On Kawara

So, this Japanese conceptual artist is not really my favorite artist. I just think it is pretty intense/ borderline insane what work he has done. If you don't know, he has painted the date, ex: March 20th, 2008, on a canvas every day since 1966. He has done some other conceptual work, and sometimes he includes paper clippings of the days paper, but for the most part he has spent 52 year painting every day the date.

Campana Brothers

I really enjoy the work of these two Brazilian furniture designers. One is a trained architect, the other a lawyer. Apparently, the lawyer does more of the design work and the architect works more on the business end of the things. I appreciate how imaginative and playful their work is and always find their efforts refreshing. I'm sure you're all familar with their work but here are a few images to refresh the memory.

Eero Saarinen

One of my favorite designers is Eero Saarinen. I was exposed to his work at a young age- my grandparents have a set of tulip chairs, which I've always loved, and they live near St. Louis, so I visited the Gateway Arch numerous times growing up. I had no idea they were designed by the same person until a few years ago.

Love/Hate Relationship

Why I Love CAD:

• Precision- it is very easy to draw things exactly the size/length you want
  (good for perfectionists!)
• Snap-to (midpoint, tangent, perpendicular, etc.)
  
• Fun patterns/textures to add to your models (wood grain spray bottle, anyone?)
  
• CAM & CNC technologies/applications
• Pixar!

Why I Hate CAD:

• Rebuild Errors
• Programs are expensive and often not Mac compatible
  
• Designed objects that look too CAD-y
• Decline in traditional animation with nice, hand painted backgrounds (old Disney)
• CAD renderings can look nice, but I would be sad if hand-rendering died out completely
  

Love:

1. Undo/redo
2. Cut/Copy/Paste
3. The clarity, portability, accessability and adaptability it gives ideas
4. The time it can save
5. Extreme accuracy and the ease with which that can be transferred to production/fabrication

Hate:

1. The time it can waste
2. The immaturity of it.
3. The expense of the software
4. It is for me a very sterile, disconnected way of working
5. Parent/child relationships and how difficult they can make organizing the order of operations

Love/Hate CAD

Love:
1) Making new planes
2) That I can see it from all angles just by playing with the rotate button
3) When it works right
4) That it ryhms with many other words
5) Extruding, and the word extrude

Hate:
1) The beeping noise that goes along with the "undefined" message
2) The "what's wrong" box that comes up that I don't understand
3) When it won't let me click on what I want to click on
4) When it won't let me move things to where I want them
5) That you have to draw a rectangle from the corner

love/hate

5 things I love about cad:

1: the rotate tool: you cant do that with hand drawing.
2: the ability to see an object in 3 dimensions without having the cut or glue anything.
3: being able to switch from a solid model, to a model made of just lines, or a combo of both.
4: smart dimensioning.
5: the crust texture.

5 things I hate about cad:

1: Having to run windows on my computer.
2: vague error messages.
3: not knowing the smartest order in which to build things. thus making my feature tree way longer than it needs to be.
4: not being able to make a rectangle move outward from a center point.
5: im a slow learner.

Top 5s

5 Things I Hate About CAD

1. Drawing with a Computer.
2. The computer is unable to read my mind or see inside my head. However, computer mind reading is being developed. http://www.bbc.co.uk/northyorkshire/fun/games/mindreader/index.shtml
3. The 'over-defined' error alert in SolidWorks.
4. Staring at a computer monitor.

http://health.dailynewscentral.com/content/view/140/62
5. False sense of revolution... Think: The Segway




5 Things I Love About CAD

1.The potential of CAD programs to enable more socio-cultural responsive design. http://laptop.org/



2. Ability (once proficient) to model and work through ideas much faster than mock-ups/full-scale models.
3.Ellipitical tool... SO much easier than hand drafting an ellipse.
4.Ability to email CAD files... especially when working collaboratively
5.Changing dimensions and measurement units with relative ease.

hate and love/like

Not in any particular order

 5 things 

I hate....

1.  that when I'm trying to produce a feature and there is an error in my sketch, Solidworks won't be more specific on what that error is.

2. that the learning curb for solid works and other cad programs is steep, but it will eventually plateau, until it is outdated and I have to learn a new program every two years.

3. that the Polar Express  was made possible by cad. http://www.artof3d.com/downloads/HumanCgKerlow.pdf

4. bad CAD design lacks the sensitivity and craftsmanship that Chris is always talking about. Many designs produced on the computer look overworked, streamlined, and homogeneous. I'm afraid this will become the standard and be considered good design. I'm not sure how I feel about this chair but it has obviously been assisted by cad in its production and is a good example of an overworked, streamlined piece of furniture. http://www.nextnature.net/?p=1546

5. building on#4 my concern for the popularity in cad will result in Cad being the primary way of prototyping objects that would once have been built.(not likely though)

Things I like/love...

