Ambigram

I came upon something intriguing a few days ago, when exploring Scott Kim's website. He calls them "inversions", and has many examples that he has created over the last 23 years, many of which are animated. They are commonly called "ambigrams", and I was astounded by the beauty and creativity that they displayed. An ambigram is something that reads the same way when rotated 180 degrees, or reflected over a horizontal or vertical dividing line. Wikipedia's definition explains it in more general terms. Basically, certain letters are transformed or distorted to work as something else from a different view. Sometimes, a letter already has symmetry, or is very similar to another letter, but sometimes, it needs to be changed so much that it becomes a great challenge to make it work. I started out by working on my own name. I quickly realized that "Ben" would be nearly impossible, "Ben Scheele" would be very odd, but "Ben Thomas Scheele" had some potential. The Hs lined up, and a few other letters made easy pairs, such as B and E, and O and C. Of course, there were still many tricky ones in there, but I think it turned out pretty well.





I made a rough draft, then I carefully drew out the first half of the letters with a pencil on paper at about 1.5" height, then I scanned it, smoothed and darkened the text with Photoshop, and vectorized it using live trace in Illustrator. I simplified the splines to make the borders smoother, and then shifted each letter through scaling and translation to make them aligned vertically and spaced horizontally to my liking. Finally I copied the group and rotated it over to make the second half of my name. I realized after completing it that an image with this aspect ratio wouldn't fit on a screen very well. Oh, well. I made a rough draft ambigram for my roommate Brian (and my other roommate Bryan with a small modification). I'll post more ambigrams as I complete them. Just like how when I first got into palindromes and anagrams, I will probably want to transform everything I see for a while.

Origami, Business Card

As I said last post, I have gotten back into origami something fierce. Once I had discovered origami theory, I couldn't wait to make some original designs. When I am folding models now, I like to make variations on them, such as on these two models; a gargoyle designed by Jerry Harris, and Robert Neale's classic dragon.





I also love folding and throwing paper airplanes. I had the idea to make a paper airplane business card that would teach other people how to fold my design. I used Adobe Illustrator to make patterns for both sides such that step by step instructions would appear as it was folded. I tested it on my roommates, and they were able to make it, so I am pleased with the design. It flies very well, and can be gripped and thrown in many different ways: from the nose, the midsection or the tail, or even by holding the top and bottom loosely and then projecting it from the hand like a shuriken dart. It it pretty cool, and I think it will be a great conversation starter. I can talk about how I like origami, or I can mention that I got an aerospace engineering degree, or that I know how to use Illustrator. It is an example of my ingenuity and originality. I wasn't able to find anything similar online; the closest one involved carefully cutting and pasting together a paper plane model. It looked pretty fancy and probably took even longer than mine to design, but I doubt many people would actually take the time to construct it. Mine can be folded on the spot in a couple minutes, and is a simple and fun puzzle that will teach others how to transform other business cards in a similar way. I think it will communicate to others that I am focused on creating high quality, enjoyable products, and on educating others about good design. My final version will have my phone number on it, but I didn't think it would be a good idea to post that online.





To see the full folding sequence, and what it looks like completed, check out my gallery on coroflot.com.

Here are some more origami models I folded recently: "Magic Rose Cube by Valerie Vann, closed and open, a Bowl by Aldo Putignano holding a tiny traditional crane, a butterfly by Akira Yoshizawa, and an original creation of mine, a helmet with an eye on the back of it kind of like the one in Nausicaa, a "Business Card Puppy" by Larry Stevens, a Unicorn by Stephen Weiss, and Cerberus by Robert Lang. The magic rose cube is really amazing, and I think that one would make a great gift. Now, I realize that the last two models didn't turn out too well, but I was mostly just doing a test run before trying them with a higher quality paper. In the case of the unicorn though, I think I'll look for another design, as I didn't like that one very much. The cerberus design is pretty cool, but it needs a sheet bigger than 10" square to work well. For that helmet, I was just doodling with a small square of paper while thinking about how cool it would be to make a helmet like the one the emperor had in Nausicaa, and lo and befold, I had come up with something that actually worked. I'll probably fold it from a larger sheet, and then post the sequence online some time. I'm going to have some good fun with origami, I can tell.

