Apologies aside, here’s to 2010 and all the bright shiny things it will bring.

The short of it [from January] is that I am in a beautiful exciting job working with the fine humans at People of Resource. That month was a bucket full of partly sunshine with projects like promo videos, website / identity packages for local companies, and some invigorating design challenges/collaborations/discussions. Some crazy moments have really defined and redefined our mission as a design service agency with hard work and honest solutions.

It’s been a great ride so far, and February showed no lack of challenges and payoffs. Being continually curious, asking the right questions, and doing really good work all seem to be some of the mantra of this ilmatic place.

I can’t even contain my excitement for what March will contain.

Check back for less vague and more defined posts about work and the madness of March.

Fluidity is basically in contrast to just blobjects and things of organic nature but withour stringint rules, intentions, and geometries. It’s really all about the sublty even in defining the radius of every curve and concavity. We played with SolidWorks in getting very defined and specific and comparing results quicker than with modeling.

We made a few iterations in automotive clay, and then for the final did a clay, white [out of ciba-tool -- dense foam harder than sine foam], and solidworks model. All had to be within 1 mm of each other in accuracy. whoa. a little frusteration and a few weekends of all nighters, and this is what i have:

1 = burning the styrene to get the cruved shape [iteration #1]

2 = before putting clay on styrene [with other clay models and latex mold results]

3 = playing with the rubber oppurtunties and proving the inversion idea of my phone

4 = with solidworks print ou and closed form model

5 = in paint room with parts

6 = closed with solidworks print out

7 = half open [for answering phone] [both flipped out = texting] — 3 form possibilities

8 = all open

geometries on closed form = 1/4 circle with arc to edges, one bigger for hierarchy of opening the top one first for just answering a call. also, flat surface on outside but when opened to full form, “draft” / thicnkess is varied and softened for a curved outline on the inside the phone. may look like a chinese throwing star a bit

well, as with most journals, i may have been not so on top of updating as of recent. but i do have some quick pics of the studio project which in fact are the main reason i haven’t been updating. its a full circle dillema. but here’s some pics:

project one: the mp3 player [some sort of music device that's poetic and really about the details / material choice---this was 3d printed and finished with a transparent paint]

[wordpress can't upload pics yet...? but http://www.architecture-page.com/go/projects/la-casa-dei-bolidi__all]

its a cool museum building paying tribute to ferrari. i liked the digitally created ribbon-like structures that wrap it loosely around the inside. we have to take something distilled from that and create a square block in SolidWorks and make contours or different lofted surfaces to make something new. its hard for me to abstract from just doing ribbons [even vertical ones] or anything wrapping. i got tons of synonyms for wrapping and stuff but it’s loosely and not suffocating or anything. anyway, i started doing a grid system for the dimensions of the slants of ribbon roofs, but i was missing the point of poetry and ribbon. 

we gotta make “heaps of iterations” for tuesday, so i’ma work on it some more and sketch it out. hopefully pics will work to be uploaded later.

–what am i wrapping? what is freely flowing ribbon remind me of? how do you have protection but still be in something open?

materials = taking a song and pulling out emotions/etc and then getting materials that explain some of it or relate to the music/lyrical quality. i’m doing it’s all coming back to me now – celine dion. and it’s kinda tough cuz at first i went with diagramming the musical intensity of it–graphing it as time passed with high lines for intense and flat ones for softness. what material is soft and strong? [spiderwebs?] and i can’t bring in golden silk just cuz it’s celine. 

with our song we have to later 3D print something that is dynamic and moves and preferrably plays the song [mp3 guts maybe]. and then we gotta show what it might look like in 100 years [4D]. i’m thinking of stuff like pictures that get fogged or torn and then magnetically come back together or something–i wanna use the drama of the music to match the object–timer? also, i’m trying to figure out if to go with the musical/lyrical quality of passion and soft or to go with the theme of reminisce and nostalgia. maybe the object fogs [dry ice?...:)] and then when she “remembers” it clears up? or it inks footprint things and although it comes off of the pictures, there are still traces. 

