so much for knocking…

…opportunity is pretty much beating down my door. Yesterday, I got some fantastic news–the College of Architecture at Georgia Tech is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, and there will be a big celebration/bonanza/party at the end of the semester. For the event, Tristan Al Haddad will be creating another installation for the Architecture building, and my furniture design class will be designing, fabricating, and installing the seating for the event!  The overall focus of the class is to design parametrically, so that a design can be easily adapted and customized while maintaining design intent, and the installation will be focused on reactivity, kinetic motion, how the body exists in space, and “first spaces.”

Some questions to drive our design:

How can one systematize not so that the design becomes fixed but so it becomes flexible?

How can we define structure? Structure is simply parts and the relationships between them.

I feel like this opportunity is a once-in-a-lifetime deal–also like our studio trip to New York. I never imagined how rich this semester would be… I might not sleep much between now and April, but I feel like these next few months are going to be some of the most rewarding ones of my life!
Over the weekend, I need to work on building a portfolio, finalize the form for my kitchen appliances, develop the interface for the appliances, create a mood board for the furniture project, finish up my Alias project, and study for the materials exam. I better get to work!

a little soul-searching

I stayed up all night sketching forms for my three concepts. I’m tired. I was going to just post this picture and say goodnight, but I’ve got some more serious things weighing on my mind right now.

I just don’t feel right. I don’t know if I’m really cut out to be a designer. I feel like I just go through the motions without ever really reaching a satisfying outcome. I know the drill: I sketch, model, sketch, model, render, present. I pull all nighters. I spend a lot of time trying to meet the deliverables and satisfy the requirements of the projects. What else is there? I feel like I put a lot of effort into pleasing my professors. So, I’m a good student, but what happens when I’m not in school anymore? I’m not going to be a student for that much longer, so it’s really time for me to figure some stuff out. Where do I fit into the realm of industrial design? I like technical details. I love getting down into the nitty gritty so much that I’m a little disinterested in the bigger picture. I also feel like I just don’t achieve desirable forms 90% of the time. Am I just not capable, or is going to take me a little longer to develop that skill? If that’s the case, I’ll put forth the effort to make it happen. I’ve been working hard on producing better sketches, and I’m starting to see some results from that. Is it likewise possible to improve on form development?
I just want to be able to figure out where I’m going with design. I want to be able to objectively assess my strengths and weaknesses and find out what careers are best suited for me. I wish I were an awesome designer, but I just don’t think I’m ever going to get there. Maybe it’s time to get realistic and figure out what I actually can achieve.

This is exactly the reason why I want to go to New York. I want to meet a bunch of real designers and see what they do every day. It’s so hard to get a real perspective on what design is really all about from inside the school walls. It’s time to make this trip happen.

Too many design students, not enough jobs? Depends on your definition.

I think reading this is going to help me sleep a little more soundly. I thought I’d share…from Coroflot’s Creative Seeds Blog:

A smart and jarring post last week on Unbeige bluntly states: ‘Prepare to Find Another Line of Work’ Say Working Designers to Design Students. The sentiment is reasonable. In light of the current economic downturn, this sort of tough-love, meted out the previous day by designer Ian Cochrane and “branding guru” Michael Peters, seems entirely appropriate. “There is too big a supply of young designers and far too many people doing mediocre work,” Peters concludes, and legions of young design school graduates presumably hang their heads in shame, contrite for ever having nurtured such a frivolous collective dream as doing the things for which they were trained.

While some hard realism in an ailing economy is certainly appropriate, it seems like a slightly overwrought response, what with Cochrane suggesting design school students go work in restaurants rather than try to get jobs designing them. I say overwrought because it comes from a deeply polarized view: either you do precisely the sort of real design job that school convinces you is appropriate to your ideals, or you ditch the whole thing and go bus tables. No discussion of the variances within the design economy as a whole. No suggestions of less obvious fields for which design training is highly applicable. Just “pack it up, you’re not good enough.”

