Vase.

lovely light

by Trent Jansen.

Great, isnt it? Best of show@bombay for sure.

Photoshop render.

Design changed a little. Took a little over 90 minutes from paths to render.

Rush...

more doodling this afternoon...

Has anyone started that computing assignment?

hard to say the least.... anyway, here is one concept for a helmet - language taken from the trek madone. 

Trek have two design languages they use, one called "race" and the other called "rush". Madones fall distinctly under "race", sharp surfacing and, new for 09, bight colours...

crits always welcome

Sustainablility

This is a word that is thrown around far far far to much.  This is something ive wanted to clarify for a long time - listen in Mar:

The common linking between environmentally sensitive design (words chosen carefully here) and 'sustainablility' is only a small part of the problem. Any company that mass produces their products and calls them 'sustainable' is full of shit. No joking, a capatialist society is completely unable of making 'sustainable' decisions.

Outsourcing production to China, for example, is not sustainable. Chinese minimum wages have risen gradually over the last few years, with a sizable wage increase last year (adding a few percent onto retail prices). At some point, it wont become economic to source everything through China. How do we as a society react when this happens? Are we fucked like the US automakers, geared to production of inefficient, poorly built automakers? International oil refieneries, geared to produce petroleum not diesel? These decisions were made with medium term profits in mind without considering long term consequences....

Much like mining crude oil from earth, coal from the crust,  it all has a finitie end. 

As international markets have realised over the past 9 months, growth comes with adjustment. Mass manufacture of pure SHIT out of china, sold for SFA and thrown out every year to produce profit is NOT A SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS.

I dont have a huge problem with it all, just dont label your designs as 'sustainable'.

Insightful?

What an amazingly unique insight into a world we have never seen.

via: about 10 million places on the internet.

Glass.

Exerpt from my rationale.

I think that in itself is the nature of the material. Glass provides containment and protection that humans rely on. A near invisible barrier between us and the world yet made of a material that deeply permeates our culture. It protects us from danger and the elements, facilitates social interaction and still allows us to indulge in vanity and luxury.

Its the fishbowl effect i think. This idea of two way visual interaction between two completely states. Warm house, raining outside. Red wine, dining table. etc. etc.

 

Bad Design/Good Design

Bad: Rashid.
Opens a bottle fine, sits nice in your hand, but due to its unobvious direction, its a pain in the ass. You dont know if you have it the right way around once it's in your hand. Directionless = shit.




Good: Newson
Well weighted, fits in the hand nice. It just works. Nothing more.

Syd Mead.

http://designyoutrust.com/2008/08/25/fuck-art-ride-bikes/

Always backup your hard disk.

Thankfully, i did on monday night. My computer must have been in a grumpy mood and wiped my uni folder some time during the night.

just uploading an image

move right along, nothing to see here.

I swear...

..this has absolutly no relevance to the post below.

oh, yes - it does.

Best of Show - SouthernX Packaging Awards

For thoes who care, this was the design that won the Best of Show. Made from laser cut poster tubes, the packaging is part of the product. What you're actually looking at is packaging for a energy efficient light and cord. The shade and the packaging are one in the same.

The rationale was beautifully laid out, clear, concise and she (making assumptions on production quantities of like 5000 or something) could work out a cost, then final retail price.

Im assuming its a girl. A guy wouldnt design a product like that.

US army's 'Black dog'

Creepy, no? Fowkes showed me this yesterday and it haunted my drunken nightmares.

Signed, Sealed and (nearly) delivered.

Im trully stoked with how this project worked out. Learnt a stackload and am honestly satisfied with the result.

Fasteners

I have a passionate dislike for 'VCR' srews as i call them. Thoes tiny silver screws found on all crappy electrical good worldwide. I opted for matte black coated 5mm hex bolts and nuts.

work in progress

quite possibly one of the most complicated things ive made... and it's not half done yet. working with real material makes one bloody appreciative of how easy foamies are to throw together...

anyway, thar she is. does it look like 8 hours of work? it bloody well is and im exhausted.

Pareto: D4M & D4DA

It takes less than five mintutes to either assemble or disasseble this Samsung DVD player. Talk about reducing a massive cost...Pareto in action.

Veneers

New age in Hornsby sent me some convieniently sizes samples. Good way to win business, thats for sure.

Colour Options

Simple!