lots of concepts but i gotta dive into a few and pan em out. off to work and sketch!

finally got to our first class of design in a foreign land. turns out i guess the world is fairly connected when it wants to be, because many similar principles showed up; this confirms what i’ve been taught

couple highlights:

thinking 4D instead of 3D. kinda like what we were taught about sustainability and not designing landfills or manufacturing needs. our materials guy was the first and probably last academic to present/critique apple products. he showed some explorations he had done with different materials like copper with a layer applied to it or other metals where OVER TIME they actually got better and all slightly different. mass-customization. also he had ideas with imprinting/stamping information into the ipod with warranty and other coupon info so it encouraged the buyer to come back to store and builds relationship. otherwise, if another technology is close or better than apple, they would still have the personal experience that might sway ppl to stay with them.  really cool to think about things GETTING BETTER or at least different but good OVER TIME.

a lot with interaction design in  cool ways–students past work has included little mechanical things inside 3D prints that dance or vibrate in response to things, and can change based on volume of voice or how you twist/pull the object, etc. very simple but neat.

talked about claytronics where there’s work being dont to manipulate obejcts on a molecular level–re-arrange them. the example they’ve done is start with a blob or brick of something and it turns into a trumpet.

progression of production: one person whittling something for his own use —> one person being more skilled in the town —> specialists and skilled craftsman —> one country possibly [china] that’s really good at making something  || future might be going to chemists and them doing 3D prints for people and even later possibly having at home 3d printers where you can gesturally design or download files to 3D print for yourself. crazy. what does that mean for industrial designers…if they’re no longer needed in this way? if everyone can be one?///

Ponoko is a company example of this [our teacher actually helped found it]. crazy stuff.

our materials project is to turn a song that has some sort of emotional resonance with us and reinstate into an interactive 3d-printed [of course--these people are obsessed ] object. should be poetic, 4D,  and shows that it’ could only be made with 3d printer.

“not made by hand, not made in china”

that’s a huge discussion on possibilites and consequences all in itself. but anwyay, the printer also has rubber and some colors availible to it.

my songs i’m lookin into:

300 soundtrack     country for the lyrics      dispatch for the jams      david gray but i don’t really wanna go chill / relax      vertical horizon      coldplay      5 for fighting           feist         james morrison

we’ll see. oh we’re also using solidworks in studio to make crazy forms in computer, manipulate based on controlled and isolated factors, and then printing a logical and defendable result.

i think we’re gonna learn a lot!    although this is more conceptual—wish i could hack out a lamp or something. but maybe i need to get back to the basics, back to the heart.

will update laters.

highlights: 2 type of flushes on toilets [smart] don’t say restroom; they’ll laugh. TOILETS.    and    prices in stores are sometimes digital!! saves paper and is easily updated!

http://www.siliconvalleytimelapse.com/

i just learned about hdr [high dynamic range] where you take a few pictures with different exposure ranges and then combine them for one picture. it makes details that would otherwise be read as dark or bright seem their natural color.

actually, this guy named gustave le gray used this technique in the 1850′s in his photographs because he didn’t like the underexposure of the sea when he focused on the sky, and visa versa. pretty cool stuff.

i’ll post some pictures of my hike today with the fam up sawnee mountain [it's really a big hill]. but i’m looking at video tutorials on the canon website so i can not be a point-and-shooter with a nice camera. lame.  …i’m workin on it

here’s some highlight pics, but i advise visitng the site for all of them. they have lame gadgets on there to make fun of — which is good too

 pours and self-equalizes–like $1000

ak-47 bullets!! ice cubes

   3d yo

steampunk french press [makes steam too which is doubly functioning with the name ]

 wake up to bacon!

 can make a homemade coffee roaster with a cheap popcorn machine

favorite: 

put into “scale” / perspective of measuring