Designs of the Day

At this point, it is clear that my goal of producing a design each day that would be worthy of posting online was a bit too ambitious. I have spent time almost every day this year doing design work (minus a couple of days of moving into my new apartment). I think one problem I ran into was the same problem I had last year. I kept wanting to outdo myself each time, until it became difficult to continue working at that rate. The time required for each project would increase each time. I realize that this is just my pefectionism kicking in. In order to rein this in, I will change the parameters slightly. I want to keep developing my design skills, so I will continue to do design work every day. I will post once each week with highlights of the week's work. It may be one big project, seven small renderings, or something completely different. It will turn into "designs of the day", instead of "[intermittent] design of the day". I guess I will post on Monday nights for now, but that may change later.

The thing that I will post today is a small collection of photos of an origami tesselation I created. I designed it using a computer program I found online. Little did I know that the design I made was probably one of the more complex and difficult tesselations I could make. I modified the output in Illustrator, and printed it onto a piece of paper.



I cut a section out, and then creased all of the lines, some on one side, some on the other, which took a long time. I then spent probably an hour to collapse the model into what you see here, which is less than half the size it started as. One thing that made it difficult was that it all had to be folded together more or less simultaneously. It was very tricky to fold, but eventually I figured out the patterns, and saw which sections would have to be the highest and lowest points, and that helped in the process. One cool part about origami tessellations is that they create beautiful light patterns when backlit.






I will continue to explore this form of origami occasionally, but for now I want to do just try folding and understanding many different models, with the intention of eventually being able to design my own. I have been inspired by finding tons of amazing examples of origami sculptures online recently, and learning some of the methods of model design. Some of the masters whose works I have been marveling at include Robert Lang, Michael Lafosse, Eric Joisel, Satoshi Kamiya, Brian Chan, Jason Ku, Hojyo Takashi, Tomoko Fuse, Akira Yoshizawa, Issei Yoshino, and many more. I encourage anyone with an interest to look them all up. Prepare to be awestruck.

Bump-less Coffee Table

So, today's design is another piece of furniture. The design comes from a question I asked myself. How would one make a coffee table that would be less likely to cause severe discomfort in the shin region if bumped into? Well, the first thing that came to mind was to surround it with foam rubber padding. This would be excessive, unless the pads had some other use. Well, you could divide it into sections, and then shape them to be used as seat cushions for sitting at the table Japanese style. Well, I played around with the idea for a while, and this is the result. There are six segments, with two different types. They could be used to make sitting cross legged more comfortable by raising the angle a bit, or to rest your knees on while kneeling.



This coffee table would make for a great Lego play table, since it contains pieces and prevents them from falling off the sides.



You can also put the pads onto the table upside down, which makes an interesting pattern.



I chose to construct it with Mahogany for the main surface, and oak for the legs. I changed the direction of the grain for the corner sections of the table to make it more interesting visually, and also to help indicate how to put the pads on. In designing this table, I learned the value of making things easily modifiable. When I changed the size of the table legs, everything updated fine, but when I went back to make a change in the contour of the pads, I ended up having to reassign and redo all kinds of stuff. It was pretty frustrating. Sometimes things like that just can't be helped, but I think I started to see how it could be planned for. You need to build things with the expectation that things will be changed down the road. I guess you would call that a flexible design. That kind of thing was easy to do it POV-Ray with the different coding constructs that help parameterize things, but in solid modeling, it gets a lot trickier. There is so much that is hidden, and below the surface. There are of course ways to explore and see how things were made, but it does take a little while. I have a feeling that once I have put in as much time with SolidWorks as I have with POV-Ray, I will be producing at least as elegant of source files.

Room Arrangement

I'm moving into my friend's apartment soon, while he will be working on the west coast. I needed to decide what furniture I would be able to use, and what I would want to replace with my own. I measured everything up, and then tested out different room arrangements using sketch blocks in SolidWorks. I wanted to follow the rules of Diamond Feng Shui to have my desk and bed both facing in one of my four best directions. Someday, I'll have my office and bed in separate rooms. That will be nice. But for the time being, this will work fine.

