This past week we have been trying to finish up as much of the work on the current brief before we start the next one. This is involving finishing final models and preparing design booklet covers etc. I’m trying to go for a style where you can see the design in a somewhat appealing way that shows off what it is. To do this I finally used some CAD in my own time which I Was itching to do and I cant wait to get my teeth into solid works.

I can see my modelling skills getting better all the time, seeing my skills progress from making my first model which was essentially two cuboid shapes stuck together to a more flowing and comfortable shape that fits the hand very well.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This (Left) was my first iteration of my front cover, I really like the overall style of it, however, I need to make the whole thing lighter, and switch it to landscape and so probably re render the image. But overall, I do like this style of cover.

 

We were also assigned the task to make a cutlery mood board for our next project. We were told the mood board was to be on the topic of cutlery, I this this brief could be both very interesting but it could also end up being quite boring. I’m hoping I could try and make a design for disabled people, but we will see.

This week we have been selecting our 3 top designs and then the last final design. My 3 final designs are shown below. I picked these because they scored best in the matrix evaluation but also I could see them being more desirable and applicable to the gaming industry. Then I decided to take the folding one forward as I can see more people using that than my other two designs.

 

Constellation had a few moments that applied to design in general today but also product design specifically. Firstly the question of what is art, and more specifically is design art. I found this an interesting question because, you don’t necessarily intend on things looking good, however, they sometimes do and then that means it must be art? And the point that directly applied to product design was that our lecturer went on a rant about how the power button on an iMac was badly placed, it is placed behind the bottom left corner. This means when you o to adjust the angle of the screen you accidentally press the button. This was a moment that truly highlights that testing is everything in a successful product.

Started modelling more models for the gaming project out of blue foam and keep making stupid mistakes all the time. Constellation continues to be a little boring, we have been learning the history of neo futurism and the designers and architects that started this trend. I am still finding it a little bit useless and taking nothing from it that applies to product design what so ever.

Starting to really like the idea of compact designs that could fit in your pocket and augmented reality games. This week, I started modelling with blue foam. I’ve had very little experience with. I’m finding it very difficult to manage how easy it is to cut too much and ruin your model. I do really enjoy making models, it is probably my most enjoyable element of product design, especially when making models out of solid materials.

Started constellation, I am in the neo futuristic architecture group, I find the topic somewhat boring now, though I feel when we get into it I may start enjoying it more and potentially more useful.

This week we started our first project. This is to design a hand-held games console. I think this project is going to test my ability to, one, think outside the box and fin solutions to the problem that haven’t been done before, which is going to be difficult as we are competing with a multi billion dollar industry. Currently I am thinking that it’s going to be very difficult to make a reason to buy a dedicated hand-held console as the mobile phone has nearly dominated this area of the industry. For this reason, I think it may be better to focus on an extension to the mobile phone to make playing games on the phone more enjoyable/easy. That ended up being the focus of my 50 sketches we were tasked on doing. Also, started learning to draw again and render by hand, finding this very frustrating as simply put, I suck at it.

This week I have also done some workshop inductions, for example the ceramic induction where I made a few random shapes and attached them together.