my contribution on A05 (Coleman Tent Bed Project)

This was our final group project where we had to conceive a product for indoor use from an outdoor/camping product manufacturing/retail company. The group tasks were divided in following manner:


Concept development, Design: Me
Tyler Bi: Packaging
Courtney: Kiosk Design
Trevor R: Presentation in powerpoint


Concept development and Design: As we brainstormed, we decided to go ahead with my idea of a tent bed for children. I developed the concept in 3D with help of Google Sketchup, and elaborated the concept, assembly, dissassembly and storage with drawings. I developed the concept considering following ideas:

1. The product is a twin bed with a collapsible tent for children.
2. Illustrations of how to set up the tent on the bed and how to remove it and store it.
3. It is for people who live in an urban environment. As outdoor living and camping is not an option for them yet (family with babies/young children), the tent bed provides them with a flavor of outdoor in a small environment. If you can’t go to the jungle, bring the jungle to the bed-room. It is also good for playtime as the bed gets converted to a tent, the whole bed-room may become the imaginary camp ground.
4.  Durable Tent fabric made out of 100% recycled plastic bottle.

a.       The tent structure is made out of recyclable plastic beams.

b.      The structure folds up like an accordion and can be stored easily in a small area when not in use
c.       The sturdy bed is made out of recycled engineered wood, with rugged finish, giving the bed a campy, outdoor feel.

 

For the final project, I looked forward to working with the group, and the members were receptive of my ideas, and appreciative of my work. I am also thankful for their co-operation and contribution. However, the group didn't work together as much, which affected our end result. The other members wanted to 'split the work', which I didn't realize, apparently meant not taking any ideas/feedback from other members of the group on the work of an individual member. We never got to formally meet for going over our work for any significant amount of our time.  I wish our group members showed a little more enthusiasm to participate together, then we would've gotten a much better product developed. Overall, I really liked the class and the instructor and the students, and my group members too. It was a great first experience as a design class.  

Reflections on Classes 17 and 18

My experience in last two classes was a mixed feeling of both good and bad. I would say I learned a lot from this class and I am glad that I enjoyed it without getting tired and bored. I enjoyed all the presentations in both days, realized my mistakes and blamed my luck little bit.  I saw other groups' members (not all of them)  had more communication, organization, enthusiasm and group effort than the group I belonged. I felt that my group refused to work together every time an opportunity came and didn't show much interest in making the project attractive. I guess the reason was that no one was interested in design and took this class mostly to fulfill GEC requirements. I have to admit that I didn’t like this lack of interest of the members of my group in the final project.

Overall I think the course was a great starting point to learn design. It made design processes, creative thinking towards design and design in business/industry accessible to us.

Reading Reflections from "Design A very short Introduction"

The last two chapters of the book were on context of design and its future. Both chapters are crucial for an aspiring Design professional like me to understand, but I found the chapters very dry.  I wished the author used examples, illustrations and photos more often and more effectively.

Context:

Design context basically represent three areas, first and foremost, designers’ views on themselves, then design practices in the industry/business and last but not least is government policy, or lack thereof, on commercial design. It is difficult to contextualize a vast, varied and individualized profession like Design, and that is why designers usually do not have any organized body similar to Medical, Engineering or Architecture professionals creating a framework, rules and regulations, governing the members, and handling how professionals would deal in their work with non-professionals.

Every company selling products and services uses design to promote, compete, advertize and differentiate themselves and their products from competitors, but use vastly different design framework. Some use formalized internal design teams, while others farm it outside to design consultants. Sometimes designers make their own companies and use iconic design to define their products and companies.

By and large, western governments do not have a significant handle on setting and implementing a comprehensive design policy, whereas some Asian governments do.

Future:

Many technological revolutions in the last few decades have fundamentally changed the profession of Design and its workings, and in the fast paced world of 21^st century, it is continuing to do so. As designers help create, market and sustain products, in an ever changing world, they desperately need to be up to date with new technology, especially in the visualization aspect, and how it affects the customer and the product, and need for new products.

Journal 10

I learned many things in an unusual way. I believe that creating blogs is unique technique to get information, present it to the world and learn about new thoughts . This was a whole new experience for me and I enjoyed more than formal studies. However, I didn’t like the grading system because I was confused about how much effort I should give for each assignment. When I was checking the blogs from others, I saw many students wrote so little that anyone can guess that they didn’t read the whole book.  But they all got hundred percent no matter how much were written.

Class Review

Class 13, 14 and 15 are mainly based on our last assignment,  “Coleman for the home” that we discussed.  We were once more, to work together as a group and propose and present a product from Coleman which would be used indoors. At the beginning of the quarter, we really didn’t know what group work meant. This time we realize what team work means.  It is partly frustrating and exciting at the same time.  At first, I felt like I can’t work with the time but more I worked with the group the more I began liking it. However the result will tell how we worked individually or together as a team. Overall, I enjoyed the whole process and learned a lot.

Design and the Environment

To me design and environment are like glove and hand, when they fit well, together they serve their owners masterfully while glove protecting the hand as well as the hand looking elegant in the glove. On the other hand, when they don’t fit well, the glove makes the hand clumsy, fails to ease its work, doesn’t look good and also may cause discomfort/harm to the hand. What I learnt in class so far tells me that a successful design should serve its purpose of use, while being sustainable, beautiful, elegant, and at the same time, neither causing any harm to the environment, nor being an eyesore in it. A truly beautiful design can inspire people, enhance their quality of life, and add beauty to the environment around it. A bad design causes more harm than benefit, doesn’t add the quality of life of the intended users and doesn’t fit well with the environment around it. Then there are some designs which at the superficial level may look beautiful, but when all its impacts are considered, it is found to be unsustainable, and causes harm to the environment around it.

Among the design and environment pages:

Proper interior design in hospitals help heal patients. This is a very powerful video showing how the deep connection between human mind and body is pushing for a 'wholistic' approach to treatment of patient, where hospital design, considering various things like access to nature, indoor air quality, noise control, and lighting.

Masdar City, Abu Dhabi, UAE: Introduces the concept of passive sustainability as contrasted with active sustainability, and how it can dramatically improve our energy efficiency, and reduce our carbon footprint, while costing much less than the latter approach. It is kind of getting energy for free. A massive amount of energy in urban environments in desert climates is air conditioning.  By intelligent planning and design, Masdar city achieves a 36 F⁰ lower temperature compared to Abu Dhabi city, thereby reducing energy needs to artificially cool the environment.

Wales city design/planning document: Wales, UK has taken a great step in rethinking its public space design for improvement of the quality of the cities there. This detailed report talks about organization, and many examples of faults of current designs and how they are being improved to add beauty, cost effective maintainance, and sustainability.

Wales UK urban planning document 

Dubai Islands have high environmental cost 
Impact of artificial Palm Islands, Dubai:  The ambitious developers of the city state Dubai, United Arab Amirates have developed real estate by creating artificial islands off the coast of the city in the Persian Gulf. The environmental awareness website Mongabay.com discusses the negative environmental impact of this lavish project catered towards the ultra-rich by destroying marine habitat of an extremely bio-diverse seascape, and changing the sea current which may eventually destroy the Dubai beaches.

Palm Island Dubai, UAE (photo taken from the International Space Station)

Aero-dynamic design of cars making them more fuel efficient: This is a wonderful video from the car manufacturer Audi AG (Germany) that highlights how the force of air dictates the designs and shapes of vehicles like planes and cars, and proper design can make them more fuel efficient. Fuel efficient vehicles are extremely important for our environment and sustainability.

More reflections from Cradle to Cradle

I have not tried to read the book while taking shower, but I was tempted to. This is an amazing book on design that embodies its own design and construction as an example of sustainable, high quality design. Below are my short summary chapter by chapter:

Chapter one mainly discusses the Industrial revolution and its positive and negative effects. In one hand, it gave us modern, improved life, cultural and natural richness and on the other hand created a culture that dominates and exploits nature without limit, and continues to generate waste, pollution, crude production chipping away the basic achievements. I like how it describes the whole invention or the design as a strategy of tragedy and suggests that it is high time to rethink and redesign.

Chapter two talks about eco-efficiency and how to achieve it through recycle, reduce, reuse and regulate. It will change the whole idea of living.

Chapter three opens up with example with various types of book production to ask the question, What is efficient production and growth? Every process has side effects; however, we can solve the problem. We need to rethink the entire production line, and product life cycle once it goes into the hands of the user and its effect on nature in its entirety. Then we can come up with inventive solutions like the idea of recycling waste as a plant food.

Chapter four title “Waste is food” aptly describes its content. The authors discuss how in traditional societies, whether nomadic or agrarian, waste products would either completely be consumed by natural cycle and return to nature (bio-products), or be continually reused and recycled as valuable, like metals and metal made objects. With industrial world came ‘monstrous hybrids’ which cannot decompose properly, thereby draining nature of its resources, leaving a trail of poison everywhere it goes, and adds to the future problem of sustainability of life on earth. These, the authors refer to as ‘unmarketable products’, which need to be stored currently to be detoxified with future technologies as they become available.

Chapter five: I like how the authors describe the diversity of needs and desires. Creating something that can be use over and over. For example, using the jam bottle as a glass tumbler once the jam was gone, is very practical, elegant and has large impact on environment.

Chapter six talks about how to put the ideas that the rest of the book discusses into practice. It talks about new ways (products, constructions) of solving problems, with impact on individual user’s needs as well as societal impact and overall, its effects on environment. One perfect such example of this that I find is neither a product nor a simple construction, but an entire city built on the concept of efficient, eco-living. It is called the Masdar Project, which claims to be near one hundred percent self sustainable in energy and water resources, with near zero net carbon footprint, while living in ultra-high tech comfort.

Inside Masdar City, Abu Dhabi, UAE