Design for disaster reflection

I found this assignment to be an extremely good learning experience. It was a very interesting and refreshing assignment. We often have briefs that feel frivolous and not that beneficial to the community but rather just adding more “stuff”, possessions, to people’s homes. This assignment felt as if we were really making a useful and beneficial product that had a purpose and in that respect I really enjoyed the assignment
I not only have I learnt about bushfires, the damage they can cause and what problems arise, which was interesting in itself. i found that while reading on the internet problems that occurred and experiences that people felt, it was actually the person interviews and firsthand accounts that were the most useful because you got a really good understanding of what it was like to be in a bushfire. Which is an experience that is not imaginable and the issues that arise are not the typical smoke inhalation and heat problems but many other unexpected problems that both the firemen and the survivors experience.
What I mostly had a learning experience about was materials. Due to the product I had to make I had to find out which materials would be able to withstand temperatures of up to 1000 degrees. There are not very many that will do that, and those that do are expensive and often quite harmful for the environment. Also while a lot of these materials can withstand that temperature and exists on kilns and other high heat ovens, they are not able to withstand the wind and change in temperature of the outside environment. I feel that i have grown in my knowledge about these materials and have learnt about insulation effects of different materials as well as heat resistance, expansion and thermal co-efficient.
One area that I felt that I was really lacking in is my knowledge about how the different materials interact with each other the environment also the electrical engineering of it all. I felt that this assignment, while the concept and form was to be made by a designer and maybe the initial material choices should be made by the designer. The actual material specification and figuring out the electronics was more of an engineer’s job then a designer. In this sense i really struggled trying to grasp the concepts of material science and electronics.

(for pictures please refer to submit folder, cause the i just didnt manage to make the picture load)

the story of cap and trade

the story of cap and trade by annie leonard is very interesting, i really enjy the way she explains the situation and i find the graphics make it easier to understand and keep the interest.
while i think that mos of what she says is true and especially as designer we should be involoved in this, try to figure out how we can make a differnce, design a solution that will be better for the environment.
on the other hand i do think that the way annie leonard presents the argument, and mostly her solution is way too simplified, i think that she may have a good understanding of what going on, but its too simplisitic, there are many issues involoved with the reduction of carbon emissions, these factors are hard to chane. the cap and trade option could work if there werent so many dodgy loop holes.

design for life

i found this mini series incredibly interesting
i thought that phillipe stark was very intersting in his opnions and thoughts, so i looked at this series from 2 perspectives, the first being philipes many philosophies and the second the students design process

philipe stark had ALOT of different ideas that he meantioned during the series.x
A couple of ideas that i both liked and agreed with were, first that good "design is about making beautiful, useful, and sustainable objects that can be enjoyed by everyone" this is what i think is the big difference between art and design is, Art tends to only be a medium for a small amount of the eilte population who have so kind of understanding in art rather than a broader more all encompassing interaction that is found in design, which is why i have always loved it.

Stark belives that design should help your tribe, your society, your civilisation to have a better life, and to do so through a useful and sustainable manner. by this i think he means, that products that are of no use to anyone really should not be made, and products that are made should have a profound impact on the user in a way that positively improves their way of living, while i think it is a very noble thing of him to say and i would tend to agree with him in this perspective esspecially talking about usefulness and sustainability, yet i fail to see how he has achieved these things in his design?

from the perspective of the students i would like to say that i believe that the ideas they came up with for the first major project were just terrible, most of them didnt even come up with one product just wishy washy half formed ideas which i was not at all suprised that stark reacted badly to.
i think that some improvemnts were made although i felt that the only viable ideas where the elderly chair aid and the blind plate (although even this did not seem too inovative)
i felt that the students were not deep enough in their thought process and did not come with wordly design solutions.
i think starks decision to let the elderly chair thing and the blind plate thing through was a good desicion compared to the other 2 designs as they were more aimed at helping people.
i think that the design the won had a beautiful form, it looked almost like a sculpture rather than a product yet it was still a usefull product.

one little thing i noticed that made me rather happy, was that the designers did not have to make their models themselves, they got judged purely on form and not on model making skills...

summing up i loved this mini series as it not only gave me insight into how others design, and also their failings but also into philipe starks thoughts and ideas where they come from

the 11th hour

the 11th hours was both and eye opening and also a frustrating experience.
i felt almost shocked at the amounts of problems are earth faces from global warming to deforestation, mass species extinction, and the depletion of the earths habitats.
not onky was it abit confronting to be told, hey your earth is slowly dieing, but also hey its all your fault.
i felt so frustrated that no one was really making a change, or at least not enough people were making a change.
this is when i realised that as an industrial designer and someone who is essentially encrouaging mass consumerism in the world by designing things that people either potentially dont need, or making them feel like the things they have are not valid anymore cause there are more current "things" out there, i was essentially causeing the problem
i think that by watching this video, and having statements such as "Global warming is not only the number one environmental challenge we face today, but one of the most important issues faceing all of humanity... we all have to do our part to raise awareness about global warming and the problems we as people face in prompting a sustainable environmental future for our planet" (leonardo di caprio) i am more aware that designers need to have a new outlook on what should be the aim of industrial design.
is it really to make people want to be things they dont need, or should it be take make things more durable and longer lasting through a better quality design that is made to last, or a design that will transcend the different fashions and trends that come through, or even use materials that will be more environmentally friendly.
all these things will mean that our part of industrial designers will not be making things like global warming worse.

charrette 2- part 4

charette 2 - product disassemably part 3

i thought that this exercise was a very interesting one.

