Drawings Galore (constraints 1- 4)

This new assignment is really forcing us to get a hold of our techniques.  Drawing, painting, and eventually Illustrator, are things we'll all be a lot more accustomed to after this project.  There will be a total of 300 drawings, 15 of which will actually be used in the final product.  It's been difficult to be sure, but I've managed to get most of them done.  Here are the first 4 constraints.

1. Photo
The end result will be a 4 x 4 tile of 16 images, the first will be a photo, hence only 300 drawings, not 320.  Here's a photo of the pliers, and we'll quickly move on.

2. Gestural
This was harder to pin down.  My teacher was explaining it one way, and I found notes in the other teachers rooms that explained it differently.  I did both in the end.  Linda described gestural as finding the image with your arm, letting your body make larger movements while your marking device stays more or less planted on the paper.  Here are a few examples:

3. Painterly

This was a bit more fun than I expected.  Brush and ink have a remarkable ability to be very dynamic.  I play around with some ideas here, and the calligraphic style renders quite pleasant abstractions.  Some are more detailed attempts, but I find that the fewer strokes, the better, at least with ink anyway.  I suppose the Japanese would say the same.

4. Graphical

This one is a bit trickier.  All straight and 90 degree lines only.  Or it seems so for now.  I've come up with a few solutions if that constraint ends up changing to be a bit looser.  Nothing I really love yet, but here are a few.  The first is the realization that I don't need to make these perfect, as the graphical drawings will be re-created in Illustrator.  I essentially dropped the ruler so I could get ideas out quicker.  Below are some of the older ideas that took way too long if you're trying to get 20 original ideas down.

Many many more drawings to go.  Better get to it.

Old and New

Here's the final prototype from the last project

I helped come up with the fabrication method, but James executed it to perfection.  This is my only image, so you can't really see how the thickness changes, but that's why adding the color between layers works as kind of a contour map.  That's 5 layers of balsa with ink between them, it expands out, and then back in to make the grip area help keep your fingers from slipping down toward the food with your downward motion.  It's pretty cool, and I think James might actually make one.  He has access to a machine shop through some engineering program.

Anyway, there was a poster too, but I didn't design it, and I'm not a big fan of it really.  Here's my team though:

On to the new project!

First we had to pick a hand tool, actually, first we had to pick 3 hand tools and sketch them.  Then we narrowed it down to one, which will be the subject of this new project.

Representation.  So, there are a million ways to represent something, like the faces you see above, this face "  : )  " and the word "face" are all representations of faces.  We have to fill a grid with images of our chosen tool that go from a photograph to language, and the myriad steps in between.

16 images, each with a specific concept designed to help us explore the ways we can simplify an object without completely losing its communicative abilities.  Or, you know, hopefully.

So, I drew a Zyliss juliene slicer, a spatula, and a nut driver, but I brought like 6 other objects with me to class.  In the middle of the night I was thinking about my drawn selections, and started having doubts about my choices.  The nut driver is radially symetric, so it's angles of representation are limited, and I knew I was going to have to draw 300 images of this thing, so that was gonna get boring.  Spatula also, far too boring to ponder for the next few weeks.  I ended up with some pliers, and I think I'm happy with that decision.

Got a billion drawings to do.  I'll scan 'em in when I get the chance.  Lots and lots of drawings.  Better get going.

GeorgeP

Project 2, conclusion

So, we went with one of the other ideas, and I have to say, I wasn't all that excited about it to begin with.  It is the exact opposite of my idea, as far as complexity.  It's essentially a knife, and yeah, I know, there's a million knives out there, but this one IS different.  I'm sold, really, and I want one now.  So, let's start with some rather stunning pictures of the prototypes.  We got to use the photography studio, which was nice.

Above is the basic prototype, and, obviously, the second is even nicer.  So, let me explain.  Though, the creator here (James) hasn't included a cutting board, I think that's what makes the whole concept.  So, imagine if you will, a cutting board with a slight spherical depression in it.  The arc of the board is wider than the arc of the blade of the knife.  So, it's like a chopping version of the mortar and pestle.  Now, the knife is different than normal in a few other ways besides it's shape you can make out above.  The blade taper is quite severe toward the top, so that the top of the blade is a very thick and easy to handle.  It's more or less operated like a cleaver in the sense that you're using the weight of it to do the work.  So, rather than smashing like a mortar and pestle, you chop or mince, any amount, with fairly excellent control of just how chopped up your food is.  Oh yeah, it's also not a uni-tasker like my last idea, this will work for a variety of things.  Lastly, and one of the only garlic specific features, there are knurls on the edge of the top of the blade, not just for hand-grip-ability, but to hold garlic cloves in place when you smash the husk off.

