Digital design studio

On a cold and windy stressful Friday morning less than a week before d-day for our community alarm design project our class took a less than relevant trip to the digital design studio. I was not very enthused since I had SO much to do for our other project which seemed much more pressing than our design and technology module that I had seemed to have neglected. None the less we travelled in classic school trip fashion as the class formed a walking bus through the streets of Glasgow.

The digital design studio is part of the Glasgow school of art which I never knew existed. We entered the big impressive building and got led into a room with an even more impressive screen- definitely the biggest screen I have ever seen, probably the height of a standard two-storey building. We then put on some HUGE 3D glasses- not like your normal cinema 3D glasses these ones were much more industrial – no messing around with these bad boys. 

The nice man who worked there then took us through a presentation on the hugest screen of all time. He spoke to us about what they did there and the overgraduate courses they ran. 

The work they did was based on 3D scanning machines. They used them to make digital representations of old buildings which had no proper blue prints just artist impressions which were not very precise. They also used them them for biological 3D representation of things like the human scull. 

This was all very impressive especially on such a huge screen.If this wasn’t already impressive enough they then wapped out another wowing feature. The advanced 3D glasses have a really cool ability to adapt to a persons viewpoint on the screen as they moved around the room. They could go round the side of a building or behind the human scull. We all had a go running about the room like lunies. Jumping up and down and changing our viewpoing to see how the screen moved and changed.

 It just demonstrates how technology is replicating real 3D life more and more. No more are the black and white flat graphic days. Maybe soon technology will get so advanced we wont be able to tell the difference between graphics and reality.

Unicef Tap Project

An intended do-gooder trend I’ve witnessed on social media lately: unicefs tap project- For Every 10 Minutes You Don't Touch Your Phone, A Child is given Clean Water For An Entire Day.

To me there’s something really wrong about this; if us privileged beings are able to survive the heart wrenching struggle of abstaining from touching our expensive smart phones for a WHOLE minute (note there is not even an obligatory donation involved !! ) Then Unicef will give a dying child water to keep them going for one day….. WHAT THE HELL HAS THE WORLD COME TO!?!??!?!

Don't Judge a Suit by his cover!

Being completely honest I wasn’t thrilled when seeing our weeks design and technology slot was being taken by the director of the GSA. I didn’t know anything about him but imagined him as a next level school headmaster- another man in a suit who speaks about values of the school and how we all need to excel ourselves in order to get the most out of our education BLAH BLAH BLAH. After 16 and a half years in education these talks get a bit old….

But surprisingly he wasn’t as expected at all! He was in fact a very interesting man and had a lot more time for us than expected. His talk titled- ‘professor tom inns- why I see things the way I do’ was very refreshing.

He took us through his background from studying in Bristol to researching for the rspca and finally working as dean of the university of Dundee. He then went on to speak about product development success using the obvious example of apple. He spoke about how apple are not as bullet proof as people think and showed us an example of the apple newton- a product that they took out but completely flopped! 

This opened up a discussion of the future of apple. Being such a successful company many question when or what will eventually lead to their demise. There were some theories that companies like Samsung who are actually more technologically advanced than apple will overtake them with more advanced products at cheaper prices. This is due to the fact apple are more of a design company- their capabilities with technology are actually not as advanced as you would assume and they buy in lots of their internal tech from other companies. Personally I imagine they’re not going to fall anytime soon, they have such a dedicated following I can only imagine apple will keep on growing and producing more apple branded things for apple junkies to lap up; perhaps a complete integrated apple home system. Apple heating, apple kitchens ,APPLE EVEYRTHING!! 

He also presented us with an interesting stat: of all the new products produced by all companies in the last 5 years only 56% were deemed to be ‘successful’ by the companies who made them. That’s a pretty disheartening stat. What chance do I have as an amateur designer if the odds are already stacked against me!?

This quickly moved from quite a negative note to a much more positive one as he went on to discuss his PHD which explored the impact of the designer on innovation in small businesses. This was very interesting and completely relevant to our Product Design Engineering course. He explained how he discovered designers have an amazing ability to look to the future, since everything they do doesn’t actually exist at the time of doing. This made me feel like some kind of crystal ball mystic meg and that’s always good.

Finally he moved on to speak about business strategy and took us through a few well known businesses’ strategies. I learnt my favourite clothing shop – Zara have a reactive strategy – they do all their product testing in store- they put lines out in the shops and if they don’t sell they stop stocking them. Very logical if you ask me. All their factories are in turkey not china because deliveries cant come from china quick enough.

Tesco use the same reactive strategy- they adapt every one of their stores around what the locals buy and eat. They surprisingly have more data on us than any other cooperation in the uk since the tesco club card tracks what we buy and when we buy it.

