#96 Laptop Bag

Now that the semester has finished, I can get on and show you the main focus of my efforts this semester, my laptop bag.

The basic idea behind this bag, apart from it needing to be designed for myself, was that there are times when people do not have enough room to carry all that they are wanting to carry in their laptop bag. This left with the simple principle of making it modular. A main laptop bag was supplemented with a number of smaller bags in order to achieve what I was looking for. These smaller bags were attached to the main bag using belts or straps. This gave a very distinctive appearance.

Overall I am relatively happy with the outcome of the bag, but there are quite a few parts of it which I feel as though could have been carried out better. Anyways, here are the pictures.

#95 NCR Boards

Part of the main product design module this semester was for the NCR Student Competition, held with a number of Product Design Courses at Universities in Scotland. Having been one of the ones chosen to go through and present at the final event, I pulled out due to the amount of other work that was needing to have been done for the course at that particular time (amongst other reasons).

The following boards show what my final idea was. The basic concept was for those living in rural india to be able to record, share and view other videos on a device aimed at helping those with their own small business advertise themselves to try and increase their income. It was called RECORD.

#84 100 Ideas: For a Laptop Bag

Along with the scrapbook which we had to produce, a sketchbook of 100 ideas of a laptop bag or case was to be created. The following is what is to be found in my sketchbook.

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#83 Scrapbook

This is the scrapbook which accompanies the work which we have carried out in the first five or six weeks in the product design module this semester. It shows the work which we did, ranging from the soft toy penguins which were made to making a glove which had embedded electronics, and a big wad of research at the end of it.

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#81 The Final Penguins

The penguins which I wrote about in post #78 have been finished, and below are some photos of them.

#78 Penguins!

As the product design module advances, we are doing more and more important work. This week it’s penguins.

#24 Review of 2009 & 2010 Predictions

2009. A year to remember or a year to forget? I’ve put together this review of my year at University, saying what I thought about the second semester of first year and the first semester of second year. Following that, a small review of what designs caught my eye through the year.

The year has been a mixture for myself. Some highs and some lows, though in all fairness the lows did outnumber the highs. The projects in the second semester of first year didn’t really grab my attention as much as I wished they would. This is apart from the second project undertaken in Design Studies regarding supermarkets, where I feel the group I was in (bar one member) put in some of the best work we had done at University up to that point, and it was the first time since possibly the December of 6th year at high school where I felt I had put in the sufficient hours and had gotten far. It was a good group to work in, but not as good as the group for the first project of Design Studies in that semester where we had to create characters out of ‘junk’, and then using these characters, create a story involving them.

The product design part of that semester was interesting to say the least. A combination of modelling a dyson, a kitchen object and creating a product which met an unmet need in the kitchen was required. At the time it didn’t really seem that relevant, and if I’m honest, part of me still does not see the point in what we did, but it, at times, was good fun none the less.

The mechanics module was, well, rubbish. A lot of time was spent helping others, which, I should point out, do not really mind doing as long as people at least say thank you. Then there are those (and only one or two) who I like to help without expecting thanks from because I like them too much to mind. However, once the exam was over in the middle of May, that was the hardest part of the Mechanics done and dusted for the full university course.

First year left me with mixed feelings about the course. On one hand it was not quite what I had thought it was going to be, and thoughts were coming into my head about whether or not I had made the right choice about what I wanted to to, or if I had chosen the wrong place to go since I could have gone to either Edinburgh or Glasgow instead of Dundee. However on the other hand, I did have quite a lot of fun in my first year, ranging from meeting huge amounts of new people, some who have left a huge impression on me, to doing a range of things which I would not have done anywhere else, from sticking my face in paint, in the name of leaving my mark, to making a Dyson out of blue foam.

Before I knew what was what, September sprung up again and it was time to head back up to Dundee for the start of the second year, and as it turned out two of the modules were once again verging on awful, but one was pretty decent. The two which were not that enjoyable though were not two which were expected.

