Comments on project 2

http://guyuliang1990.blogspot.com/2010/10/upcycling-unwanted.html

http://stellaanddesign.blogspot.com/2010/10/miss-magpie.html

http://snailmina.blogspot.com/2010/10/ides1031-project-2-upcycling-2010-10-26.html

http://cocodesignforever.blogspot.com/2010/10/project-two-upcycling.html

http://jharleydesign.blogspot.com/2010/10/rationale.html

Project 2- Upcycling

Rationale- Seat belt iPad case

The iPad case I made is from seat belts in cars that will be scraped.

Statistic shows that from July 2008 to September 2009, 14.8millions of cars are scraped in the USA, which has the largest amount of vehicles around the world. Moreover, 70millions of cars are produced all over the world, and the average life of each one is around 15 years, so that the amount of dead seat belts is enormous, and they can be easily recycled from local car scrap.

From the environmental angle, as the seat belts are made of plastics, the will be taken to landfill and it can take thousands of years for them to break down, so choose seat belt as the raw material will reduce the pollution to the environment. What’s more, the whole case is purely handmade, combined by needle work, no glue involved, totally environmentally friendly.

As a matter of fact, seat belts are well-made industrial products, they are extremely strong and can last long, even longer than the iPad its self, so it is the idea material for accessories for protecting. As the screen is the most fragile part of an iPad, it needs better protection, a folding technique is applied on the front surface of the case, this will create space above the screen, absorb energy when impact. Four pockets are made on the back, user can put paper in the lager pockets and SIM cards in the smaller one. Two buttons on the top can secure the iPad inside the case.

In conclusion, this seat belt iPad case is totally environmentally friendly, achieve the up cycling purpose, and it really does its job: protecting your iPad.

Video Reflection- Design For Life

Design for life is a TV show made by the world’s most famous designer Philippe Starck, it is basically a show of Philippe selecting one young designer from 12 candidates he already picked up before to work for him for 6 months, who will help Philippe change the world by designing new chairs, and it's every young designer's dream.


First, Philippe sends them to the supermarket with a simple task: to buy things that represent function, ecology or gender. The candidates have to prove that they can think in the right way, that they share Philippe's philosophy and understanding of the world. One person came back from the supermarket with condoms to represent male and female, one brought a bicycle back to present the green object, a battery the environmentally unsound one. There's nothing really wrong with their selections, but in Philippe’s point of view, their choices are unimaginative, uninspiring, lazy, they've been too narrow-minded about the task, too literal, too English. Two people ended their journey here.

The second task is that they had to design something that would benefit humanity. Neither round produced anything interesting. In this task, I learnt that whatever we design, we should consider target market as one of the most important thing, the thing we design should be appropriate for the right people.



The third task is to design a product that is ethical, ecological, democratic, for daily use and is non electronic. I really like the way Mike used to design. As he is designing a product for blind people, he blind folds himself for the whole day so that he can know how blind people feel and what they really need. This is what we designer should do, think of the people we are designing for.



This TV show is really beneficial, especially for people like us who just started their design careers, we can learn things from the world’s most famous designer, as a experienced designer, he knows what people really needs, what we should do and so on. I wish I can have a chance to meet and talk to people like Philippe Starck to inspire me.

Project 1 Comments

http://snailmina.blogspot.com/2010/09/ides1031-project-1-experience.html

http://guyuliang1990.blogspot.com/2010/09/experience-enrichment.html

http://jharleydesign.blogspot.com/2010/09/experience-enrichment_20.html

http://lilynguyen1506.blogspot.com/2010/09/experience-enrichment.html

http://mycollectionsofmisdirections.blogspot.com/2010/09/experience-enrichment-appearance-model.html

Project 1

The beer opener I designed is for men aged 25 to 35 most of whom are leaders in their groups. This kind of people are independent, they do everything themselves even little things in daily life, and they have fun doing them. Also, as a leader, they want everything under their control. They like simple, unique products and make decisions fast because they are always busy, but once they are free, they’d like enjoy their life. This group of men got high grade of personal tastes and they pay attention on their quality of life.

According to the target market I’ve chosen, I design this simple beer opener. It got a quite modern and streamlining shape, like a fast shuttle. Once seen it, people feel the speed and efficiency of this simple tool. Shinning metallic surface shows it is made of steel so that is quite tough and can easily open beer. As we know, mostly men have big hands, so this extra-long handle can fit, and comfortable grip make people feel the full control of this product. In you a physical view, the longer the handle is, the less strength it needs to open beer, that means people can open the bottle much easier. Moreover, it can be treated as a decoration on table due to the modern appearance.



