Week 04 - 3D

Class Format

Unfortunately as stated in my 2D entry also, I was absent for this weeks class. The class followed the usual format with a group exercise and practical exploration. The aim of the class was to further develop a critical discourse about design choices from within a collaborative environment.

Group Exercise

Experimentation: Exploring & Challenging

Each group member choose the best of their designs from last week’s practical. The group votes on the 3 best designs. Using the idea of experimentation the whole group discusses and researches how each chosen design concept could be explored and challenged. The Scribe for each group documents findings for 3 designs under these headings;
Considering my absence from todays class and what I felt was a relative thinness to last weeks weeks idea creation I will be focusing instead on a recent thing I built. A more accurate description would be of a thing I deconstructed and rebuilt differently. The thing is a 15 inch computer monitor and my intention was to give it a sense of the Steampunk aesthetic through the process of its strip down and reconfiguring from a horizontal to a vertical aspect. I appreciate the main focus of this exercise is to complete the reflections below in a group and as such I will be using my class peer proxy for this week. I will also be focusing our reflections on the one design project outlined above.

• Design Exploration.
  - Could the design be more 'steampunk'? For example more brass colour or more redundant apparatus.
  - Does the design intention work in its surroundings? Standing next to a shiny new iMac for example.
  - Would the design benefit from expansion? Two linked screens would add complexity and further lend itself to the intended aesthetic. Also considerable are differing dimensions and orientations.
• Design Challenges.
  - Safety? Exposed wiring, circuitry, etc.
  - Practicality? Design functionality.
  - Adaptability? Further repurposing of the hardware.

To the right is one of the monitors before I started hacking it. John Douglas acquired about fifty of the monitors with the (still in the works) intention of creating an artwork from them. He came across these through the I.T. company he works for during an office refit. Headed toward the skip bin he actually saved the company money by taking them away for the token sum of $100 (you have to keep the accountant happy and this type of thing happens more often than you would think). John Douglas has an obsession with redundant tech. Below is front and rear views of the monitor after my hack. There is another view in this post.

PRACTICAL – Design Exploration

Choose your favourite concept from all your current 3D designs. Use any tools you wish. Put the results and a paragraph of description in your Blog. Through a combo of research and creative thinking explore the possibilities of concept experimentation, variation and evaluation. List these items clearly, draft examples and explain your thinking.
Continuing from the above 'Experimentation' I will be focusing the steampunk monitor reconfiguration.

• Two Experiments
  - Rework the design to make more 'steampunk'.
  - Expand on the design for added functionality.
• Pros & Cons
  - Screen extension, inexpensive (they cost around $2 each for the reasons detailed above), following that expendable, versatile.
  - Safety issues, functionality issue (in that it is screwed to the desk).
• Choosing & Refusing
  - This was in all honesty a fast and dirty solution to the design problem posed. This was to take a redundant screen and inexpensively repurpose it to extend the screen of my shiny new Mac while giving it elements of a steampunk aesthetic. Further work (time) and extension via added redundant tech (money) would improve functionality, safety and the intended aesthetic. Although this would detract from two of my primary goals which was to create this with minimal expenditure and investment of time.

 

Research

Video

This came from the same place as the optical illusion in my 2D post. Here 2 dimensional forms give the illusion of a 3 dimensional space.

Images

Here is a more elaborate work in progress.

Here is a very elaborate and very polished example. While I'm on a roll, here is also an example of an OSX modification in the style of the steampunk aesthetic...

 

Reflection

First a quick tip for the punters. Lets say you downloaded an image some time ago and did not save the reference. Then you want to use that image somewhere like here where you must reference your source. You could try to remember the search terms you used and look for the image all over again, but there is a quicker way. Located in the search terms field of a google image search is a small camera icon, click that, upload the given image and google will find it for you.

I believe that it is essential for any creative endeavour to have built into its process an element of critical discourse. In the design field this will most often occur within a public forum. Gaining an understanding and participating in a version of it is a highly important component of this course. Specifically this week sought to demonstrate to us the importance of developing a process which would automatically, 'Challenge assumptions, reflect on ideas and refine approaches' (from the course outline).