Break

Well I'm finally finished with first semester of my Junior year at Pratt and have already arrived home in Seattle. The semester ended with quite a lot of work and I'm still working on documenting and sorting everything out before I can begin to share it. My final critique for ID View went great, here's a little peak of my setup:

1000 Page Views

A big thank you to my friends, family and fellow students for their continued interest in my work and for 1000 page views as of today.

Finals week is in full swing here in Brooklyn, but check back soon for post ID View updates of my latest projects and final work.

Pure Melt Drawings

These are some recent drawings of the Pure Melt snow melting bag. Although the design has changed slightly since I drew them, they still give a good general idea of function, material and styling.

If you are interested in some of my earlier work on this same project check out these old posts that explain the idea as well as some of my process:

Product Design Update

Product Design

More Models

Here are the rest of the Pure Melt photos, 4th sketch model below:

5th (Semi-Final) sketch model:

Finals

Everything is beginning to get a bit crazy in Brooklyn for finals week. I thought I'd post some photos of the various Pure Melt sketch models I've been working on all semester for my design course before I get completely bogged down.

I'm starting the final model this weekend, but these photos help illustrate some of my process in designing the snow melting bag:

2nd sketch model:

3rd sketch model:

Table Top

Here are some finalized renderings of the table I built in Solid works that I posted from earlier in the semester with the addition of some dishes for scale. Rendered in Photo View 360:

Pratt Radio Light Box

As many of you know I've been an employee and show host for Pratt Radio for the past couple years. This year the station manager Nick Childers decided we needed some sort of device that promoted the station while also informing the student body of show times, host names and more. I was asked to build a window mounted light box to solve the problem, by drawing the attention of students walking by the station and projecting show times. The photos below are only a selection of the shots I took throughout the entire process- the rest can be found on my Photobucket.

This project was very low-budget: we spent about $50 on materials... If I was to do it again I would definitely minimize the depth of the frame because the current setup is extremely large and quite heavy.

Solid Works Bicycle

Here are some recent renderings I did of a bicycle assembly I've been building in Solid Works. The rendering was done with Photo View 360. The bicycle was an assignment for my Solid Works class that I took special interest in due to my own passion for cycling. Hope you enjoy the images, they are my first renderings.

Great Blue Heron

I've continued work on my wooden 3D pieces and adapted the Blue Heron two more times. Here are some photos of the most recent models, I have one more to complete for wednesday and will be finalizing the size, elements, and materials for a final piece. The top 2 photos were the second adaptation and the bottom 3 are the most recent:

Whisk Sketching

Here are some sketches I did for short group project in my design class at Pratt. I had to do 30 hand mixer sketches total, 10 that would be used in a professional kitchen, 10 marketed to home cooks and 10 that fell into the "goofy" category. I tried to develop some quick whisk sketching techniques for these sketches to speed them up, so all in all each drawing took a little less than 5 minutes. We developed these specific groups based on market research of currently available whisks and the general categories they fell into. The sketches were done with prismacolors and a fineliner:

Wooden Animals

Here are the photos of the wooden animal abstractions. Since finishing these pieces I decided to continue evolving the Blue Heron and will post pictures of the newer ideation shortly.

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3D

My 3D class is taking a break from the bristol board animal studies and are now focusing on wood construction. I began the project with three abstract models constructed with scavenged wood. The original forms, joints and materials I used for these sculptures were then applied back to more animal abstraction. Here are the first three sculptures (I clearly need to get in the habit of using a nice camera for these photos):

Halloween

Halloween couldn't have come quicker, this year seems to be flying by at an almost alarming rate, as I was finishing a number of midterms and deadlines these past couple of weeks. I hope to upload some of my more recent work this weekend as well as some photos of the costume I put together for this year's festivities.

Seeing as October is the month of honoring the dead, I'd like to honor the lives of two amazing musicians who died this past October:

The reggae legend Gregory Isaacs died on October 25, 2010 at age 59, after battling lung cancer for a number of years. Although his discography contains a number of classic reggae hits, my all time favorite song is Night Nurse (click for the YouTube link).

The much younger and lesser known Micheal Larson, known as Eyedea of the underground Hip Hop duo Eyedea and Abilities died on October 16, 2010 at age 28. The cause of his death is still unknown, but comes as a great loss in a time when creative and original Hip Hop is getting harder and harder to find. Here is a link to the groups song Act Right.

Product Design Update

Here are some of my most recent sketches for the Hot/Cold design problem. As you can see these drawings were highly influenced by some of the concepts I sketched earlier when I was more focused on winter shelters.  I call it the Pure Melt water purification system!

SolidWorks Practice

One of my classes this year is all about learning how to use the 3D CAD program SolidWorks, one of the essential tools of the modern-day designer. Here are a couple screenshots from a recent homework assignment that had me building tables and using of of SolidWorks more unique features that allows for multiple "configurations" of one model. The two tables are actually the same file, simply configured so one is a dinner table and one a bed-side.

Product Design

My four-credit class for the fall semester is Product Design and I chose to enroll in a Biomimicry specific course. Our first project has been very research intensive so far, but I've done a little sketching that I can share. The project we were assigned is about either heat or cold conservation and I was originally planning to apply it to winter survival shelters. In an effort to scale down my project I'm beginning to design some sort of fresh water storage system that melts and filters snow.

"Biomimicry is an emerging discipline that studies nature's best ideas and then imitates these designs and processes to solve human problems" - Biomimicry Guild. I've already done quite a bit of research on some of Earth's best cold weather species and am currently in the process of studying Caribou fur as well as the petal patterns of certain tundra flowers. Here are some of the early sketches I did when I was still focused on the shelter problem: