Upcycling Unwanteds - Peer Comments

1. Fiona Lee

2. Stan Darmawan

3. Sam Whipp

4. Emily White

5. Guida Arezzi

Project 3 - Upcycling Unwanteds

Floppy Disk Lamp Shade



Don’t know what to do with those outdated, obsolete floppy disks lying around in your house? Or don’t you even know what these are? It doesn’t matter, it probably wont even slot into your computer anymore because they stopped making slots for them in computer cases years ago! So what do you do with them? Don’t chuck them out! Turn them into lampshades!

The construction is easy, and only requires four things:
Floppy disks
Paper clips / Bobby pins
Sewing Needle
Fishing Wire

Then all you need is a basic knowledge of sewing, or if your extremely lazy, just use the bobby pins / paper clips for the whole lampshade joinery!

The idea is simple, after taking the inner plastic disc out of the floppy disk plastic enclosure, it is simply folded in a particular way, which is then sewn with fishing wire or paper clipped / bobby pinned together, and voila! You have a myriad of different ways to join and connect these double circled pieces together to create your own fun and interesting lamp shades!

You can cover your current table lamps to make fun and interesting light patterns (see left image of poster), or you can even slot them over your christmas lights with the ball shapes (see right image of poster). Anything is possible with the floppy disk lamp shade!

Richard Seymour and Dick Powell: Designing Dream Machines

This video is primarily about the design process as a whole, and all of its steps which make a design either a success or failure. Seymour and Powell both talk about how there are various stages in designing which make a design, truly a successful design. These stages involve not just individual work, but also group discussions and market research for a greater understanding of the target market and also a wider mindset when designing as working in groups allows for thoughts to be expanded, rather than limited when working individually.

I found this video very useful in my future years of Industrial Design because it shows me the right steps to take in order to design successfully to a market all the while keeping within the client’s parameters. I will consider all factors and steps shown in this video to help me in designing ‘dream machines’, in the near future.

Industrial designers as a whole can benefit in the same way as I did, with the knowledge that designing is not just an individual act, but a notion with a whole lot more entangled within it. There are hints, tips and clues all over this video to help industrial designers become greater than what they already are, and to help them succeed further in their careers.

Annie Leonard: The Story of Stuff

Product life, sustainability, global warming, consumerism, power, politics, are all factors of everyday life which every person who lives in this world has to consider or at least experience. This video shows just that, at its core, and at its most inhumane. Annie seems to exacerbate the evil of consumerism, and how the U.S is one of the biggest contributors of that factor, along with most of the other factors which every day people have to consider or experience each day. It seemed the video wasn’t primarily focused on educated the audience about product life, and recycling, but more about attacking her own country about their approach to a stable economy, and how unjust and not right this system is.

Industrial Designs can make use of this video by taking into account the life span of their products, and each step of the design, from its gathering of materials, to manufacturing, then consuming, then disposing. Each factor needs to be considered, but also, what needs to change are the parameters in which designs work in. It’s all well and good that designers can produce products which are environmentally friendly, but if the client or manufacturer does not want it, because they think it will not bring them profit, then it is a problem of the client and manufacturers, and not of the designers.

What I can learn from this video is that in order to grab the attention of the good-willed consumers of today’s market, one needs to design products which are environmentally sound all the way from material collection to product disposal, but not only that, the product must also be appealing enough to sell itself to today’s heavily influenced consumer market of current trends.

Postal Presents - Peer Comments

1. Jonathan Biet

2. Cori Eom

3. Valerie El Khouri

4. Brett Rushbrook

5. Chelcie Nielsen

Project Two: Postal Presents - Model Maker's Spray Can Rack

Imagine you were a model maker; you continuously make figurine models day after day, and you have several dozens of spray cans of every colour of the rainbow in your cupboard. Rainbow… don’t you sometimes just wish you could display your rainbow of colours of spray cans, just as proudly as you display your figurine models?

With this easily flat packed and simple spray can rack, you can quite simply, display your vast array of spray can colours in a rainbow form, as both an aesthetically pleasing industrial design piece and also a simple form of organisation of the many spray cans that model makers have available at their fingertips.

The spray can rack is made of Acrylic perspex because it is a cheap and cost effective material that is also readily available. The cutting diagram for this product is very simple, five identical rectangular pieces which slot into two larger semi-circle pieces. This make for a cheap and cost effective laser cutting process because it is very simple and does not require much time at all to cut, even with a laser cutter.

If there were no size limitations to this project, the amount of slots for spray cans can easily increase, as all that needs to be added is more semi-circles of the same size, and readjusting the rectangular pieces' lengths so that they all slot into each semi-circle correctly. The limits to this spray can rack can be endless as every extra semi-circle piece adds another four slots to the rack, and can be continued indefinately.

This design could have been improved by making better use of the negative space around the ends of the semi-circle just before it hits the surface, as there is enough space to fit two more slots so that two more spray cans can sit in the rack, making a total of 6 spray cans, as shown in the last two pictures before the poster, however this design is limited to only fitting 4 spray cans, because of the lack of the use of negative space in the design.

Ross Lovegrove: Organic design

Organic design seems to be the only thing on Ross Lovegrove’s mind. He is quite literally as he said it, ‘Captain Organic’. He believes in form and the philosophical aspects hidden behind form. Through watching this video it was clear to me that the message he was sending out to me, and most probably to other industrial designers, was to take risks when designing. Don’t always follow the market trend in order to just earn money.

He believes in the driving notion to be different, and create designs which will benefit lifestyle in the future, in a natural and organic way, not just in its form, but in its entirety, that is, construction, materials, interaction, affordances, design elements, the whole lot. This idea was exacerbated in the final example he gave of his ideal car design. Although most companies ignored it, his philosophical reasoning behind it was, to me, perfection at its best. I agree that the shape of the car did not look as aerodynamic and sexy as todays concept cars, but what it does for you, your surroundings and your environment was amazing.

For me, this video meant a lot. It showed me that designing is not just about making products which are similar to todays market, but to design products which are different, in ways which benefit the users, physically, emotionally and philosophically. Although risky, designers must be risk takers in order to change the world we live in and our natural perceptions of what is right and what we prefer in our products.