Well, I'm starving, I'll post the final prototype and the poster we have to make next time.  We're starting a new project though, so it's kind of overlapping now.  I'll have to think of new blog titles I guess.

GeorgeP

So, we decided on garlic processing, as I said, and we've made a bunch of interesting mind maps.  Here's a few:

 Zoom.  This was one of the more effective things we did, though it's also the thing that has changed this project from redesigning this particular garlic press, and led us into new prototyping far outside making this thing out of a better material, with a better grip.  The world kind of opened up, especially when I looked at the quantity options.  Out of all the fields we used in the above exercise (power, material, etc.), quantity took me the most by surprise.  I hadn't really given it thought in my earlier design renderings, none of my ideas went beyond the amount of garlic I use, but there are chefs out there that might want a lot more fresh garlic on hand.  That's where my prototype idea came from.

Here's a "mind-map" proper.  Fun, but not as effective as the matrix above.

So at this point we're coming up with new garlic processing solutions.  My brainwave is a hand powered garlic processor that can dispense say, 20 or 30 cloves, for a chef that wants fresh garlic over and over, without pre processing, and without effort.  My drawings are pretty basic, and my prototype was sort of pointless, as it hardly expresses the amount of engineering that I have to explain for people to understand, and even then, maybe.  For this reason I don't think we'll probably end up choosing my idea.  It's a bit complicated.  For those who care, here's the concept, and hopefully some pictures if I got them scanned already.

Yeah, here it is:

Ok, so, now let me explain.  At the beginning of your shift, you husk 30 fresh garlic cloves and dump them into the front of the machine and replace the cap.  I've actually changed this design a little already.  I want to make it circular, so I can snap the cap on securely, AND, so I can have a second thin layer of metal on the extrusion plate that will rotate to slice of the garlic that was pressed.  Ok, so the power design here is the over engineered part.  I thought to myself, getting garlic out of the machine should take nearly no effort, just point and shoot as it were.  To make this hand-powered, I had to figure out how to put the effort into one step at the beginning of the process, and then 'reap' the power when needed.  So, in essence, it's a battery for mechanical energy.  My battery is a spring.  To begin, pull out the plunger, which compresses the spring.  Now, as you pull, you need to pull the trigger to allow movement of the plunger.  Let go of the trigger and plunger when your spring is compressed enough to fit the garlic you need.  The above picture is the garlic loaded and spring compressed.  Now let me show you the trickiest part.  I think it's on notebook paper.

Ok, this is the back view of the object, the center circle is the plunger-rod that sticks out the back of the press.  3 large bearings are held in place against the plunger rod, and each of these are encircled with a steel band that at resting state is pulled taught against the bearings, and thus holds the rod in place.  This idea is to control the release of garlic with infinite rate of flow control.  The outside lever actuates a bike cable (that's probably not the most efficient way, but it's my mechanical language) the cable pulls the steel band away from the spring holding it in place, thus loosening the whole mechanism.  Oh, it's a clutch of sorts I guess.

Anyway, as you can see, this is probably the mechanical engineer side of me getting a little too into the design.  It's difficultly to explain will probably mean we're going with someone else's idea to prototype.  I'm still pretty proud of it though.

GeorgeP

Project 2, continued again.

There was a vote, and my object was chosen to do the redesign.  The first thing we did was a battery of creative thinking exercises.   And while we're on the topic of teamwork, there was a homework assignment I missed earlier to discuss an IDEO video we watched as a class, right here on this blog.  I got all excited about writing this thing, and didn't realize we'd have required topics.  That's good though, creativity thrives through limitations.  Right?

