
acupuncture, did home work in the morning, drawing in the after noon
and relaxed the early eve. away till i picked up ianna...
7:34 PM
Wednesday, March 19, 2003
...another wednesday of four classes i'm exausted, i got all a's on my animal
essence project i also got the life sized bust of ianna in the kiln with glass on
it and started the kiln. i will be there tomorrow during the "event" when the
kiln reaches it's highest temp as to moniter the level the glass melts over
the form. shower now...
9:38 PM
Sunday, March 16, 2003
...even nicer today than yesterday, wish i could say i did anything related to school...
8:09 PM
|
|
| |
|
|
|