 

The UWUD, a WIP

I have been working on this product design for some time now. It will take a lot of work to complete it. Its nature changed as I came up with more ideas on what would compose the Ultimate Wake-Up Device (UWUD). I had an idea for some modular electronic devices for one portion of it, and a couple neat products that compose the other parts. When it is all complete, this will be quite the nice addition to my portfolio. I just need to keep plugging away at it so that I can eventually work out all the details and then present it in a clear, concise manner. This is the first output that's really worth showing; it is a study on some different configuration options for the modules. I figured out how to make design tables to efficiently create multiple configurations for a single part. I had to create the module in a different way than I originally had in order to allow this, though. There is no way that one would use all of the different modules in one device. I am thinking that three layers of add-on modules would be the most that would be practical to use at any one time for a portable hand-held device. I will explain it all in more detail once I add the connectors and the details which differentiate the modules. I'm not sure if this will end up being an original invention, or more of an innovation, taking inspiration from Bug Labs' products. I did come up with this idea independently, but upon further exploration, I discovered that modular electronics products such as this are not that new, though they have yet to reach mainstream acceptance the way that convergence devices such as the iPhone have.

Portfolio Pieces

In the week leading up to Christmas, I worked diligently to create a couple of product designs, which I then posted to my online portfolio at coroflot.com/metamere.

The first project was a chair design. I just doodled for a little while, and the "Lean-Back Chair" is what resulted after further development in SolidWorks. I was able to test the balance of this half-rocker chair to see whether it's behavior would be interesting to experience, and comfortable to sit in. You can read more descriptions and see more photos in my portfolio page for it.



The second was a design that I had thought up back in the late summer or early fall. I wanted to fully define and execute this idea, since it was a simple and complete one. I wanted a strong, sturdy utensil that could work just as well as a spoon or a fork. I wanted it to be able to stab a grape or meatbell, cut a piece of chicken, scoop ice cream, and scrape yogurt out of the corner of a cup. It had to be beautiful and comfortable to use. In creating this model, I figured out a lot about using surfaces, which will be very valuable in the long run. I also did some FEA (finite element analysis) to test it, and then modified the design a bit based on the results. Here is the portfolio page for this project.

Interesting Things

I came across a couple neat things recently. One is an informational video that teaches about the interactions of government, manufacturers, retailers, and "consumers" to help explain why our world is in the state it is in, and how things will have to change for the situation to improve. I'll probably watch it again if I'm ever feeling too materialistic.

The other cool thing is a photography gallery that shows a collection of fluid images of splashing water and the like. They are unusual in the ways that color is used. The forms that result are simply breathtaking.

Blocks and Animation

In today's design, I wanted to learn how to use SolidWorks' sketch blocks feature, so I chose a subject that would work well for it, and went to work. It took a while, but I got most of the process down well. Sketch blocks are neat because they allow you to test out a design that has motion only in one plane while you are still in the sketch phase. Then you can create the parts out of that sketch. I created a simple rotary blocks device. I'm not sure what exactly it is called, but it was some little device I saw somewhere. Just posting a still image didn't seem to be enough, so I figured out how to make and save an animation of a simulation. It turned out pretty well. The next step will be to play around with all the different options and types of animations, such as exploding an assembly, making parts transparent, and moving the camera. It can make some cool looking results. I have been working on a product design with a more complex assembly which will benefit from having a nice animation to show how it works and fits together. In case you couldn't view the video below, you can download it here.

Design of the Day - Continue!

Yes, that's right. Since I am an industrial-designer-in-training, this will be part of my training. I will create a new design every day. I will vary the software I use between 2d and 3d, and sometimes I will post a drawing or sketch. I may not post each day, but by the end of the year, I will have posted 365 individual designs. That's a lot, but it's a small drop in the bucket of what I will produce in my lifetime, and I want to start filling it up right away. I want to make every one interesting in some way, and that way there will surely be many that are portfolio-worthy. I am moving out soon, and even if the job I find to support myself does not help me build my portfolio, I will build it nonetheless. My new year's resolutions are to work to support myself in living independently, and to do industrial design. I have the abilities to do real industrial design work, of student level or better, and by doing this kind of work, I shall continue to become a stronger industrial designer. These may be my most challenging resolutions yet, and they may also be the ones that I achieve in the fullest. So, here goes, 2008.