Week 03 - 3D

Class Format

After a review of last week the class consisted of a group exercise and a practical. A fair amount of group discussion occurred while evaluating the results of the group exercise (apart from this the PDF relating to this portion of the class received only cursory reference which I will address more thoroughly in 'Reflection' below).

 

Group Exercise

Creative Thinking Exercise

In small groups and based on the concept of REDUCE, brainstorm one design concept for an eco- friendly form of personal transport. Brand your design with a catchy name. Enter sketches and notes directly into your blog.

What positive thing can I say about this exercise in the allocated five minutes. The purpose of this exercise was to elaborate on the term 'reduce' as it relates to transportation. The intention was to inform ideation through collaboration. The result is a pair of shoes with springs on the bottom called 'Less-Steps', Cherill had some ideas as well.

 

Practical - Design Options

Individually draft a range of 3 excellent design options for your group’s eco- friendly form of personal transport. Brand your 3 design options with a catchy name. Use any tools you wish. Put the results and a paragraph of description in your blog. Describe how each of these options differ in the criteria below OR any 3 criteria of your own choosing – list these criteria clearly.


• Function
  - make walking easier
• 
Materials
  - shoes, springs
• 
Style
  - whimsical

See picture above.

 

Research

Video

This was shot and edited with an iPhone. It really has no relation to this weeks topic except to show that I am experimenting with different sources for video entry. On the technical side the video was created with two applications, Reeldirector & Action Movie FX. As with most video production this one minute was distilled from about half an hour of footage. Being the first time I had combined the use of the two applications editing time was around six hours. Rendering various edits consumed about a third of this time. At about 90 MB upload took about twenty minutes on my connection. After reviewing it looks like Blogger has automatically compressed the video for web optimisation. Co-star is my wife Lisa-Marie.

 

Images

I discovered  Jean-Paul Bourdier via an RSS feed from My Modern Met. I am including this here because I see elements of Bourdier's work as challenging notions of 3 dimensional space. I also appreciate his use of the human form and the counter balance created between camouflage and contrast. I also have a bit of a thing for rangas with silver skin.

 

Reflection

A quick note about my blogger experience first as I experienced some data loss recently. When you create a post the buttons to the right of the post title are; Post, Save, Preview & Close - auto save is automatically enabled with the inclusion of the save button. When you go back in to edit a post these buttons become; Update, Revert to draft, Preview & Close - there is no auto save. So if you (as I did) close a tab which is not in front with changes that you have not applied the 'Update' button to you may lose those illustrious words of wisdom. This it seems is system specific as I just tried to duplicate my error at home and pop up told me I had unsaved changes on the page (the data loss occurred on campus, I also just updated Safari which may or may not have something to do with it). The thing that irks me about Blogger is that when you hit the update button it takes you back to the post list, what if I just wanted to save my progress and continue editing?
On the cursory reference to the 3D element of the class, you may have noticed that the 'Exercise' and 'Practical' sections of this post were a little thin when compared with the post for 2D. The reason for this is quite simple, I like writing this blog while in class - particularly those sections. Half the work is done for the entire post via copy and paste (as was suggested from the beginning of semester). When a separate (?) PDF for 3D is summarised in the remaining minutes of class this can not happen. At best we have time to copy/paste the template for the post and the questions posed by the exercise/practical with no actual content. There are two solutions to this problem. The first is to cut off presentation of the 2D PDF at its delimiting time prescribed within it at 10.45. This may however have adverse effects on delivery of the prescribed content. The second is to follow Maeda's second law of simplicity, by blurring the distinction between 2 & 3D conflate the PDF for both into one. Thereby streamlining delivery for both the lecturer and the student.