There’s a touch of egotism here, and I don’t mean on the part of the two very talented professionals to which these quotes are attributed; I mean the design community as a whole. A rigid pecking order tends to get established early on in the creative professions, where a handful of highly desirable job titles are labeled “real design” — the most conceptual ones, typically, with the least amount of logistical encumbrance — and the rest dismissed as a misapplication of our creative prowess. Woe be to those who end up taking a position with “engineering,” “media,” or god forbid “marketing” in the title, for they forsake their true nature. Or something.

The more realistic advice to design students might read more like this:

You’re in a competitive field. If you’re studying automotive design, for example, you’re probably not going to get the job cranking out car renderings for Porsche all day — there just aren’t that many jobs like that out there. Same goes for shoe design. Or magazine cover illustration. Or interior design for high-end boutique hotels. If it’s a prestigious, high-profile job, lots of people want it, and some of them are probably better than you. Sorry.

For every sexy job, though, there are 50 of the more mundane variety that also need your skills. Of your graduating class, one or two of you will be doing the job you currently envision. The rest of you will be managers, marketers, copywriters, trend consultants, researchers, social media specialists, human factors engineers, technologists, etc. etc. etc. You’ll be using skills you learned in design school on a daily basis: branding consultants who sketch communicate their ideas more easily. Iterative problem-solving of the sort they teach you in a design program is good for solving all sorts of non-design problems. And design problems crop up in lots of unsexy places. And provided you put as much effort into finding a good fit from within this other, much larger job pool, you’ll probably be pretty happy.

I can’t say I didn’t suspect it already…

Now, I don’t want to get off on a rant here, but in all honesty, today’s talk didn’t surprise me at all. I almost feel like I’d even been expecting it to happen at some point. I’m a paranoid person, so I’ve been looking at Coroflot portfolios and comparing myself for some time now. It makes me really depressed. I always feel like the stuff I have just can’t compete with that. Then, after a while, I get realistic–I make A’s in all my classes, so I must not be that bad, right? It doesn’t mean too much if I’m good compared to my classmates but only mediocre compared to my peers from other schools. It’s also not so surprising that our ID program is less than stellar. Each year that I’ve been in the program, at least one good professor has left…leaving more mediocre professors to take over their classes. I feel like this is the real problem that all of us have now. It’s not the case that other schools just attract more motivated and talented students–none of us came to Georgia Tech expecting it to be easy. It seems more likely that somewhere along the lines, we’re not being educated in a meaningful way. What I mean to say is that we’ve been allowed to get by with sub-par work, and then then standards are shifted down so that sub-par becomes acceptable work. I hope this is all making sense. In the past, I feel like we’ve been missing out on what the real design process is like. We were given strict deliverables–“each student must have 3 study models.” And when we bring the study models, we’re thanked for actually doing the work that was assigned rather than an honest critique, maybe something like, “you used an inappropriate material for the form you’re intending” or “are you really satisfied with the form of any of your models?” The last two statements are exactly what we’ve been missing. Maybe I should keep it more personal–it’s exactly what I’ve been missing. So we continue doing bad work because no one has wanted to expend the effort to tell us it’s bad and how to make it better.

That’s what I’m looking for in this semester. I want real feedback! In the past three semesters, I haven’t gotten descriptive feedback about my work at the end of a project, sometimes (only sometimes), I get back a rubric with the grade broken down into various components. Most of the time, it’s just a number posted on T-Square. How are we supposed to improve if that’s all we get? I want to know what I could improve. Today, that was really useful information–we all neglected to research and describe how our forms might actually be made. Honestly, I don’t even know where to begin finding that information. How do we research that? I tried to find wall-thickness information about bone china a few weeks ago, but nothing came up, so I just abandoned it. Today someone pointed out that the thickness of the handle and the thinness of the cup may not work out. Since I hadn’t done any significant research, I had nothing to say. As far as I know, he’s right–it won’t work. Going forward, I want to be able to know every single thing about my designs. If someone has a question, I need to have an answer. Be it questions about form development, modeling, manufacturing concerns, or technical specs, I should know it. That means I’m going to need to do more work. I did a lot of work on this project. Now I know the process a little better, so I’m prepared to do even more work next time. After all, I do need some good portfolio pieces. I would like to get a job some day.
Of course, that’s just my opininon; I could be wrong.