The IDEO video, was a Nightline special about the IDEO design firm back in 1999.  I hadn't even been exposed to the idea of industrial design in the world, I thought engineers did everything.  But I was already keen on design back then, not necessarily the aesthetics, yet, but things like clickable jog-dials on Sony HandiCams, or good decisions like when digital cameras switched back from proprietary battery packs to double a's when rechargeable AA NiCads and Lithium Ions became available for cheap.  Anyway, the reason we watched this was to watch their innovation process.  The reason this show was interesting to the NightLine audience was because they were a huge profitable business that has a very loose and creative business model, the kind of thing that cubicle workers dream about.  If I had seen this back in '99, I might have chosen University of Cincinnati over Oklahoma,I thought engineers were the designers (a lot still are), and though both schools have an ME program, only Cincy has ID.  Whoops, I keep losing focus here.  They followed the team through the redesign of a shopping cart.  Besides some of the actual thinking exercises they use, the main point here was using ALL ideas to start with.  In other words, no self-editing, just amass all the ideas, then start trimming them down.  Bad ideas can lead often lead to brilliant ideas if you don't thrown them out to early.  You see an edge of the executive process in this video too, and that's the major editing of ideas presented.  Something that's pretty tricky to do in a group without an executive.

Here's the video on YouTube:

IDEO: Deep Dive

George P

Project 2, cont.

So, let's start with some drawings.  This is the garlic press that I've chosen to redesign.  We've been put into groups, but we haven't decided whose object we're going to tackle.  More on that later.

Although switching to ink outline drawings was an attempt to save time, due to the nature of ink, I still sketched these first before applying the micron to paper.  Thus, not really saving at time at all.  I really like the way they came out though.  Not sure I could render an outline drawing with nothing to look at though, which is the true skill I'll need to develop.  Drawing at all though, is helping rendering skills too, it's like reading vs. writing.  Drawing objects is reading them, creating non-existent objects in 2d that are legible is writing them. 

Speaking of legibility, this is the removable basket from the garlic press.  Yes I know, a removable basket is a great idea, but honestly, it's still a terrible garlic press. 

Easily one of my favorites.  India ink and brush.  I honestly don't know how it turned out this well.  

This drawing betrays my methods a bit.  Back when I took Drawing I at OU, we sat on benches and drew farily large compositions.  You had to make sure your bench was always in the same position if you were going to come back to your drawing later.  We would mark the floor in chalk and initial it so we could find it the next time.  When drawing this small objects right in front of you, it's really really easy to change your perspective entirely.  A few inches one way, when your object is close enough to see detail, would be like moving my bench/easel thing back in Drawing I, halfway across the room.  Solution?  Take a bunch of pictures, edit out the backgrounds in photoshop, increase the contrast, and draw from the image on your laptop.  This image was drawn from a picture taken at a wider angle than the eye would normally see, so my drawing of a crappy little hand tool, seems a bit more sizable, a bit more architectural?

That's all for now, more to come.

GeorgeP

Project 1 redux, Project 2 begins

As we begin the new project, we were also given a chance to re-design our previous assignment.  After looking at everyone's work, and accepting the critiques of my work, I've re-worked the design.  This is done only on a small sheet of paper, and not the 18x24 foamcore that the main project was on, but I certainly feel a lot better about this one. 

I added some color, and since the grid feels very De Stijl, I went with primaries, and used them in a way that roughly corresponds with Kandinsky's color theory.  The sizes of everything but the main object is reduced to one inch squares, and any floating objects on a white plane have borders to bring out the grid.  The focus object is enlarged, with two drawn views and a large photo.  I'm much happier with this layout, even though it's just pencil and pen.

Most of the afternoon yesterday was spent in the Architecture building with a friend and co-worker Matt Salad, sketching away garlic press design ideas.  Only a few of these were taken all the way to ink and marker, but, I'll show you most of them.

This device is the first thing I drew, and really, is probably the first prototype I've ever drawn.  It's much easier to draw things that you're looking at.  This scissor style garlic press would likely not draw the two ends together unless the handles were permenantly further apart.  But not bad huh?  I immediately drew from old tools I've interacted with, as this device looks very familiar, like an old pair of pruners, or sheet-metal crimpers.  It's a little medieval for the modern kitchen, but I just need 10 ideas, not 10 perfect solutions

Pen and markers!  I got to use my new toys, and here we are with something that probably already exists somewhere.  It slices the garlic into little thin wafers, a la Goodfellas.  The top part pushes the slices all the way through the blades.  I probably should have colored the handles differently to better communicate that idea in the side view.  If the top were purple for example, a little bit of that purple would show though on the bottom.  This also suffers from imperfect rendering.  The top handle would not go all the way down as described in the side view.  This is hard to do with ink.

