Posts tagged education

The Delft University of Technology’s Industrial Design Engineering department has posted their “Delft Design Guide” online, for free PDF download. The content in the guide is drawn largely from five of their design courses: Introduction to Industrial Design, Concept Design, Fuzzy Front End, Materialization and Detailing, and their Final Project course.

Posted alongside the guide is this video interview with Jeroen van Erp, an alumnus, faculty member, and part of the Dutch creative agency Fabrique. (Warning: The sound is horrible, as if it were recorded with one of those snazzy DSLRs with amazing video capabilities but a terrible microphone. Get ready to lean in close to your speakers.)

Hit the jump to learn more about what’s in the Guide.

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Killing two birds with one stone, the design way: In October the Savannah College of Art and Design will be hosting two conferences at once, studiously arranging the schedules “so that attendees from either event can attend keynote speeches from the other conference without paying extra cost and without having to miss anything from their own conference.”

The first event, quite fittingly, is the 2ND Annual Collaborative Innovative Networks (COINs) Conference, which “[brings] together a multi-disciplinary, international group of practitioners, researchers and students of the emerging science of collaboration.” The second event is Design Ethos, a four-day conference on the future of design education.

“This once-in-a-lifetime intersection of the world’s most noted forward-thinking designers will foster an extraordinary sharing of knowledge and ideas,” says SCAD Graphic Design chair John Waters. “We expect the energy in the room to be virtually combustible.”

Hit the jump for full details.

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It’s always about this time of year that the news is suddenly full of unemployment horror stories; debt-laden graduates scrambling to find even a whiff of an opening to the world of work, in an ever-shrinking and increasingly uncertain job market. Reports of Bachelor waving twenty-somethings rummaging in bins for basic sustenance, or facing the prospect of moving back in with the parents, is enough to set the teeth of any student on edge. Employers don’t exactly help matters. Professing that recent graduates are lacking in slightly mysterious sounding “soft-skills”, doesn’t help current students identify where they should be focusing their academic energy.

For those of you that don’t follow his “Strategic Aesthetics” blog, Michael Roller of Kaleidoscope (you might remember Mr. Roller from his candid “5 Self-Promotion Dont’s” – on Core77 here) has been on something of a personal mission to tackle this problem – at least for budding industrial designers. Gathering insights from a survey of 100 design employers in consultancy, corporate or academic practice across the globe (if a little biased towards North America), Roller has produced a simple and concise 17 page booklet, under the title “The Ideal (Junior) Industrial Designer”, outlining what employers in the design industry look for when hiring a junior.

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A friend who works as a toy designer recently told me her new intern–an ID grad–had never used a glue gun! And I wonder if today’s ID grads know what graphite smells like. I believe my graduating class was one of the last to learn drafting the old-fashioned way, with an assortment of mechanical pencils.

Nowadays most ID curriculums revolve around the computer, whether for modeling or drafting. I don’t mean this to be another “When I was your age” type of post; but I just came across “The Decanter,” a promo video from design consultancy Walter Landor and Associates, which details the design process of the titular product way back in the 1960s, before I was even born.

If someone dropped a project on you today to design a decanter, you’d probably look at pictures of other decanters on the web, and do your drafting and modeling on the computer, which you’d also use to e-mail the client for updates and feedback. What the heck would you do in the 1960s when, needless to say, they didn’t have any computers to run the design through?

Many of you may be curious as to how they got projects like this done back then. Here’s to hoping you’re fifteen-and-a-half minutes worth of curious, as this video was edited in the 1960s (the project doesn’t even really start until 1:23 into the video). Check it out:

Design story: The Decanter from Landor Associates on Vimeo.

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The Savannah College of Art & Design’s ID department continues to impress us with its significant ties to real-world industry and the educational opportunities this affords to its students. SCAD’s latest team-up was with heavy equipment manufacturer JCB, who collaborated with SCAD ID students on a re-design of their 3CX backhoe loader, show above.

The new 3CX features aesthetic changes to its loader arms, cab roof cap and engine hood that make it look more “rugged.”

“We gave it more of an Americas look,” said Chris Giorgianni, JCB’s general manager for product marketing. “From a look and feel aspect, it’s always been about the guts of the machine. Now it looks on the outside the way it performs.”