The two modules which were the ‘unenjoyable’ ones were the Design Studies and the Industrial Design modules. Design Studies because we started the project very late, the workload in the group was very uneven (read that as 2 or 3 people in the group doing the work and pulling the weight of the other 3 or 4), and in all honesty it was not the most interesting project, despite the people involved, those with Aphasia, who were some of the nicest people anyone could meet.

The Industrial Design module did not start very well, and neither did it finish very well, however the middle was quite enjoyable. This was probably in part due to the fact the lecturer ripped down everything that was put forward and did not really give any useful criticism. They changed their mind from week to week, and strongly seemed to favour some people more than they did others. And I know that this sentiment is shared with at least one other person in the class.

I have posted a full review of those two modules previously where I covered everything, or almost everything, as fully as I could, or felt I could since this is publicly available. You can view them here for Industrial Design and here for Design Studies.

The surprise module was the mechanics one, or giving it its proper name, Software Applications. This one was surprisingly enjoyable. I think this was because it was the only time when I felt as thought I was learning new skills which would be useful in later life. It started off with AutoCAD and then onto Solidworks. Whilst neither were taught that well, self experimentation gave me most of the answers I needed (along with Google I should add). This was then passed onto the majority of the class, who seemed to ask me more than they did the bearded lecturer. Again the same opinion as per first year mechanics, I did not mind helping people, and definitely helping more people more than others. It was a good thing most of my work was completed by putting in longer hours than others at the start of each part of the project as the later parts were consumed spending time crouched down, on my knees, next to the computers.

The other part of this module which proved to be quite enjoyable was the Microcontrollers part, though I am probably on my own with this one. It did finish quite quickly, I felt as though I learned quite a lot, though maybe it is not quite as useful as the AutoCAD and Solidworks. The labs were good as well, working with people who I enjoy working with, and putting into practice what we had learned. We had to do a project as well, creating something which used a microcontroller and all the previous knowledge we had gathered. Our group, after initially wanting to go for a car traction control system, changed it to an outdoor keyboard. The basic prototype is shown in the picture below.

Overall 2009, in terms of the University course, was not as good as what I was hoping it would be. There just seemed to be too much of ego’s getting in the way in some areas, not knowing what was going on, having to carry people through projects and not seeing the relevance of what was being done. It was sort of counterbalanced by the fact I got to work with some really good people, begin to make more of a mark for myself up in Dundee, feeling more comfortable with what I was doing, and since the amount of alcohol consumed in writing this post has increased over the time it has been written (though not that much to say what I really am thinking and start to not make sense), gotten closer to people who I really enjoy being with.

I am hoping that 2010 will be a much better year overall in terms of university work. Hoping that it will be more useful, more enjoyable. One of the projects I am looking forward to though, is one where we are going to be making an MP3 player, which should be interesting. There are many areas in which I feel as though I could improve and I hope to do so quickly and effectively..

I am aware that I have gone on for quite a bit in this post, so I shall try to keep this next bit to a minimum, despite it being a part in which I could write so much more than my 2009 University musings. I shall also try and keep it away from my usual haunts of Apple and Bang & Olufsen (or as it has been said to me instead of B&O, Häagen Dazs), but in some instances I cannot help it.

One of the first pieces of design which was revealed in 2009 was the Apple Magic Mouse. I wrote a piece about its predecessor, the Mighty Mouse a while ago, citing reasons why people thought the scroll ball was a bad piece of design and possible areas of improvement. It seems that Jonathan Ive or Steve Jobs read what I wrote and implemented it in the Magic Mouse. It is probably one of the best pieces of Apple design, up there with the iMac G4. It’s beautifully simple and elegant, almost Scandinavian in its design, and I love it. I was very close to ordering one when it was launched, and sometime over the break, I am planning on heading to the Apple store in either Glasgow or Aberdeen to try one out and then possibly buy one. (Post about Mighty Mouse here).

