Audio Hack

What are people supposed to do when their radio, headphones, or speakers break? Most of us throw them in the gutter and go buy another.

To me music is food for our souls. Without music life is empty. I am looking into sound and how we experience music, there has to be a solution to deal with all this audio waste.

B&F collaboration in the works

Just picked up some Nigerian wax cotton for a collaboration I have in the works with Bowyer & Fletcher.

Should have some developments on the project in the near future.

Digital meets Nature

I decided to work on a stool with a natural top or Digital meets Nature. I have spent a few days playing with the shape of the stool; I think a series of stools will be more powerful. I will project the natural pattern onto a wood beam section if I can’t find the proper stump size. I think it is best to make thee different shapes with gender and space in mind.

New Networks

Week Nine: After a tough critique Friday I have decided to go a bit deeper into the concepts I have generated. I looked at the process of selecting pieces of wood from nature to help expedite the manufacturing process. Taking this a step further I came up with a marriage of natural selection and high precision engineering.

The idea is to select pieces of wood from nature cut them into a workable size then 3d scan them into the computer. Form a 3d stl file we can use a program to generate cutting paths and optimum places for seating. This morning I went out to track down some unprocessed timber in order to carry out this idea.

It has been quite a challenge trying to find the material for this process and even when I find a piece it will need to be kiln dried so I also need to find a place that dries wood. I hope that three weeks is enough time. I am giving myself till the end of the week to find my material and if I fail to find the proper material I will end up using another idea for the chair. This process has been quite a challenge. Working with wood in a new city where I have no connections and no idea where to get material. I have to start form scratch and may new connections and networks.

Fifth scale models

Week Eight: This week has been about prototyping and solidifying our concepts. On Friday we have a critique. Each of us will present three 1:5 scale models and explain the story of each chair. This is my first time making a fifth scale model so I have been playing around with a few different materials that seem to be quite easy to work with. Chemiwood has been my number one choice as it is quite easy to manipulate. I found a few scraps around the workshop and have been playing with a few different forms.

I have three pretty good models completed and am quite interested in working with a natural material in my construction. Wood is my number one choice as it best represents both traditional African and western craft. How we use wood is represented in many different elements of our cultures. Wood is nature’s gift and as I look around the studio I see nothing that embodies this gift. It is a bit of a shame to see very little reflections of nature and one of its most unique gifts. Bringing this material into a new form and generating a new found appreciation for it is quite a challenge.

I had a great tutorial with Simon Maidment. He had worked in South Africa with a group of basket weavers to develop a new way of visualize the art form and craft coming out of the region. I think he gets where I am coming from with this project and what I am trying to achieve. However, it is hard for the other tutors to really understand what I am trying to achieve with this project. Maybe this is better represented in another project.

Concepts in Culture

The week has been occupied with one on one tutoring sessions with visiting tutors. Unfortunately I didn’t have my one on one till 6:30 Friday night. But it was great to get some feed back on some of my ideas. I have three main concepts: hollow, culture, and temporary. The concept I most like deals with culture, in particular the mix of west African and western culture. I have been looking through some great books on African sculpture and artifacts to find inspiration in the shapes and textures used in some traditional West African artwork. I am inspired to create a contemporary mixture between African traditional sculpture and western seating.

Sine Wave Project with Pierre

Been working on a really fun project with my classmate Pierre Paslier . We are developing a second version of his SineWave project that we hope to launch by summer.

Concept Generation

Week Seven: This week kicked off with so great exercises to generate concepts and ideas for the SuperForm chair.

Monday we had a lecture on Morphological Analysis with Peter Childs. This form of generating ideas is based off making selections in a matrix of associated elements or constraints. This type of analysis can be found in the entertainment industry when generating new ideas for films and series.

Miles and Yoon ran a full day of brainstorming. This was the first time we had a workshop lead by Miles, it was quite obvious from the jump that this was something he had a lot of experience in doing and was passionate about.

WE warmed up with of a sort of sketching battleship game then we jumped into World Cafe. World Cafe is an exercise where a series of tables are set up, each table specializes in a subject (materials, human centered, key words) the cafe has a manager, the manager is in charge of keeping track of the ideas generated in his cafe. With a decent sized group of designers each cafe is filled. The cafes have seven min of personal concept generation then ten min of discussion. The designers then move on to the next cafe and the manager stays behind for the next group to rotate. By the end of the exercise each cafe has a number if ideas and can find some connections between them. We grouped our sketches and started to analyze the data finding some really cool concepts for SuperForm.

A Day of Sketching

We had a full day of sketching lead by Mark Owen. He was a painter turn designer and now finds time to teach sketching skills. Mark really encouraged us to be courageous and sketch and sketch a lot no matter how skilled we think we are. He really made me feel comfortable with putting the pen to the paper. I think he did this by showing examples of both excellent sketching and very basic sketches from great artists and designers.

We ran through three drawing exercises. First we drew. Chairs on tables using pens then we drew the same chairs using sticks from Mark’s garden and ink. We had a blindfolded exercise where Mark described objects on a table as we drew them. We ended the day with a 360 sketch, we each sat in one place and drew what we saw in all directions on a long strip of paper.

RCA Shop and RapidForm

The RCA has a shop on the second floor of the Darwin building. This shop has a few different areas: Wood, Metal, welding, vacuum forming, laser, general project working. The shop is most strong on the woodworking and has a 5axis CNC. I find the shop guys really friendly and helpful but I do have the feeling that I got to prove myself a bit, show them my knowledge base through my work. This is a pretty common thing in just about any shop. You got to earn trust.

Here we have a Rapidform is a separate section of the RCA. This department deals with all rapid prototyping for the students and outside industries. There are five different types of rapid prototyping machines. We have the ability to print in paper, plastic, resin, and titanium. You can also have your sketch models scanned and preped for printing. The cost seems to be reasonable and the staff is really friendly. I can see myself getting involved there soon.