In one word, this product perfectly fits its target market with the unique simple shape and comfortable under-controlled handling.



Vedio Reflection- The Objectified

I’ve learnt a lot of stuff for my future design career after watching the film the Objectified. This is a good documentary film that covered such a huge and complex topic, and it is a useful introduction of industrial design for people like me who just started learning this.




One good concept the Senior Vice President of Industrial Design for Apple, Jonathan Ive made is that a big definition of who you are is a designer is the way you look the world. Designers often try to draw too much attention to a feature simply to force the user to look at their clever design contribution, instead, a good design is able to demonstrate its function by itself, and some functions should only be there when it’s performing, like the indicator light on Macbook pro.



When we design a product, we have to look into the attribute of the product, some may be the material, the form connecting to people and how you physically connect to your product. There are three phases of a modern design, one of the phases is looking at a design in a formal relationship, formal logic of the product. The second way to look at it is the symbolism and the content of what you are dealing with. The third phase is to look at design in a contexture scenes and a much bigger picture. It’s looking at the ecological context for that object and human-object relationship. And design is search for form, what form should an object take.



As David Kelly said, bad design is where the customer thinks it’s their fault that something doesn’t work…People should demand more from the things they own. They need to demand that things work. Oppositely, a good design is innovative and should make a product useful, it should be a aesthetic design and will make a product understandable, it should be honest, unobtrusive, and long-lived, it is consistent in every detail and it is environmentally friendly. Also, it should be as little design as possible.



I would like to end with a quote of Marc Newson’s words in the film, “I wish people would be more critical of design, and of designers, who are responsible for designing some pretty nasty stuff.”

Task5 Design Confusion

Video Rflection- The Story of Stuff

Before watching the video: The Story of Stuff, I thought the procedure we get the products is just four steps: from extraction to production to distribution to consumption to disposal as the text book told. However, there were a lot of important things missing between them.




One important thing missing was that this system is a linear system, so there is no comeback, as the planet we living on has limited resources, once used up, they are gone and will never come back. So this kind of system will lead to a bad end. The system actually exists in our daily life, it is related to societies, cultures, economies, the environment. It also related to we people, which is missing in the system. Government is one of the most important kind of people, thought they spend lots of money on military, they still got the value taking care of us, they are of the people, by the people, for the people. Then along came the corporation, which is more powerful than government, that lead the consequence that government cares more about the corporation than citizens.



There are other things missing in the picture. In the extraction part, people exploring and getting resources from the earth, they chop down trees, they blow up mountains to get the metals inside, they use up all the water and they wipe out the animals. In one word, we are ruing the planet and running out of resources. And in the production part, we use power to mix toxic chemicals in with the natural resources to make toxic contaminated products. So what we got will be danger to our later life. And we don’t know the influence on the entire environment that we are living in. Not only in the products, but even more leave as by-products, or pollution. And it’s a lot of pollution.



Consumption is the heart of the system, the engine that drives it. We have become a nation of consumers. Our primary identity has become that of being consumers, the primary way that our value is measured and demonstrated. So people keep buying things to show their value, and the products we bought before became trash. As a matter of fact, a lot of products are designed for the dump, so stuff will become useless quickly after buying it, so people will buy another one. Factories make more money in this way.



However, the dumped products becomes trash, all of this garbage either gets dumped in a landfill, or burned. Either way, both pollute the air, land, water and the climate. Also, the toxics get out from burning goes back in the production stage. So one way to deal with it is recycle, though it doesn’t help a lot, because it is hard for people to separate trash.



It’s necessary for people start doing something to prevent the earth, like saving forests and clean production and conscious consuming and blocking landfills and incinerators. The most important thing is to taking back our government, so it is really is by the people and for the people. We should build a system that doesn’t waste resources or people.

Video Rflection- Don Norman: Emotional Design

In the video Emotional Design, Don Norman showed us how important emotion is in a product, people like product that can actually make them happy when using it. And it is necessary for designer to understand what beauty is about and pretty and emotions, to design products beautiful and functional.