The next piece of design which caught my eye in 2009 was the Bang & Olufsen Beotime. A gorgeous alarm clock inspired by a flute. I have no other words to describe it other than I want one. But then again, I am a bit of a sucker for B&O (and Apple I should add). It just seems that at the moment, both companies are producing products which are leading in each of their respective fields. We all have, in our minds, what we think an alarm clock should look like, the Danes then took this archetype, turned it upside down and rewrote it, or drew it to create the Beotime.

Despite only being a concept. the Art.Lebedev Transparentius caught my eye for being something epically unique. It takes an aspect of road safety and turns it into something which has not been seen before. It is absolutely astounding. When following a lorry and looking for opportunities to pass, the driver is often unaware of oncoming obstacles until they pull out, and it is often too late then. A camera mounted on the front of the lorry, projects the front view onto the rear of the trailer so the drivers behind are able to see ‘through’ the lorry. Whilst this could be quite distracting, it is a start to reducing the number of deaths on the roads. Additionally, being from Art.Lebedev studios, a Russian design company who are responsible for some of the most random, yet brilliant pieces of modern product design available, you know the final product will be just as radical and fun as the concept.

The final product which has captured my imagination is another one which I have written about. The Eigenharp. Not really being musically minded (despite playing the violin for a few years when I was younger), the Eigenharp is an electronic instrument with a difference. It looks beautiful and sounds pretty spectacular, especially the Moby Extreme Ways version. Read more on what I said about it in the original post here.

I know those four may not have been the most radical designs of the past 12 months. But those are the three which have made an impression on me, or the ones in which I can remember. I may end up adding a couple of more in the coming days, as this year draws to an end. What sort of things am I expecting to appear next year? I don’t know, that is the beauty of product design, and only a question which can be answered when you work in the industry and not just studying it.

So there we go. Nearing the end of not one of my favourite years. A post verging on 2000 words, and the general tone of my posts turning to grumbles instead of musings. I am planning on making a few changes on here for next year, some more subtle than others, a post sometime in January will hopefully and probably outline them. Thank you for reading my posts this year, and I hope everyone got something from at least one of them.

Radio Redux: Final Thoughts

Post previously going to be called “Let there be light… and music!” until I decided to defer posting this until it had been completely finished and I was in such a mood to finish what I had started on here.

The following post has not really been updated too much from original draft up until now, so any updates made during this post being held back will have an update next to it, so they have not been updated since this has been published. The first part of this post was written on the 14th of November, so it has been sitting, waiting in the wings for almost a month.

Time for another update about the radio project. Since the last time I posted something about it, there hasn’t really been that much of a change. After spending time getting the two light organs soldered up and then hooked up to get them tested, neither of them worked. This was a very big problem as the feature of the radio, having the light flicker to the sound produced by the radio, was very important. This problem even flummoxed the graduate in the department who is helping us with the electronics part of the project.

Eventually, the decision was taken to ditch those two light organ kits and try and use something else. So a Vellemans MK 103 light organ kit was ordered. This kit, instead of being hooked up directly to the speaker of the radio, is hooked up to a microphone. Getting it soldered up and tested, showed that it worked, and so finally I am able to move ahead with the technical prototype.

On the aesthetics side of the radio, they haven’t really moved on that far, a top cover has been produced and overall dimensions have been calculated, and put into a cutting list in preparation for it to be made, starting this week. I’ll post photos of the exterior of it once it has finished instead of the concept model since there are some differences which make all of the difference between them both.

So that was a little update for this part of the course. The next time I say something about it, I should be finished it and it should all work. And on that note, I leave you with a video of me testing the light organ.

Update: As of today, the 23rd of November, I have commenced making the radio and should be finished it within the next week or so. And despite generally seeming generally positive about the project, everything has just dipped in terms of its ability to keep me interested. I shall power on though, and it will be a very long and hard couple of weeks until everything is finished.

Update II: Today, the 9th of December see’s the project finally finished. Well, in all honesty, it finished on Monday, the 7th, but because I was exhausted and didn’t really want to post anything about it then, since it was still quite annoying me and not really something I was going to spend even more time on when I had finished, I had decided to leave it for a few days and come back to it when I could reflect on what I had done more effectively than what I would have done on Monday.

