Design Methods 2 – PMI (Portbelysning Med Information)

Back from a refreshing summer vacation we dive into different methods designers can use in their line of work. The course is held by Addi and so far has been focused on Krippendorff’s book.

The challenge is to design the in-house debut product (a lamp for a front door) for a local production company specialized in metal works which have up untill now only been producing for other companies. The lamp should convey information of some sorts, i.e. the street number.

“Small” Side Project for Kalmar Konst Museum

I was approached by some students doing a project for Kalmar’s Arts Museum to do a design proposal for dishes and silverware.

So yea it’s 5 am so I’ll just post the images… *yawn*

MakerBot printout of Dispenser

Ok, now I have been slaking again for some time, due to a revised schedule and some other work which came up along side this final project of my first year at LNU.

However here, without further a due (is that how you spell that?) a movie of Magnus Eriksson’s MakerBot printing my Dispenser.

Thanks Magnus, you are the best!

Projekt Rörelse – colorful update

Colors, many of them, red, yellow, teal, green, blue – but why tell you if I can show you…

New Shapes for the “Rörelse” Kitchen Project

I worked some more on the different shapes the device could have and produced this pdf.

SKETCHES_april

I also produced two animations of cut through views to show the internals, and briefly tested an other method of dispensing:

Projekt Rörelse – movement in the kitchen

So some weeks ago we got the introductory papers on our last project for this semester. It is quite the opposite of the one with the GateChair. Then we had to focus on relaxation, now we focus on movement. The guidelines are quite strict we are to design a product for use in the kitchen, which solves a certain activity by only requiring physical power to use. So no displays, no engines, no fun.. Or so you would think.

The main difference is that we are being guided by not one, not two but three staff members from LNU. They take turns giving us feedback in groups of two.

This monday 11-04-11 we had to present how far we had come(the actual project lasts until the end of may). For this purpose I created a keynote – of course – and a nice apple-esque film showing my user testing. Yea user testing is one of the “new” things they introduced this project around. The interesting thing is that most of my fellows tested their activities rather then their products. E.g.: How do people crush fruit, cut onion,…

I chose to build a prototype and test the actual workings of my product instead. I did receive some critique about only testing one product and thus giving my subjects nothing to compare to. But I am unsure about this being a valid issue. Then again we never really learned how to do user tests so I could be totally wrong here.

My product is a dispenser, in my project outline I started wanting to help blind people measure things, but it got rejected due to me “not being able to find enough blind people to test”. This was an assumption on the LNU staff’s part and not really based on any merits. But I can appreciate the difficulty of finding a large enough test group. So i changed the outline twice and ended up with something like this:

[DP1]_rörelse_marioburkhardt_rev3

For the ones of you not so capable of the swedish language:

“Measure, I am to create a solution for people to measure a certain static amount of powder several times.”

Portable Hairdryer – Modelteknik 2

So we had another course about how to build physical version of our designs by standing on a workshop and using machines. We used cibatool as a base and then glued pieces together and painted them in the end.

The course was two weeks long and we began by “designing” the packaging for the product. 

Projekt Vila – Relax

This was the first really “big” product project was about “vila” – rest – and was quite free in that the only instruction was to design a product that enables people to rest.

Here we had two guest lecturers Mats Brate from matsbrate.com and Lars Gustavsson from larsg.se.

We begann by doing a week of research in groups of 5 about rest. One group researched the rest through environment, one the rest of the mind and my group the physical rest.

Design Methods with ADDI

By far the best course we have had so far! The two head designer from Addi came in and gave us a bunch of lectures on methods for designing and creating. We did moodboards, love hate analyses, osbourn’s questions, that thing where you put post-it’s on stuff depending on which on is best… but i get ahead of my self. Because it all started with a marshmallow challange (marshmallowchallenge.com)

Design History/historical design

OK this is a bit delayed but it’ll be worth it.

Design history is a class which we did sort of on the side, we had thees classes while doing our form project and a bit afterwards, mostly it consisted of looking at slideshows.

Now when I say slideshows, I mean slideshows. To grasp the full extend of slideshowness please listen carefull to this video, where the sound is clearly captured that was made everytime a slide was changed – old school.

The first thing I noticed as I entered the classroom on our very first lesson was esoteric music playing in the background. This was also captured on film – enjoy.

We basically looked at a lot of pictures of old things, some of which were design related and I spent a lot of time playing “Eve Online” on my MacBook Pro to pass the time, oh and I was actually updating this blog too.

We also got assignments from time to time, which looked like this:
note the extreme low readability  due to them being done by hand(!)

 

In the end we did learn a bit about other famous designers and artists and we also made a workbook: Designhistory_workbook

Because i ditched the class before christmas to do other things I had to do two extra assignments too:

Epocher and Stolar