MrGenX-IT-Dad-filled-with-angst doesn’t want to be marketed at.
He doesn’t want his DVD player to say how amazing it is, all over it.

What he wants is clear, succinct, technological advantage without the bells, whistles - a high-design tool. All he wants to do is sit down, watch a DVD (or BlueRay in five years).

Simple, no?

A new scenario

"My GenX male comes home from his mildly satisfying desk job at 6 in the evening. Despite fact he's be battling traffic and Cityrail for the past hour and a half, his wife insists he unstacks the dishwaher, bath the kids and get the washing off the line. Kicking some tacky, injection moulded fluro yellow toys out of his way, he sits down on his aged freedom Sofas. His wife wouldnt let him get the nice ones; "oh, the kids will spill stuff all over them" so he had to settle for Freedoms finest. Ignoring the catpiss stains on the carpet, chocolate icecream marks on the armrest, he sits on his crappy freedom armchair, opens a moderately priced beer and turns on his Widescreen HD Samsung TV. This is not kid stuff, this is real man technology. He doesnt want to sip coffee out of a wooden coffee cup, or have a machine tell him how to cook dinner. He wants to sit there and watch HIS big TV on HIS DVD player - even if only for a moment.

Blueray

To late in the process.... havent done enough... Ill go something that lets me aesthetically refine it to something a GenX wishes he could buy and make a sick model.

Thats the plan anyway.

That's a resounding 'no' on the coffee cups.

I pitched the concept to some woodworkers and this is what they had to say:

"Unless you coat the timber in a few mm of epoxy (then you won't be feeling wood) dishwashers will make a mess of timber in just a few washes. In the long term, hand washing with any sort of soap will also eventually mess about with most natural finishes.

I like your basic idea but wood is just not an appropriate material for coffee cups. A true coffeegeek will tell you that coffee cups should be ceramic or glass to retain heat. While wood will do that, the feel on the lips is the next most important thing and wood just does not feel right. Metal is also a poor choice because it conducts heat too quickly to the lips. In a barista competition (I have judged these) a wooden cup would cause an outright disqualification because of hygiene concerns. Wooden food containers are best left for salads or nibbles"

neeeeext...

tactile design

it has been scientifically proven that visual stimuli (colour, for example) has a drastic impact on taste. the aim of my project is to inject some natural, some tactile sensation into the world of the genx dad, full of audi's, granite benchtops, freedom furniture and 2.4 children...

seem fair?

Hair Dryer

Not a bad Gen X product. Looks quite masculine as well.

Liquid Crystal Displays.

The notion of liquid crystal displays is nothing new. There have been significant advancements in the application of this technology however that could potentially allow for innovation within my GenX TechyIT dads.

Double Sided LCD's? Samsung has the answer!

Want a little more physical flexability?

How about thin backlighting? Add light to objects?

Now you mention it, LCD is old technology. Uses too much power. Try digital ink, by Sony.

Much of this is 'old news', but certainly new technology.

An objective look at 'designer' furniture.

A few days ago i picked up these Karim Rashid 'Butterfly' chairs, produced by Magis. Much of Rashid's work is brushed off as 21st century plastic crap - 'blobjects' so to speak. I lost my prejudice and splashed out.

Viewed in isolation - a single chair in a white studio shot -they would look completely without purpose; potentially the reason for their criticisim. In this room, they add a lifelike quality. Little organic creatures injecting personality, colour and dare i say it, a little fun.

For a plastic chair, they're pretty comfortable as well.

"Everything that can be invented has been invented."

It may be a complete misquote from Charles Duell, but reading this article in the MIT technology review, I couldnt help but be impressed about how far the human race has come and how far there is to go.

"Hone compares his test to stretching a piece of plastic wrap over the top of a coffee cup, and measuring the force that it takes to puncture it with a pencil. If he could get a large enough piece of the material to lay over the top of a coffee cup, he says, graphene would be strong enough to support the weight of a car balanced atop the pencil."

Exciting stuff. 5 years down the track? Perhaps not - this material might miss generation X, Y and potentially a few after.

MIT Technology Review via c77

i couldn't find anything at IKEA that i liked...

so i decided to make a table.

Took a week longer than i planned, cost twice as much as i had expected and works half as well as a bought one. Well, not entirely 'half as well', but it is bleedingly heavy. As always, critiques welcome.

(new chairs arrive tomorrow...)