Companies who utalise proactive strategies are Dyson and virgin. James dyson is always researching new technology, new applications for it and bringing out innovative new products. Virgin work in a different way by buying companies to gain assets- they see something and think ‘hey that’s cool lets make a virgin version of it.’ Perhaps a worse way to run a company but still successful none the less.

Overall I found Tom Inns’ talk really inspiring. He’s a great speaker and I was pretty enthralled by what he had to say and was overall really surprised at how much of a down to earth interesting guy he was! I learnt a lot about how businesses work and how designers contribute to them. Sorry for pre judging you Tom but I take it all back!

Nissan Car factory

On Thursday we got the joys of a 6am start followed by an even more joyous 8 hours on a bus for our trip to the Sunderland based Nissan car factory. We arrived at the GINORMOUS factory and were greeted by a jolly retired Nissan worker and kited up in hi-vis vests, hard caps, safety glasses and given a fun headset ready for our guided tour.

The tour lasted 3 hours and we apparently walked over 3 miles whilst being shown the ins and outs of the world of Nissan- it was pretty exhausting but very interesting.

As we first walked into the body shop there were silver shells of cars on a roller coaster type contraption all moving towards us ready to get painted- quite a surprising sight! We then were walked through the whole process of construction of the cars from the tiniest fiddly parts and precise robotic welding to the guys who manually added in the dashboards and fitted the glass. It was amazing to see the cars come to life and the speed and accuracy of the workers on the factory floor, they had to move so quick as the conveyor belt production line moved along. On average each employee had around 30 -60 seconds to complete their task before moving on to the next one!

One of the things I found funny was seeing the workers driving about in the cars at the end. The thorough testing that the cars went through was really interesting to watch.

Some other surprising facts were that the factory now produces more cars in one week than in did in the whole of its first year of production and that when the machines breakdown the maintenance of them costs Nissan £3,000 per minute!!! Not to mention the fact that after the cars are painted they get polished with ostrich feathers!!!!

It was pretty cool and really surreal to see the whole process from start to finish of the making of these cars. It was great to get a feel for factory work and get access to a huge company’s production line. It made me feel quite excited at the prospect that after graduating we could be the people behind an amazing design and see as our visions come to life on such a large scale as that!

Design : Now open

Open source is an approach to design which allows anyone and everyone to contribute to the design process. Whether it be hardware or software or anything inbetween the designs are released for the world to edit, comment on and utalise. It’s a non profit help-each-other-out community feel idea from the design world and can be interpreted in many ways. It has no one definition but a whole ecosystem of definitions But does it work?

You’d think this was a new concept but it’s been around for a while now. Enzo Mari was a designer in the 70s and made a range of open source furniture that the common man could understand. It has often been said that he was the first pioneer of open design. His believed that ‘if people are encouraged to build a table with their own hands they will better understand the thinking within it.’ This theory clearly makes sense- he wanted to educate people on design and successfully did so.

How open is open source design? There are different ways to interpret open source design and I don’t know that much about the topic but I believe for a design to be truly ‘open’ it must be made by tools and materials that are accessible to most and done in a way that is easily understandable and in which people can contribute to the upmost degree. Obviously not everyone would agree with that and different projects and designers demonstrate different degrees of 'open-ness'.

More successful and well known examples of open source are ‘aurdino’ a brand of comerically successful microcontroller boards. It’s a project to get people involved in electronics who aren’t necessarily experts in the field. Its an open hardware project that involves everyone in expanding their business by programming new software and educating people on electronics. This demonstrates a problem as despite the popularity of the brand, the more successful it gets in terms of uptake, the less open source it can be as it becomes harder to take the design in new directions.

The fiat mio project is a more poor example of open source

 

fiat used this project more as a publicity stunt than anything and the level of openness was in fact quite closed. The design input from the public was questionable and it certainly was not made using a technology that was accessible to everyone.

Local motors demonstrated a similar but more successful project

it was done by community vote and you could pay to go and make the vehicle yourself. It was , however, still tied to a production method that was inaccessible but the process was much more accessible than fiats attempt.

Open source has many benefits but there are ethical issues. If these designs are publicised who is responsible for them once they go live on the internet? The 3D printed gun is a good demonstration of this issue. It was no big deal in America where fire arms are legal- people could just buy a better gun in a shop so what was the problem!? It’s the ability of open source designs to cross boarders that causes the most issues. Cultural and social implications are not considered on the internet. This poses the question : Is the man responsible for the design of the 3D printed gun also responsible for all the deaths that this gun caused? 

All in all I like the concept of open source design. Despite its obvious drawbacks and issues, it brings people together in the design process- if your designing for everyone surely everyone should have the right to get involved. If I was a successful designer would I make my designs open source? - well that’s another question. I’ll get back to you when I’m rich and famous.