PLAY

After the ideas day on Tuesday & talking to my lecturers, I have decided on a couple of ideas to move on to the play stage of the design process - experimenting & prototyping different solution to problems. I have created a blog to document the progress - http://findplaymaketalk.blogspot.com

Feel free to comment on anything & add to the list of things I should look at.

Cheers.

1/4

Currently I am one quarter of the way through my final year (scary thought!) - completing the first in four stages of our courses design process - FIND, PLAY, MAKE, TALK. I have found people to work with & generated one hundred ideas all about mystery, selecting the best twenty.

To help aid our year in choosing what ideas to take forward & play with, a selection of industry figureheads came to have a look at our ideas. The people were:

Andrew Shoben from Greyworld
Daljit Singh from Digit
Richard Banks & Tim Regan from Microsoft Research
Bill Gaver from Goldsmiths
Charlie Rohan from NCR

It was a great day & I learned a ridiculous amount of the design world outside of academia - chuffed! & I might even have the idea I want to make...

Here are some pics of the setup of the room & my table.

Business Card

Sorry about the font change on the last post, I can't figure out what happened...

Anyway, to increase the believability of my "company" I have create business cards based entirely on the scene in American Psycho - an amazing prop in its own right. I think they look pretty good!

PropDeluxe

I've been keeping this under wraps & have been way to busy to post anything, but now I can show everyone my (currently fictional) business - PropDeluxe.

PropDeluxe creates bespoke film props for movie lovers, customised exactly to their wishes, so they can have have a deeper, more meaningful experience with their favourite film.


The Mission Statement:

To create the perfect movie experience through making beautiful bespoke props of the highest quality for lovers of film.

With this company, I have created some "fake evidence": images that show how successful I want the company to be if I actually set it up.

There will be more to come, but I hope you like it & tell me what you think. Cheers.

The Website!!!

Finally my website is up & running!

Please visit it at: http://www.mrleemurray.co.uk

Tell me what you think...

Done!

Here's two pics of my final design. Hope you like them!

The finishing touches...

I'm almost finished the project! Just making some extra features to make the whole experience a bit more convincing- such as a nice shoe box sprayed black, with the logo laser cut into the top, for the packaging & a nice little booklet that accompanies it. Lovely!

Coconut Cup

As a small personal project, I'm looking at existing materials and what can be done using them. Currently I'm looking at reusing plant material - for this I'm using a hollowed out coconut and trying to make it into a functional cup. More details later...

Re3 Website

I've been a bit busy for the past while and I forgot to post up the link to our Re3 site - go have a cheeky peek!

click here - enjoy

Fast Food Robotics

Currently for our engineering module, NCR have given us another brief - this time we have to envisage the future of self service in different business sectors. Giving the most potential, our team chose fast food as a sector to develop. Each member has a section to work on, ordering, cooking, stock, and paying.

Although I don't agree that automation is going to be the future (I've seen terminator!), I'd rather let the workers at McDonalds have a better life doing more constructive things, than flipping burgers for the rest of their lives - I know, I've worked there!

New Render

Here's a persuasive drawing of one of my models...

Re3 - Sustainable Living

Everything is coming together nicely on the sustainable business front. We've got products, visualisations, a website and a cracking logo (as seen above)! Although this is just a theoretical enterprise project, I believe this could be something great if we want to pursue this!

Make It, Don't Fake It

After the prototyping stage of the concept, I have begun to make my hard drives for real. This will involve five weeks of good 'ol hard work, but I'm sure the results will be great! I've set up another blog on the subject of a step by step guide on how to make them - this is not only a required element of the module, but it will help future students with certain manufacturing processes.

The link is:

http://ipd.dundee.ac.uk/users/lmurray/blog/

p.s. since it is the start of the process, there's not much on it, but I'll keep adding to it over the weeks.

PowerUp!

Just a quick prototype of getting power from a USB plug. It's surprisingly easy!

Models

Here are the concept models for my project - made from blue foam and painted to give a sense of form and scale.

Re3

For the interdisciplinary work creating a sustainable business, our team has created a set of products - furniture throws, curtains, table runners, and other household textiles - made from photo negatives and old VHS tapes. Very interesting stuff!

We've got a blog dedicated to this. It's:

http://dhtpgreenteam.wordpress.com/

Renders

Here's the renders of the objects I have hand drawn for the project. These were all done using markers and coloured pencil.

The End of Play...

It's been four weeks of developing my concept, and I wish I could say it's been easy!

Four weeks of indecision, redesigning and frustration - but finally everything fell into place.

To give you a hint of the final concept, here is the blurb for my rationale board:

Before the rise of personal computers, people stored their most treasured information – pictures, videos, music, and letters – in very personal and creative ways. But due to the rise of multimedia computers, these rituals and idiosyncrasies have been replaced by standardised and lifeless methods – digital folders and files all in one location.

The richness of this information has decreased due to this system - pictures mixed with text documents, videos mixed with graphs and charts - there is no way to fully appreciate and value all of these types of information simply from a computer screen and uninspiring storage devices.

Rewrite renews the sentimental value of this information using the modern method of digital storage devices. Each drive has been created from lost methods of interaction due to replacement by computers – a chrome microphone for music, a VHS tape for videos, a projector slide for pictures and a journal for letters.

By allocating each type of medium a physical artefact, the organisation and storage of the data becomes more tangible and meaningful. It makes the experience of using digital information more valuable, and through being able to organise and store them wherever you like, it revives the rituals and interactions connected more with traditional media and enables users to interact with information in a more intuitive and creative ways.

If you haven't already guessed, my products are called Rewrite!

Concept Development

The concept has developed from having five or six different hard drives for all sorts of data (one for pictures, one for videos etc.), down to two - one for work and one for play.

I came to this conclusion because on nearly all computers, work files are mixed up with more sentimental files - such as pictures - decreasing their value to the user. If these two types of data were stored and organised in two physically different places, the user can appreciate each files contents more.

Organisation & Storage

For my project on the physical organisation and storage of digital information, I am currently researching different storage techniques. I never knew how many different types there are!

I hope my research will uncover the use of different materials and techniques depending on the nature of the objects function and value so I can apply it in context.