A few weeks ago, when the model of the radio was being made, it was clear that despite looking quite good in the original concept sketches, the proportions of the actual model were not what they would have liked to have been. It was far too chunky for my liking. And so began the smorgasbord of different problems which occurred over the next few weeks in finishing the project.

Making the model went pretty well, and only took about a day and a half total, but then the next problem arrived. The painting and finishing of the model. Painting it started off well enough, as did the sanding down of each layer of paint to get it smooth before the next layer was put on. It then turned out that when the paint was finished, there was none left in the studio or the workshop, so a trip to B&Q was in order. A small tester pot was bought of emulsion paint, which was the same colour as the paint used. However, once it was painted on the model and it was dry, it was clear that the paint was not the same, it was a light grey. So instead of just one more layer of paint, the model required a further 2 coats, which took too much time, and the finish on the exterior was not as good as I would have liked it.

The next problem to crop up was with the electronics. One week before the deadline, the electronics were working. The day in which 12 hours were spent in the studio, albeit doing Design Studies, instead of doing the radio, they were working fine, and a video was made of the electronics working was made and uploaded to YouTube. However, the day before the deadline, when the model had been finished drying and sanded, and was getting put together, a number of wires came off the volume potentiometer on the radio, so a quick trip to a friend who had a soldering iron was in order, and thanks to them for allowing me to use their soldering iron. Everything was then working fine, until attempting to assemble the model part 2. More wires from the radio circuit board came off, and the potentiometer on the light organ stopped working. There was no time to solder them that night, so I had to make sure I got into the studio early the next morning to get them soldered.

The next day, deadline day, I did manage to resolder the radio, and get the light organ working again, but the radio decided to make a buzzing noise, similar to that of a small toy aeroplane, I could live with that, however, it was doing it when it was switched off. Quickly playing around with a number of the wires, resoldering some more of them, seemed to temporarily solve the problem. Enter trying to assemble the radio part 3. It was all going well until, just millimetres away from getting the base cover on the radio, the buzzing started again. The cover was quickly whipped off, and the buzzing stopped, and reassembling began again. Went well this time, cover went on, light bulb inserted into the holder, time to test the radio. Turned the dial, switched it on and increased the volume and…….. nothing, the radio was dead. The batteries were inserted and there was nothing. The cover was removed once again to find that another wire had come off. But the wire which came off was from a position which would have taken ages to fix, and all I had was 2 hours. I was sick of the project at this point and had to leave it, I had a video of it working from the previous week and that is all I had to go with on that front.

One of the other things which I am considering to be a problem regarding the radio was the dials and the buttons on the radio. They didn’t quite fit or seem to appear to work as well as I would have liked them. The dials were too big, too chunky, didn’t fit the appearance of the radio at all. The buttons were fine, but the they did keep on falling off.

Overall the only part of the radio project which I am relatively pleased with the outcome of was the presentation boards which accompanied the radio for the hand in. Despite making them with a cold/fluey bug type thing, they turned out quite well and the way which I actually envisaged.

Did I like the project? On the whole, sort of. There were many high points, but there were also quite a few low points which did bring the overall mood about it down. Stress levels overall were far too high for my liking, and because of that, many packets of Polo’s were consumed. Let’s just hope that the project next semester is much better than this one though.

Work in Progress…

Note from the end: I apologise in advance for this being a relatively long post in relation to the rest of the posts I have written, I may have rambled on a bit towards the end.

As I am writing this, we are just about to start week six of semester 1, year 2 of the Innovative Product Design course at Dundee University. And as far as I am concerned, it has passed extremely quickly, and despite regular posts (well weekly), there has been very little talk about what we are actually doing. So this post will concern 2 of the modules of the course, the Industrial Design portion and the Design Studies area, missing out the mechanics module since you are able to guess what we do in that.

