With both of the products finished, I wanted to get some decent shots, or see if I could get some decent studio shots of my projects before they are boxed up and sealed before the presentation. Camera in hand I went through to the rapidly declining photography studio at the back of the electronics workshop next to the studio. These are by no means high quality or my one great image but they really are for my own personal use and are of a record.
I am going to retake them again, probably tomorrow. The one thing that I am worrying about is that the studio shots that I took today, highlight the flaws. In a way it makes me feel quite ashamed about it, and I know that there isn’t time to fix it anymore, but it is something that I am now going to have to live with… hmmm
Unhappy with the way the box I prototyped earlier, this evening I set about making a new one, more like the way that I wanted it to look like. With a lack of card at my disposal, I have had to use layout paper so therefore it isn’t very strong. However it did turn out quite well so I shall look forward to tomorrow morning to get it made up in cardboard.
As mentioned in my post last night, there was a fairly significant issue with the width of the MDF pieces in relation to the acrylic block. The problem was, I thought, that the layers of spray paint added too much width to the product. It turns out that it was partly because at the end of last week I skimmed the bottom of the main body off. I didn’t realise it was tapered as much as it was so hence it was 1mm larger than what I wanted it to be. In all fairness it doesn’t really help that the acrylic block is 79mm and not the 80mm that I wanted it to be.
So with the joining edges to the acrylic block fixed and now repainted, there are still worries with the project. A lot of worries…
In a similar way to what I did a few months ago. In the past couple of days I have tried to have another go at rebranding my project into what it will hopefully be for the final thing. One of the main things I wanted to change was the name. Avoiding Temptation, which has been used since Ideas Day in November was just the name of the area that I was looking into. I want to give the product a better identity that will last. The current one hasn’t aged well and that has only been a few months too.
To start off with, I started to look at different styles and fonts that I like and that I would think would fit with the product. I made another board on Pinterest that showed all the things that I found. (click on the image below to view it). There were a lot of similar things pinned. Mainly Helvetica and a clean modern layout that I think would work well. I also pinned a lot of things that were to do with the Russian Avant Garde movement. One of the more popular recent examples is the album cover of Franz Ferdinand’s Past releases.
I also liked the style of MUJI and Superdry where English text is combined with Japanese text on their logos. I think this sort of design for a brand could be quite interesting because it would make it seem more international. I did have the idea of replacing the Japanese text with another language such as Swedish. But I am going to experiment further.
One of the things I also did last night was to come up with a new name. I struggled with this a lot. But lying in bed, which is one of the places that I seem to have a lot of ideas, I came up with something simple yet something that I think would work quite well. This is of course pending on feedback from potential users.
There are however two versions of the name. The first one was:
Night Night
This was chosen because it could be seen as the user saying good night to their phone, and the people they might be talking to. However, this was brought up as not being suitable by someone as they made a valid point by saying would a teenager buy something that was called night night? After some consideration of the branding that I had come up with I dropped one of the nights so it is only:
Night
This is more grown up and would be simpler for people to associate with the product. The inclusion of Japanese text before Night in the logo below (translates as night so essentially it is still night night) gives it a more international appeal and is reminiscent to that of MUJI. It could also be seen that the product could be seen to put to bed communications between people across the world hence the two languages. The asterisk at the end is more my own personal branding on it as I mentioned in my last branding post.
Of course this is just an idea and it is likely to change before the final thing, but whilst on the laser cutter today, I briefly etched a small version onto one of the layers so I could see what it looked like on the model. It turns out it is quite good.
If anyone has any ideas or opinions about the logo/branding it would be greatly appreciated.
Whilst I am sitting here in the library slowly losing faith in society I am still trying to get on with work. It does seem that there is a lot of people out there, and even in here where people are not willing on just putting their heads down and getting on with things. Anyway, getting on with the purpose of this post, my progress this week.
The main focuses for me this week was to properly know what I was wanting to do for phase 2 and then get on with it. I am focussing heavily on electronics and the making of the mark 1 model. So to start off with I will talk about the electronics.
After weeks of deliberation of how I was going to achieve it, I have decided on the rather risky yet ultimately safe (if you know what I mean) method of using 2 Arduino’s. This would help improve the reliability of the product and it would mean that I could quickly and efficiently get the code to work and do what I wanted it to do. I split it up into two parts. One for each Arduino. One of them will take over the roll that the PicAXE played up until this point and do all the flashing and vibrating when a message is received on the phone. The second Arduino will take over the more complicated task of doing the mood light and the pulsing etc. Things which I am finding a little more difficult.
Talking of things that are difficult. It is a well held belief in the class that Arduino is easier to programme than PicAXE. I am going to say rubbish. There is no way that it is. As an example, for the basic code I used for the LED’s to light up and a thing to vibrate took very little coding and very little time with the PicAXE. With the Arduino, I have spent the good part of a few days getting it to do the same thing. Not only that, with the PicAXE I managed to have a decent number of inputs from LDR’s. With the Arduino however, I can only get 2 to work. I really want three but I only have two working at the moment. Having three would have been more reliable but I guess that I will have to make do with two unless I do more troubleshooting.