Here's an odd one.  I was thinking of a mortar and pestle, but didn't want to turn the garlic into paste.  The solution is a fun, albeit impractical one.  Once you've jammed all the garlic into the little holes, the silicon backing is pushed out.  Each of these holes has tiny little plungers, and when you turn it over, you simply push the pieces back out.  It's got 3 legs so it never wobbles, and feet for being upside down or right-side up.  That pestle is not to scale, and shouldn't be spelled "pestil".

Finally, here's a very quick, just before bed rendering of Genevieve's idea for processing garlic, the finger choppers.  Essentially a safety glove rendered incredibly dangerous.    With this product, one can chop conceivably quickly, like a double trigger paintball gun.  Maybe I should mock up a four finger version.  It would be fun at least.  That hand is actually not based on my own fat, sausage-fingered hands, it just came out that way.  It was late.

There are several more drawings, but I won't bore you anymore.  If you want to give me more ideas, please feel free to comment.  Or perhaps you have "the best" garlic processing methods, let me know that too.

GeorgeP

Design Drawing

I don't know if other students are going to be looking at this, but I figured I would post this page I found about design drawing.

Books on design drawing.

Lance Rake, one of the ID professors here at KU, spoke at our Monday lecture about drawing, and very clearly pounded it into my head that I need to be constantly practicing these skills.  All this was backed up with research statistics from Michael Roller that arranged desired skills according to importance as desired by possible employers of junior designers.  In fact, the researcher is from the University of Cincinnati, where I nearly went to school for Mechanical Engineering, and is my father's Alma mater.  Maybe I'll go to grad-school there?

Anyway, I've got a nice new set of Prismacolor markers, and I have to pump out 10 design concepts for pressing garlic.  I feel the best solution is just to chop it with a knife, but this should be fun anyhow.  I'll post those drawings, and maybe some of my sketches of the garlic press that I picked out.

But here we go, design drawing starts now.  I'm going to try and mimic Carl Liu, which was who I was researching when I found the above link.  Carl Liu and Lance Rake also, he showed us his drawings and they were quite excellent.  His 3D arrows were really nice and I will definitely try to appropriate them into my drawings.  Carl Liu uses circles to highlight what he thinks is the most important among his other sketching, which usually shows his short mental research to get to the main idea.  I'm probably getting ahead of myself I suppose.  I'm not ready to just put pen to paper yet.  I'm going to start all of these with pencil, then ink it, then erase the graphite and bring in the markers.

I look forward to seeing my skills progress throughout the year, which, I suppose, is kind of what this blog is about.  After reading Core77's design school advice, one of the biggest points people kept driving home is to keep track of everything and record all your steps with cameras or sketchbooks or blogs.  I've been talking about doing this for a while, and I must say, it's nice to be required to do it, and we'll all get to watch me get better at this.  I fully plan on updating well beyond this first class.

One last thing, I have to say, I haven't done but 4 or 5 drawings since I took drawing class at OU in 2003.  I'm very happy to report, it's not been hard to get back on the horse.  I really think, with practice, I will not only get a lot better at drawing, but good at drawing things in less than 20 minutes.  It's funny, I kind of assumed drawing wasn't that important anymore, but it sounds like it's going to be a huge part of the rest of my life, and I'm going to embrace that, and become a drawing machine.

GeorgeP

Project 1 complete!

Hello again everyone.  Class just keeps on trucking, and I can't say I'm not pleased about it.  I'm very happy to be moving onto something else.

I meant to post this line drawing last time.  Its sort of a whimsical approach to all the objects before I chose one.

I chose what I call the "fancy corkscrew" for the first project, based on the vast history of that problem, and the many many objects made to address the same issue.  My research went well, and I was able to use some great images from the KU library image archive, as well as a poem about wine, and an article from 1887 about corkscrew manufacturing.

In the end though, I wasn't completely stoked with my layout.  I had spent a great deal of time gathering 'floating' images on white backgrounds, which ended up making layout even more difficult.  I dumped everything into Adobe Illustrator and started moving things around my virtual 18x24 foam core with a 2" grid.  Nothing was working, so I went back to the resources from our first lecture.

