M&M + Design Studio Two

As part of the second half of my Design Studio Two future design prototype project I redesigned a familiar childhood toy. I don’t want to say anything else about it because I should have filmed people interacting with it before spring break, but I ran out of time.. and I don’t want to give away the main idea before I’ve asked people to play with it. Luckily Tom Modeen saved the day by letting my take stills of him interacting with it so I could have something to use in my presentation to the class. I think Paolo wants to kill me because I keep producing some pretty neat ideas, but then by the time I’m done working them out and putting them together my presentations suck.. I have one last chance to redeem myself in his class.. This time all the other classes will be put on hold for his class because I am super excited to get this idea worked out so I can finally see what people think about it.

For the Materials and Methods class we had to use paper pulp and an LED light to create anything we wanted. I actually got really stuck on this project, I found the paper to be extremely uninspiring for some reason. Their critique was that I was the only student who didn’t show off the qualities of paper and how it can interact with light.. I totally agree.. at least they said it had great balance as a piece.. I’m thinking of taking Ban’s sculpture class if he is offering it next year..

M&M: The Birds Nest

In our materials and methods (M&M) class we started the semester learning about natural materials. For our lab portion of the class, we were given two weeks to learn our way around the woodshop and build a container. I decided to build a birds nest. I used pine, I cut it into strips, sanded it, stained it with charcoal, and finally waxed it. For a person who cried twice while working in the woodshop, I think I did just fine.

During critique we discussed changing up the attachment method.. by either using a ton more string, or none at all. When I get a free minute I’ll see what I can do.

Design Studio One: Open Design (Part Two): Fab-Shoes

 

 

For the second half of the Open Design project in our studio one class we as groups exchanged projects. Our group inherited the Open Design shoe file. We decided we wanted to go two different directions with the project, one would be making a 3D printed heel, and the other would be modernizing a traditional Arab mens sandal. We ended up with two files for the heel, an illustrator file for the upper, and a Rhino file for the wedge, both files can be edited and printed at any fab lab in the world. The idea for the second shoe was actually to use an Eskafi (shoe makers) to build a shoe for us, and so we would be considering the labor of one man equivalent to the machines in a fab lab. But they actually didn’t have an Eskafi’s in Qatar (weird?) so we had to modify our idea and use a local shoe factory to assemble our shoe (which kind of makes it not an open design project, but there is nothing we could do about it..). For the sandal we created a basic illustrator upper that can easily be modified and cut.

Design Studio One: Open Design (Part One): PEPACAM

Throughout last semester we worked in groups in our design studio one class to create two open design projects. Open Design is a type of design that is based off of the principles of open source sharing of information, it basically means to create a digital file that people can then use as is, or edit, then print/cut at home or in a fabrication lab. Ronen Kadushin’s name was used a lot in our class 😉

For the first part of the project each group came up with their own idea for an open design product. My group at first was really interested in the theme of travel, after we talked about the concept of travel for a while we deconstructed it into the activities that go on during travel. We ended up discussing photography as a big activity for most travelers, then we decided to examine photography in itself. Noticing that analog photography is actually a big trend right now (Lomography) we decided to build a pinhole camera using the Pepakura folding technique we learned in our fabrication class. The file we created is the most basic shape that we could think of, the idea is to allow users to expand off our simple design and do what ever they want with it. We named it Pepacam.

Though its really simple, this was my favorite project of the semester.