i found that there was ALOT of waste in this product.

firstly this product was a waste full product in the first place as it was an milkshake like blender thing that was generally just useless and wouldnt be used very often at all.

then thinking more about the individual parts, each part was made of a different material, be it the different types of plastic, or rubber or even metals, this made it not recycable in the first place, secondly it was all glued and assembled together in a way that made it nearly impossible to tak apart. i did not know where to start and had to really fight with the product to take it apart.

it shows that these products really are so wastefull and not recycable!

we came up with a more friendly design that would use less materials, would disassemble easily and didnt use electricity meaning it did not waste electricity either!

this was a very eye opening and intersting project

charette product disassembly part 2

charette- product disassembly part 1

charrette- chair concepts

add arm rests to the chair to make more confortable
add wheels to make the chair easier to manouver add cusion or contoured foam via either clipping it to the chair or other means to make more confortable

add back rest that has good lumbar support and a soft back to make the chair more ergonomic

add block underneath chair to make the chiar taller for people how are too tall for the chair and find it uncomfortable for their legs

turn chair into storage compartment when its use as a chair is finished by placing back rest parts between the four legs and buying a seperate drawer.

make lots of chairs in differnt colours (maybe out of plastic instead of wood, although wood would also be viable) then when a set of chairs are bought, the parts can interchange making a colourful chair

make veneers that can be stuck on to chair to make it look for fashionable, these veneers should be able to be modified, so a customer can bring his or her picture which can be scanned into the veneer so that you can have a personallised chair

make the parts able to be sold seperatley so that when fashion changes or there is any damage to the chair, instead of buying a whole new one you can update with seperate parts

much like the colour idea but with seperate pieces all in different shapes so that when you buy a chair that looks one way and another chair that looks slightly different you can interchange the parts so that you can make your very own combiation

make chair stackable to save space in house

stick white board material onto chair so that it can be drawn on and erased whenever the person wants to write a note to themselves etc

make marker that can draw on chair leaving fond memories of children etc permanently marked on the chair

i found this exercise quite usefull not only cause i had to learn how to work under time contraints, pressure and also be creative in demand, which i found both thrilling and stressful at the same time (i learnt that it is possible to just churn out ideas, some will be good and some will be crap but you can sift through them later and find the good ones)

i found it useful because it gave me a different perspective on how to reduce my own ecological footprint in a way that i hadnt been doing before, i was thinking more about materials, which is still good, but increasing the lifetime of a product by after purchase products or helping it make a conncetion with a person is probably a better solution cause less waste is being generated.

completly unrelated to uni work but is really interesting

hey guys have a quick look at this 3 min video its really cool, about the reinvention of a water bottle

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FDqJ0XUBvA

objectified

i found this documentary to be incredibly interesting
firstly just about the evolution of products and the design of them, where for example the design of a product was meant to tell you exactly what it was and how to use it nowadays its more arbitrary, this makes the product look more calm and collected, as it doesnt show how difficult it was to make but rather give an impression that is was incredibly simple. for example apples products had a large amount of thought put into the machineing of it but when the product sits in store it looks so simple and easy that the consumer feels it was a simple process. as dieter rams said "people react positively when things are clear and understandable".
despite this the quote that is said by henry ford "every object tells a story if you know how to read it", rings to be true, if you look at the little marks that are on the inner side of the mac you will find little dents and bumbs that show the process of making it.
what i also found intersting was dan formosa comment that "if you design for the extremes the middle will take care of itself". i think this is an important quote as it makes so much sense but isnt something a desinger often thinks about, most designers think of the average or the middle, but the chances are that if you design for those who are less able or extreme in one way or other the average will still be able to use the product, and probably will find it easier or more comfortable to use.
i agree with the idea that is made in this video that design is a search for form, what form should a product or object recieve. whether it should fubnctional like the dyson vaccum or a more beautiful and elegant. this is up to the designer to decide, and to do that we must undestand our audience, whether it be culturally or otherwise.
i found intersting that so many of the designers were talking about taking away, the less design was in the design was better, dieter rams said that good design shouw be innovative, productive, astheticly pleaseing,understandable,useful, honest, unobtrusive, longlived, consistent in detail, environmentally friendly and as alittle design as possible. There seems so much that needs to be done this doesnt appear to mean to have a really detailed complex product but rather the opposite, to have a simple product that encompasses all of the above.

Ecological Footprint reflection

i found this quiz to be quite useful not only in making you aware of how much each persons footprint effects the earth through examples such as carbon footprint, food footprint, houseing footprint, and goods and services footprint, as well as how many earths would be needed to support each person like me but also how i compare to the rest of the population.

i thought is was really useful that i was able to see how i could change this while still doing the quiz by clicking the links.

i have to say that my mark suprised me i didnt know quite how bad i was to the environment, despite knowing that there is much more i can do, i thought that i was still slightly better than i am.

on the other hand i thought that the quiz was a little bit frustrating, many of the questions asked were difficult and i didnt not have the knowledge, things such as household income and size of land are not things i am aware of, and i think that while it can help give a more accurate answer these questions can also deter alot of people from doing the quiz, and it is really important that people do, do it and maybe change some of their habbits.

as i was going through the quiz the little post that was telling me how well i was doing compared to the rest of the population was already encouraging me to change my ways cause i really wanted to do better and be a cleaner person.

i think this quiz would be useful for anyone from all walks of life to do just to understand what they are doing to the environment and what we can do about it

to us designers its important to understand the effects of our footprint as well as our consumers as we are designing the products that will later go into the home, and it is our responsibilty to design products that are more environmentally friendly