I decided I needed to create a layout before I put a single image on the paper.  Here is what I ended up creating.

With this layout, I could stop thinking of each image as something that must lay on a grid line, but could bunch them and place that entire grouping within the boundaries.  The pink is imagery, the yellow is text.  The top row is history and shows wine-making as well as bottling and corking.  The next row is 3 sets of the most common solutions in ascending order of complication but also of ease of use.  The third row is devoted to the object and the various mutations, as well as an even nicer and newer looking product based around the same lever-type concept.  The final, and smallest row is the result, or the why of the product.  A small collection of emotional and traditional relations to wine, including, pouring, judging, tasting, and a cherub getting wasted.

The end result is... not amazing.  It feels very formal, and evokes the inside of a DK Eyewitness book.  You know what I'm talking about.  They always have them at Sam's Club, and they cover every topic ever with floating images on a white background.

You remember these right?  After using Illustrator, I can't imagine what a pain in the ass it was for books like these to get their layout before it was all digitized.  Resizing, which I probably did around 2000 times, probably took quite an effort just to get one image completed.

Here it is then, the digital version of my final piece.  The first paragraph bleeds over the grid, and the final row of images, doesn't quite reach the right-hand edge.  I went into class feeling very un-stylized.  My layout was information based and just didn't look hip or modern.  I also realized that my object didn't take quite center stage.  Though it gets it's own row and the largest images on the piece are all the "fancy corkscrew", it wasn't quite as obvious as it should have been.

Once we went to critique though, I felt much better.  Not because mine looked much better, but because I was a slave to the grid, and very few other people gave it much thought it seemed.  Hopefully, though not aesthetically awesome, that will count heavily toward my success.

Sorry it's unreadable, but I'm not going to struggle with that right now.  I think I need to host the image if it's going to be bigger than this.  I'm going to change the background color of the blog now, so you can see the actual edge here.

That's all for now.  Thanks for stopping by and looking at this stuff.

George P.

Project #1

Hello everyone.  Those that are out of the loop, I am in Design class now.  Here are some sketches I did last night that won't ever be judged or critiqued or even turned in.  I figured I'd post them so we can see how much better I get at this over the course of the year.

The assignment was to sketch 5 objects that you felt were designed well, and then narrow it down to the object that most represents "good design" as laid out by Dieter Rams as well as others.  I still haven't decided which object, but here they are.

I stopped these sketches as I approached 25 minutes or so, otherwise I would have been up all night.  I also tend to be perfectionist, so I could have easily spent 4 or 5 hours on the fancy corkscrew, but, no reason.  Here they are from ascending from the simplest:

Binder Clip

One of my favorites.  Very simple, very elegant, and unchanged for years.

Park CT-3 Chain Tool

Very simple machine.  Not particularly aesthetic, and a very utilitarian ergonomics, but lovely just the same.  I probably won't choose this as it's a niche product and would be limiting during research of the following project.

Bic Lighter

It's a classic.  I wasn't going to choose this until one of our lecturers said we were supposed to bring our objects today.  Not true apparently, but I limited my objects to portability.  Hard to say if this is in the right order of complexity.  This does have a lot of things going on, but perhaps slightly simpler mechanically than the corkscrew that is next.  This drawing is boring because I forgot to do another view, so it's like the black and white version of above.

Fancy Corkscrew

These things used to be a SkyMall type product and cost hundreds.  My guess is the creator failed for protect his patent in the country of manufacture, because as well as this is designed, you can find these now for 20 bucks.  It is a very satisfying product to use, very well engineered, and surprisingly elegant.  This will likely be my choice for it's complexity, as well as the sheer age of the problem being solved here.  Getting into corked wine has been a long standing problem, probably before paper came in sheets.  I could be wrong though.  The sketch is not very good, and is head on.

iPod Shuffle

This may be the product that pleases me the most, but something in me doesn't want to choose an Apple product.  I imagine there will be a dozen other Apple projects out there.  I'm hungry, so I won't go into why this is such a fantastic piece of equipment, but it is.  I use it 10 times as much as my iPod Classic.  Here's a drawing.

There they are.  Time for lunch.

This image is from another website.  Look at this image from another website.

Nice.

Mic check.

Here is a thing.  Look at this thing.

Hello World.