Going on to the aesthetic side of things, everything is moving along nicely. But, and this is a big but, I am getting cold feet about the design that I am evidently going with. Yes it is simple and yes I wanted it to be simple, but I don’t really know if it shows my ability at all. I will have to keep going with it because I have spent so much time looking at how it all fits together and the way it is all going to work within the design that I have chosen. Also, I spent a good three hours on the laser cutter yesterday cutting out pieces that will make up the mark 1 hand in for the 20th of this month.
All in all, there were 90+ pieces cut out yesterday and in seeing them all together it is rather impressive and it is swaying me to make the final thing in a similar sort of manner. I managed to get a good deal of packaging sorted yesterday and I found out that I will be able to fit 2 arduinos and corresponding breadboards inside which is encouraging. I haven’t taken all the pictures off my camera yet so I can’t show you what it looks like just yet properly, but I did take some on my phone, which are the ones that are dotted about this post.
The video below shows the quick test I did of how the LED’s would show up when shone through the couple of blocks of Acrylic. In low light it looks fantastic, but in brighter conditions it doesn’t really fare too well, but it is supposed to be used at night.
As part of one of the deliverables for Phase One. We are required to keep a blog and update it with our progress over the course of the few weeks. Yet again it is a wordpress blog, making the total wordpress blogs I control somewhere in the region of five or six. It is a bit ridiculous.
The way I am working it, since I already post everything from fourth year on this blog, is that I am almost copying and pasting it onto the other blog. I will probably end up writing a little bit about it and linking back to the original post on here. It seems to work so far with the posts that I have put up.
So without further ado, here is the dedicated fourth year blog.
The latest task we have had to do was a biggy. Just before lunch on the Monday of Week 4, we were told that we were to try and get 100 ideas to do with our project to try and find someplace even deeper in the grand scheme of things to be focussing on in the year. We also had to prepare and come up with ten insights that our ideas were to revolve around.
The proper work started after lunch and by the time I left the studio at just after 5, I was half way there. I had 50 ideas, most of them rubbish I should admit, but I wasn’t discounting any at the time. Any idea goes just as long as it roughly has connotations to light and colour relating to sleep.
A long night lay ahead and by the time I got into the studio in the morning, I was stumped at 80, but at least it was a decent amount. From what I could tell, no one got up to the 100 mark, but it didn’t matter. Some of the ideas generated, did help to focus the mind on what we actually wanted our project to do, but I will say more about that in another post.
This is going to be a difficult summary to complete. I can’t really remember what happened in week three to be honest as doing work for this week (Week 4) has taken over. However I shall try my best and try and remember.
Monday: The work that we had to have completed for the start of the week eventually went to waste. We had to come prepared with photos and quotes that encapsulated our project. No less than ten minutes into the class we were asked to go and take one image and one quote and put them together in a similar style to the haiku the previous week.
Tuesday was a very boring day. It was spent just sitting around waiting to be seen to. It did however mean that I got a chance to go over my project and try and decide the direction it was wanting to go in. At the time it was using colour as a signifier but there was no specific area that I wanted it to go in any further at the time.
Wednesday: no great deal of work happened. The second draft of my dissertation was all but finished and time was spent just taking it easy and fine tuning what I had written for my second draft.
Thursday: I attempted to start the work that was set on the Tuesday for the start of Week 4, but failed miserably because no one was told the same thing and no one else had an idea of what they were to do. In the morning I had a dissertation meeting with my advisor who gave me some feedback on my first draft and gave me some food for thought on the matter.
Friday: Unfortunately no university work was done as I was in Aberdeen getting my MacBook fixed. However, I did get a reply to the email I asked the lecturer about the work for Monday, but as it was still a bit of riddle, I spent the train journey trying to figure it out.
Saturday. The afternoon was spent working on the things for Monday, but work was slow. I took time to consider all my options and information closely. I was on the right track though.
Sunday: Most of the day was spent in my room working on the things for the Monday. I did a huge mind map/spider diagram thingy trying to figure out the direction that I wanted my project to take. It went off in two directions on one side it was using light and colour to affect things such as sleep, on the other side it was light and colour as signifiers. I kept going until the two started to join together and I came to the area of using light and colour to help enhance or deter the use of technology in the sleeping environment.
That was the week. It was busier than it seems, but already I can tell you that week 4 has been much more labour intensive.
It is still 9 months until next July but it is now that it when we have to decide if we want to commit to New Designers. We don’t really know what our project is, we don’t know how successful we are going to be in the project or with our grades and we don’t even know how much it will cost.
New Designers is an exhibition in London that showcases the work of design graduates across the United Kingdom and over the past few years on the Product Design course at Dundee a big fuss has been made about it and we have been told that we should go.
I’ll say now that I have decided that I am going to go, and I have handed in the form to say that I would like to go, but this puts me in a little bit of a pickle as I do not feel as though I know what I would like to do as a project yet. So it puts the pressure on. Another bit which is strange yet very annoying is that we have to commit before we know how much it is going to cost per person. The cost is dependant on how many people go, but we don’t know how many people are going until all the forms have been handed in and it has been worked out.
The annoyances of the course at the moment are outweighing the potential positives by quite a large amount. Maybe this will put everything in focus and make it clearer what I want my project to do.
