It’s been a while and a busy week since my last post so tonight I hope to do some catching up! To start off, I chose to have a rethink of my design as I felt that the current design looked too stylised whereas what I wanted is a design which is more open to be reinterpreted and re-styled for specific needs. To tackle this I spent a few days of crafting and sketching - days which went by really quickly.
This has been a refreshing return to the passion for sketching I had in high school, where I would spend hours sketching, tracing and re-sketching in order to produce the perfect isometric doodle I saw in my head. But it wasn’t always perfection, I loved to sketch the numerous way things might work, from assemblies to component manufacturing processes. However, over the past few years of this course, I began to see sketching as quite a daunting prospect (particularly when I hear that we have to produce 100 ideas - of which I have never reached much more than 70…*). I would much rather jump into the deep end and start hacking things up while hoping for the best. I felt too precious over sketches, as they were being assessed, and would often find myself coming up with one idea which I wanted to jump into and begin further designing although I still had another 88 ideas to come up with. So not being a big fan of the 100 ideas approach that the course has (and even struggling with 20 ideas for 4th year) I began to resent putting pencil to paper.**
But now that I have one idea to work on, one idea that I like and feel that I can confidently remain immersed in, I have reacquainted myself with the neglected pencil case on my desk. Enough reminiscing for now though, here are some choice snippets of sketch from the past week:
This is roughly what my final model will look like. The following sketches are thoughts on how I could feasibly manufacture this within the university workshop - primarily a whole heap of vacuum forming (if it works):
…and that’s all the sketching I have documented so far. I have done a bit more since but not got round to photographing. Probably just as well if anyone viewing my blog has internet limitations! there have been tweaks and changes but that will undoubtedly come up in a later post.
*don’t tell Jon or Pete, I think I have got away with it so far…
** that’s not to say that I disagree with the 100 ideas process, it just stresses me!