Quotes courtesy of Dennis Miller

off to a good start

First of all, the title of this post is slightly misleading. I completely forgot to blog on Monday, so the blogging thing isn’t off to a good start. However, lots of other things are. I feel like this is going to be one of my best semesters in studio. I just feel driven and motivated, investigative and experimental…lots of new territory. In the past, I’ve tried to stay well within my comfort zone, drawing my tiny little sketches in my sketchbook, only making sketch models if I was specifically assigned to make them. This semester, I feel much more like the process is sinking in. You really can’t cheat the design process. You’ve got to sketch and model, and there needs to be a dialogue between them. Otherwise, your final product looks bad…period. When David was talking to us in the shop today, he said something that I felt was relevant to my work in the past. If you don’t know exactly what you’re doing, all the design decisions you’re making–every last detail–then you end up with a model that doesn’t look quite right, and your lack of enthusiasm for it shows in your presentation. I think this could be exactly my problem. In the past, I’ve tried to cheat the design process. Now, I’m resolved to do better. I’ve got myself a ream of 11×17 paper so I can do big sketches that actually communicate something. I bought an entire sheet of 2″ pink foam so I can make all the sketch models I want to. I’ve moved all my supplies into studio so that I do my work there, in the presence of other students who can help me when I get stuck. I’m calling it an experiment. If my work doesn’t get better this semester, I’ll throw in the towel–maybe I can’t be a great designer after all. However, I’m betting that this will be my best semester yet.

doubt

I have a bad habit of getting discouraged in the middle of the design process. I just feel like I’m not capable of making attractive forms. My designs always seem to look utilitarian and “boring,” and I don’t really know where to go from there. Some people seem to have a knack for it. I’m more the type of person who practices and hones a skill rather than just having innate talent. As far as I know, there isn’t really a methodological way to construct interesting and attractive forms. Suggestions? For me, feeling like my design just doesn’t look right can really kill my interest in the project. If I’ve worked for a few weeks on developing an exciting concept only to have my final design look as though it’s a first attempt, I get so frustrated that I have a hard time following through to the end. Ultimately, I think it hurts my portfolio. It’s hard to communicate an exciting idea without exciting visuals. I feel like I’m a capable designer in many ways–I love working with computers, and I feel like my technical skills are pretty good. I can sketch reasonably well (after a few years of practice), and I think I can usually manage to solve problems really well through my design. It just doesn’t look that great. So, how do I solve this problem? How can I create more attractive forms? How can I carry my inspiration all the way to the end of a project? How do I document and describe these projects in a meaningful way? Will I be able to make it as a designer?

On a different note, I’m really looking forward to learning how to use more of the shop tools. Currently, I only really feel comfortable using the lathe, bandsaw, sanders, and drill press. I’ve never used the milling machine, and I’m slightly terrified of the tablesaw… I’m slightly terrified of all the machines, actually. I think that’s just because I haven’t had much practice with them. Usually, when I ask about how to do something, someone else just ends up doing it for me because it’s faster to do it for me than to explain it. I feel like I learned a lot this morning, even. I didn’t realize that you could use pink foam on the drill press and power sanders. Those are definitely time savers, and they allow more accurate forms, too. It’s also nice to have an instructor who actually wants to teach us these things…

7 january

Today, I spent the afternoon at

Domus and Design Within Reach . I picked up an Ittallia catalog, and there were some interesting dinnerware pieces featured in it. Form-wise, there wasn’t anything too special, but some of the patterns were really cool. Pictures to come… I’m quite excited about this project!