1. The possibility I might be proficient in this program some day.

2. When I'm out of school, Solidworks will give me the opportunity to design efficiently and accurately without a fully equip shop.

3. Cad camps exist. Nothing is better than a camp for the indoors kids pretending to be outdoor inclined. http://www.umaine.edu/set/cadcamp/

4. The possibility that the interface will in a way revert to an easier way of constructing virtual objects in a virtual 3-d space. Some interface branching off of the i-phone. http://community.machinedesign.com/blogs/software/archive/2008/01/20/big-trends-in-the-future-of-cad.aspx.

5. the medical benefits cad provides. http://www.rt-image.com.com/Examine_Mammography_The_Case_for_CAD_Examining_the_technology_and_

d_its_implicati/content=9504JC4856869640769A72448080441

rapid prototyping

In case you haven't already seen this you should watch this video on 3d printing. its pretty awesome and it makes me want to print little models all day long! enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAt2xD1L8dw

rapid prototyping and furniture.

I have a few links dealing with furniture produced using rapidprototyping.  They range from rigid mathematically designed lighting pieces to freer pieces like front's sketch furniture.  Freedom of Creation is a company that specializes in 3d printed furniture and accessories, including printed woven textiles.  Most of this stuff had to be either designed or processed in a CAD system of some sort.  What is really interesting to me about this is the ability to produce customizable objects on demand.  

The New York Times

A blog

Another blog

Science Direct article

Louise Campbell

I think that these two chairs by Louise Campbell Studio were produced with the aid of computer modeling. The shapes and details appear so intricate in the first chair especially, more so than the second chair.

melding of materials

these examples appear cumpoter-designed because of the seamlessness of the seating surfaces on each. from experience i know it is difficult to accuratley convey these sorts of shapes with pen and hand.

but this is not the only element that stands out to me. the fact that there are at least two different materials in each piece leads me to believe these were concieved using CAD.
rendering these would make it much easier to play with materials and see them next to eachother on the piece.

i don't so much like the examples that i have given: they are both rather stretched looking and have unfortunate stances. the consideration put into the planes seems to have eaten into the time put into proportion.

WELCOME TO THE NAUHAUS

In his 2008 tome, DESIGN NAU, Dr. Christopher Tolles proclaims the Cinderella Table (featured at the MOMA) "... the quintessential exemplar of old vs. new. In its unflinching embrace of our postmodern schizophrenia, Cinderella embodies the emotional duality of a society on the brink of self-annihilation."

Squiggly Bed

This chaisse/ bed I believe was designed by some sort of CAD program, but I am not sure. I guess the most obvious reason is the fluid shape that I could easily imagine on a computer screen. I also think that because the piece is made with just one continuous shape (or at least appears that way) it looks like something that was just origionally drawn on the computer, and possibly made with some sort of device controlled by the computer.

I like this chaisse, it looks like it would be fun to have around, and sit in. I also think the shape is nice, and the space it creates for the person sitting in it would be nice as well. However, it is not my most favorite thing in the world. I also like the random person standing behind it.

Aeron Chair

Designed in 1994 by Bill Stumpf and Don Chadwick for Herman Miller, the Aeron chair revolutioned task chairs. Given the extreme emphasis on creating an ergonomically accurate and mass producible office chair, I have no doubt that CAD was both integral and necessary to the design and development of the Aeron Chair.

I think that there is a unique aesthetic synthesis between form and function in the Aeron chair. I have yet to use this chair for any significant amount of time but do think that it is a good example of CAD enabling new and potentially revolutionary modes of design.

Easy Stacking Chair

Designed by Jerszy Seymour

http://www.dwr.com/productdetail.cfm?id=6950

There are 2 main reasons why I believe that this chair was created using CAD. First, the complex curves in addition to the stacking feature would have been very labor intensive to design and physically make without CAD software. Second, the fact that it is injection molded plastic with a fairly thin profile leads me to think CAD was employed, again because I think CAD would have significantly reduced design/production time & cost. If CAD hadn't been used, I think that it would cost much more that it does ($120- $60 on sale!)

I'm not a huge fan of this chair. The style of it is close to my personal aesthetic, but I think there is something awkward about it. I think that certain design decisions were made to allow the chair to stack, but in turn hurt the aesthtics of the piece (mostly in the design/shape of the legs).

small,fast, out of control

I haven't read this book yet, just excerpts, but the concept of singularity in relation to design is a curious thought. How will the availability of these evolving, complex nanotechnologies eventually affect the intimacy of the design process? Will the basic skills of using our hands and bodies to produce objects become moot as technological interface becomes smaller, faster and available to the masses? Digesting these theories is overwhelming, but I think it's interesting based on the quick advancements in technology within my lifetime, and the drastic development that will occur (Moore's law and stuff like that) in the future. It might be a shitty book in Ian's opinion, but some interesting mind blowing topics to discuss.

http://singularity.com/aboutthebook.html