First off, the Design Studies part. We are looking at people with aphasia, working with them and going to develop something which would aid them, whether it be a physical product or a service. Aphasia for those who do not know what it is, usually occurs if someone has a stroke, and they then have a partial or total loss of ability to articulate ideas or comprehend speech or text. It affects different people by different amounts, so whilst it may be definitely noticeable in one person, it may be overlooked in another. They live normal lives and learn to live with and cope with what has happened. We were given an insight into what it was and what it was like when a couple of members of the Dundee Speakeasy group gave a talk about it.

As for the work our group is doing for this project, we are looking at producing an awareness campaign consisting of a number of posters and a video trying to explain to the public what aphasia is. This is proving quite difficult in terms of how to convey the message across effectively, but also it is quite difficult because after initial research into what people already know about it, it appears that no one knows what it is. Initial research for this consisted of a number of messages on Twitter asking the followers of myself and a fellow group member what it is, deeper research is going to be conducted post haste.

Moving onto the Industrial Design part of the course, things are quite a bit different to the design studies part. First of all, this module is probably more practical. For me this makes it much more enjoyable, as I am able to draw lots and will soon start to be making models. Our project for this is aptly called Radio Redux. The aim of the project is essentially to reinvent the radio for the 21st century, making it more accessible to more people perhaps. Having to look for a target market, research into them, come up with 10 insights based on these characters/users and how they use the radio etc, followed by producing 100 different concepts, narrowing them down to 25, then culling a further 20 leaving just 5.

No sooner had we picked the top 5 ideas we thought we had, based on not only feasibility of the project in terms of being able to produce a working model, but also on what we thought was most interesting, we had to do a brief presentation of the 5 ideas, allocating a mere 20 seconds per idea and then getting the rest of the folk on the course to pick their favourite in order to find a single idea to take forward. Having managed to somehow successfully bypass the need to design the radio for a specific user or target market and instead looking at the different environments radios are used in, my top 5 radios related to customisation by the user and also the relationship people have with sound, light, colour and shape (verging on synesthesia, something which I may write a post about at a later date if I can remember).

The idea which was chosen by the voting public, well everyone in 2nd year IPD, was one which looked at the relationship between light and sound, where when the volume of the radio was increased, the brightness of a bulb increased too. A very simple idea which would look, or as I should more appropriately say, should look, quite good (notice the confidence of that sentence, ha). I was however urged to have a look into a process or a device which would make the light flicker when music was being played or when someone was talking and when there was radio silence, in between words etc, the light would be off. It would add to the uniqueness and the, well, weirdness of the radio, something which I would not mind at all.

Another part of this module, which we had to undertake at the same time as the other radio related things, was that we were given a relatively cheap radio to take apart, make a note of all the pieces, measure them and draw them, then go on to create or produce an exploded isometric view of it as a practice for when we need to produce an exploded drawing for our final radio for the project. For me, it was not so difficult to produce this as I had done about 4 or 5 years of the things, or technical drawings in general at school, but it was the first time in almost  a year and a half since I had done one properly.

Those two parts of the Industrial Design module of the course did provide enough stress and work to last almost an entire semester in first year (excluding the supermarket project for Design Studies where the group I was in did put in a 12 hour day to get it finished). In saying that though, it was good fun, and I did help a few people which I do enjoy doing, as I don’t like seeing people getting left behind, or worked up if they do not understand, that possibly being a reason for being told by a former teacher that I would make a good teacher… oh joy, maybe I will change my opinion about it at a later date, but until then, becoming a teacher is going to be the least of my worries. The teacher thing may have been emphasised by the fact my 4th year Graphic Communications teacher did try to make me skip a year because he thought I was so far ahead of everyone else, but part of the reason why I wasn’t was because I said no due to the fact I did quite like helping everyone else. Anyways, I digress.

That’s all for this time, but I’ll try and remember to give some updates on both of the projects, and hopefully if and when I get the radio working, I’ll post a video of it working. Something to look forward to then.