The relationship [between JCB and SCAD] goes back three years and started with redesigns of accessories, like in-cab cupholders, assembly line workstations and skid steer loader attachments.

The 3CX was the first product redesign on which the company and the college collaborated. And it will be the first of many, Giorgianni said, given the results.

“The construction community is pretty tight-knit, and you end up with tunnel vision,” he said. “The students challenge everything. They have virgin eyes. Every meeting we have, they mention some simple improvement that is an aha moment for us. We come away saying, ‘Why didn’t we think of that.’ “

Read more about it at Savannah Now’s source article.

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I had a friend who was a caretaker for an extremely wealthy family in Westchester, New York. The family had been rich for generations, and everything they owned was “the best” and was brand-new. One of my friends’ tasks was keeping the family’s considerable fleet of cars filled with gas, and one day when he was returning with the family SUV, he carelessly let a tree branch on the estate gouge the paint on one side. When he confessed his crime to the family patriarch, he couldn’t have been more surprised at the response: “Oh,” said Rich Dad, “that’s too bad. I guess we better get a new one.”

“Uh…what?” my friend said. The truck was less than a year old.

“We’ll get rid of the truck and get a new one. It’s no good, right?”

In short, the patriarch had been raised the same way he was raising his kids–to believe that only new, pristine things were good, and when you needed something, you went out and bought it.

In contrast, I remember Karim Rashid recounting that his father was a set designer who had built many of the things in Karim’s childhood home. He had thus had impressed upon him from a young age that if you wanted or needed something, you designed and built it. (The philosophy’s certainly served him well, as the man has something like 3,000 designs in production.)

Obviously these are not binary choices in how to raise children, but if I had kids I’d certainly lean towards the latter philosophy rather than the former, and not just out of my eternal indigence.

A good place to start might be Brooklyn-based author Heather Swain’s “Make These Toys: 101 Clever Creations Using Everyday Items,” recently covered in the New York Times:

Kids who spend hours communing with technology — plugged into televisions, computers and iPods — may benefit from some good, old-fashioned arts and crafts fun. Especially if they can then play with what they make.

…”The process of picking out the project, getting stuff together and making it” is only half of it, she says. “Then they go play with it. It’s not over. That’s what I like.”

…The toys aren’t intended to last forever. After all, they’re made from cardboard tubes and glue.

“It’s going to break. It’s going to go away,” Swain says. “But they can make it again. They can change it and innovate.”

Amen to that. If my kid scratches the family car, I won’t learn about it because he told me to get a new one; he’ll just show up to the dinner table with paint under his fingernails and a respirator-impression on his face.

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One of the most awkward social interactions I regularly experience is visiting a friend’s home and suffering the “Dude you GOTTA see this YouTube clip” moment, where I am forced to stand awkwardly behind and to the side of their chair, peer at the screen they’re clicking on, and pretend to be amused by a 90-second animation of a goddamn squirrel fighting Darth Vader or whatever.

The way we use our homes and interact with people in them is now very different than the way people used their homes 10, 20, 50 years ago. Nowadays most everyone has some form of “home office,” even if it’s just a small desk with a laptop on it, where aforementioned YouTube moments are inflicted on guests, and lately I’m seeing more homes that lack televisions altogether (as does mine).

I bring this up to ask you: Given our modern style of living, if you had to write a handbook for designing the interior of the modern-day home, what rules would you lay down?

For some inspiration, check out “Easier Living, by Design.” It’s an article by Alexandra Lange in the New York Times that covers industrial designers Mary and Russel Wright’s book from 1950, “Guide to Easier Living,” which breaks down the Wrights’ takes on what to fill your house with and how to arrange it.

Writes Lange,

…The Wrights’ work was revolutionary at the time: not only did they simplify our plates and mugs, chairs and cabinets, but they simplified the way we were to live and work in our homes. Many other designers and manufacturers created modern design for the home in the 1950s, but few showed how to use it with the detail and multimedia platform the Wrights used so effectively. Without the tools for contemporary life they and others provided, our lives today would run very differently. But have we truly achieved the easier living that the Wrights preached?

To a degree, yeah, I guess. But in everyone’s home office there should at least be a dedicated chair for YouTube-clip inflictees, so we don’t have to suffer on our feet.

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