Don started with two examples, one is the Google search thing, people may feel pleasant with the “o” down the bottom when doing search but don’t know why, he explained it as human subconscious, that is the design affect users’ emotion. The other one is the Mini Cooper, Times magazine commented on this car that it has lots of faults but buy it anyway for it is so much fun to drive. Don said when a person is happy, they are more susceptible to interruption, which makes the person think outside the box, that is when you’re happy, you are more creative. So we can see how important to design products that make people feel happy and fun.



Talking about the visceral level of design, it’s not about the function, it’s all about the outside appearance like visual, hearing or smell. As the example shown in the video, people buy the bottle of water for the beautiful bottle that can be regarded as a decoration at home.



The behavioral level of a design is important, people may be more satisfied with a product that is more than they can use it as been told, they want to control the product so they can use it the way they want. This makes me thinking about a product I bought recently- ipad, as the advertisement said, you don’t need to change yourself to fit the product, it fits you automatically. So is the example shown in the video, the global knife, it makes user feel can control it. That is exactly what we designers aiming for.



The third level of design is called reflective. If you like something, your brain has no control of what you do, the sense doesn’t control the muscle, it looks over, there is a little voice watching and saying that is good or bad. For example, an expensive watch is to impress people, it reflected to the design.

Task4: Poster

Task 3 Product Sketching

IDES1031 Task2: My Design Career

My design career

Not until being asked to write an essay about my design career, I hadn’t thought much about why I would like to become a designer.

When I was a child, I was extremely interested in drawing, so my parents sent me to learn Chinese painting. However，after several years’ learning, I found out sketching can be more useful in my later life, so I started sketching since then. That may be the main reason that I am here learning design.

Drawing is really a good thing to me, it helps me to relax and calm down, then show people what I am thinking about using pen and paper. Every time I have any new idea, I’d like to draw it down and share it with my friends, it is a way communicating with people around. Drawing means so much to me that I finally decided to continue study design in university. The skills I learnt from my teachers also helps to do good in previous courses.

Although technical skills is important, the most difficult thing during a design project is coming out with a good idea, considering people overseas may think in a different way from our Chinese due to culture differences, and it would help me to open my mind, I decided to study abroad, see things and learn things that I can never find in China. It turned out my decision is right that I see a lot of students here thinking and study in very different ways, and always come out with all kinds of great ideas.

One reason I chose UNSW is that University of New South Walse itself is a famous university, it is one member of the group of eight, and it’s highly spoken of. I also got some information saying industrial design in UNSW is one of the top design schools in Australia.

Talking about my future career design, I love cars a lot like other boys do, so I want to be a car designer. I’m also interested in digital electronics like cameras and mp3 players, they are close to our daily life and develop really fast, so numbers of designers may be needed in that area. I know it won’t be easy to become a famous designer, but I’ll try my best to study at uni and make my dream come true.

IDES1031 Task1: Shape of a Scent

Video Rflection- David Kelley: Human centred design

After watching the video David Delley on Human Centred Design, I can see industrial design have changed to approaching the concept human centered design. Designers start putting behavior and personality into products. And this is going to make our designers’ job more enjoyable.




Before, we used to build 3D models to show our ideas and communicating with people. But now in order to show people how the product works, internal video production groups are, letting people see and experience the man-machine relationship.



The Prada New York retail store in the video is a great example to present the human centered design. The staff devices in store can be used to gather and manage data, they can scan the tags on products that custom interested in and put them on screen to show the color and style and so on. The changing room is the most interesting design. First, the liquid crystal glass becomes opaque at a touch of a switch, a switching to transparent allows for others outside to review. Another product is the magic mirror, the 3 second delay function can let people see what they were like in the back or all around. Data infrastructure in the store computer can collect the data of history of purchase and let all staff develop better understanding of future client needs. All the products in store obey the new rule that is human centered design, putting customs in the front of every design, letting them experience what they want or what they actually need.



I also found the two designs of cubical interesting. One makes all the walls screen that people can put pictures or family photos on the wall. This meets the need of people who thinking about their family at work or wanting releasing the pressure from working by looking at these wall sized photos. The other one makes the walls alive, that’s pretty interesting, and the idea is to make the cubical more human. Even the small flower is human centered, that will show disappointment when you leave and comes up to show happy when you come back, personalities are put in this small product.



All other products in the video like the spy fish are showing that industrial design is approaching the concept of human centered design, every product is based on human behavior and been put into personality that make life more enjoyable.