Basic Formgiving Skills - DG690

Transcription

1 Basic Formgiving Skills - DG690 Joep van de Ven s j.v.d.ven@student.tue.nl Abstract This document describes a pictorial with all the deliverables and progress that was/were made throughout the assignment Basic Formgiving Skills, during the B1.1 semester of academic year As stated on the OASE website: The assignment teaches students to learn form-language as the medium through which we communicate. Using a series of hands-on exercises on the act of making it is taught how giving form to an artefact is a continuous dialogue between eyes and hands, driven by quality and craftsmanship. Authors Keywords Form and Senses; FS; Form family; Integration Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Copyright Joep van de Ven, TU/e Eindhoven

2 Week 1 (Observing): As a designer you need to observe very well. If you can observate, you can find inspiration. You need to make clear sketches of you design. Do not use CAD software, because sketches are not permanent. People feel better with sketches. Picture s show practicing in making straight lines and elipses. General Feedback: You cannot make good sketches with your wrist, you need to use you whole arm. Sketch from your shoulder. It is important to make very tiny lines instead of thick lines, because you can always make the lines bigger. Your brains sees first the big lines and second the tiny lines, use that. Use one straight line and not many small lines, your sketch will look more professional. If you turn a circle in a certain angle, it will NOT get sharp edges. A circle in perspective is an elipse.

3 Week 2 (Sketch three objects): Look at objects as primary forms. Start with a big abstract form, and then fill in the details bit for bit. Use A3 paper, otherwise you details will have to be very small. Above you see 4 pictures, showing the build-up of the sketch. Started with very abstract forms, going into more shape, finalizing the shape. And eventually filling in the details. Sketch of a lamp. Photo of the actually lamp. Sketch of a stereo. Picture of the actually stereo.

4 Week 3 (Power socket): Duplicating a power socket, seems easy but not if you hear what duplicating means. To estimate who s power socket were the best, we need to know which requierments we think are important. I learned from that, that not everyone gives the same things the same value. While i was listen from the back, i heard that completion was very important. For me, i think the finish goes above the completion. You can make something that is 100% accurate but looks like crap. General Feedback: It is important to make sure that every corner that should be curved, is perfect curved. Keep it mind that paint has a tickness, so maybe you should make your hole, just a bit larger Personal Feedback: The paintjob could better. Make sure that you first apply primer, be aware that MDF, is really ugly wood. Spray primer wil not work. So you need to prime it, and then spray putty it, to get an even spaced surface. Then apply tiny layers of spray paint to it.

5 Week 4 (Form integration): Make an abstract form, which contains one circulairshape and one squaredshape. It is important to communicate your design descissions. Why that diameter? The space between objects has to matter. General Feedback: Do not think only about your design itself. If you need to present it, you have to know how you would like to comunicate it to the world. Personal Feedback: You could make the object more interesting, by make the corners of the cube curved. Two color effect is strong, but make sure you tape it very tight. There is still some paint on your design. It is important to take the tape off after some minutes, so the paint did not become completely dry.

6 Pictorials Week 5 (Extention box): Make a extention box, with a formfamily in it. It has to have 2 powersockets and 1 on/off switch. I wanted to make something that works. So i chose for a concept with turning parts. This made it hard, but nothing is impossible for a designer. General feedback: Details are very important when design a product. Everything has to be clear. Therefore it is important that you think about what the colors of your design communicate to the rest of the world. Also do not use to many diffrent thickness of layers, because then your product will look very complicated.

7 Final Feedback: What you are trying to communicate is clear. The formfamily is very obvious. I like the concept of hiding the sockets and the switch. There are still some possibilities. You could consider to give a hint of the turning parts. And you could make the connection between the cable and the block brown, so it will look more interesting. The finish could be better but therefore you will need a lathe, because round shapes are hard to make by hand. Discussion: I chose Basic Formgiving Skills to learn more about what important is as a designer, while making prototypes. I wanted to improve my prototyping skills. This assignment definitely learnt me alot. I still have to practice more on good spraypaint jobs, but i now know were to look for and i know i have to have patience. It was a really good exercise to learn more about what is possible with materials. Overall I think the Basic Formgiving Skills assigment is more then just an assigment about Form and Senses. For me it helped to determine a part of identity, because I learnt how I want to communicate myself to the rest of the world. I am very happy that i followed this assignment. I will use the Knowledge and the skills in my next project, to achieve a better looking prototype. Acknowledgements Special thanks to dr. ir. B. J. Hengeveld and dr. ir. M. Bruns, for there inspirationfull lessons and the helpfull feedback.