The Pixar Story

A great documentary about Pixar, very inspirational - it shows you what happens when you mix creativity with technology. I recommend watching it if you get the chance.

Zombies!

Another book that I bought recently is "Zombies: A Record of the Year of Infection" by Don Roff & Chris Lane. I wont give the plot away, but the title says it all! Great Illustrations & story.

Logicomix

Merry (belated) Christmas!

So for my first post in ages, I will look at one of the books I received...

"Logicomix" by Apostolos Doxiadus & Christos H. Papadimitriou is a graphic novel about the life of mathematician Bertrand Russell & his quest for the foundations of logic. The drawings in it are incredible & I'm learning a lot about maths! Good times!

Furniture Storage

A set of sofas that have usb hard drives embedded in them. Reminds me of my third year project about physically using digital data. Nice! Created by Cabracega.

Who Doesn't Love Fresh Food?

Some great non electrical solutions to preserving a whole selection of foods. It would save me a couple of bob from rotten veg & bills!

Here's the link.

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.

If I don't become a designer...

...I want to work here! (This only applies if the company lives up to what it's saying!)

The Sonic Manipulator

The Sonic Manipulator is a guy from Melbourne, Australia who creates his own digital musical instruments & dresses in a ridiculously amazing space suit! My favourite invention of his is the Greet-o-meter (seen below), it just makes a nice beat & sound - Hello!

This is Creepy...

Although this is fascinating, I'm still not sure whether having a machine perfectly mimic a human is a good idea - I think we need some boundaries to differentiate between humans & robots, especially the part of the video when you see the bald guy/machine looking at everyone in the room - scary stuff!

Science!

The next books I have moved on to are a bit more sciencey & theoretical - "Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You" by Marcus Chown & "How To Build A Time Machine" by Paul Davies. I love the whole idea of time travel & quantum science - the possibilities are endless!

Zombies!

I've just recently finished reading Max Brooks' "World War Z - An Oral History of the Zombie War" & all I can say about it is that it's amazing - the level of detail in it is crazy; he thinks of every aspect you might wonder about & even some that you don't! I hope that they make a film of it that does the book justice.

Why have I not seen this before?!

This is brilliant - peoples take on comic book covers, just great!
http://coveredblog.blogspot.com/

Behold... Gordon!

After a couple of days of planning & calculations, our flat created a chocolately god... Gordon the rice krispie square! His vital statistics are:
weight - 17kg
dimensions - 37cm x 36cm x 24cm
calories - 66000 (enough to support an average man for 26 days)
cost - £38

He consists of:
5.5kg of rice krispies
6.5kg of chocolate
3kg of butter
3kg of golden syrup

All I can say is that he is glorious!

Worlds Deepest Bin

Just a bit of fun, but also encouraging people to recycle. So simple!

Glorious!

Meet The Robinsons

A great family film with some good philosophy for designers. I love the whole style of the movie too- very art deco/retro future!

Love it!

The Magic of Mystery

I've just found the most amazing & relevant article for my project ever! It's Lost creator J.J. Abrams talking on Wired Magazine about the subjects of mystery & experience. Read it here. Love it!

Noam Toran

After looking for some research on experiences, my lecturer pointed out a designer/film maker Noam Toran. Although his work is more artistic & research based, I do like the fictional quality of it, especially "Desire Management" - a set of bespoke experiences for different people. A good theory.

Graffiti vs. Porcelain

Not really immersive design, but I just like it. A bit of fun by Portuguese designers Cabracega.

Amazing!

I love it when you are so amazed at something you can't stop watching it, like this:

The Liar

The book I am currently reading now is "The Liar" by Stephen Fry - possibly the smartest & wittiest man on the planet. I've been trying to stay away from non-fiction books recently to expand my imagination as it is key to the idea generation process. Saying that I still listen to the HowStuffWorks podcast to continue learning about new things however trivial they are. I'm all about the knowledge!!!

Shooting Stars

Pure comedy genius! I love the absolute randomness in it - some of the best ideas come from ridiculous situations & thoughts.The new season of the show has just started - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00lt2wx

5.5 Designers

I love the exhibit Cloning by 5.5 Designers - they create incredibly personal everyday items. I especially like the eye lamps!

Taken for granted...

What a week! After an incredibly long journey back to Scotland from Australia, it turned out our luggage magically disappeared in transit!!! The scary thing is that the airline - who we put all of our trust into - had no idea where it was either. What an emotional rollercoaster the following 5 days turned out to be before our possessions were located & delivered back to us in (almost) one piece:

1) Confusion - the initial realisation of the missing bags
2) Anger - how could they do this to us?
3) Fury! - after being told the airline had no idea where our things were
4) Despair - knowing we probably wouldn't see our bags again
5) Acceptance - remembering when we had our stuff
6) More Anger
7) Ecstasy - Finding out that the luggage had been located
8) Frustration - waiting for our possessions to turn up
9) Excitement - knowing we would be reunited with our bags
10) Joy - when they arrived (although one bag had been utterly destroyed!)

In summary, you don't realise the emotional connection you have with even the most trivial article until you think you will never see it again.

G'day mate!

Sorry for the absence, but a lot has happened this month - notably my birthday(!) & currently biggin' it up in Australia, where broadband is a bit elusive...

Anyway, there's a lot of things I need to blog about, including the journey here & the many amazing locations I have visited including a golf themed bar, some wine tasting (hmm, this seems to be all orientating around booze!) & the general Aussie culture.

But what I've realised when visiting these place is that I'm fascinated by how immersed I become in the experience - completely losing myself in different scenarios & places - a sort of virtual reality. This had made me even more interested in the topic by reading the graphic novel "Surrogates" - taking virtual reality to its limits through robotics & discussing whether we have control over products or them over us.

So apart from that, you haven't missed much! I'll continue my efforts to blog regularly & get pictures, videos etc, but there's no promises as I'm having too much fun in Oz!!!

Zero Punctuation

I've been following this game reviewer, Yahtzee, for a number of months now & I think it's about time I posted something on him. The video reviews on his website, Zero Punctuation, are hilarious - just watching him rip game after game to shreds is great & I like his use of simple graphics to get his point across.

It shows you there will always be very harsh critics out there, but you just need to take on the chin & get on with it!

District 9

After watching the trailer for District 9 & the short film that inspired the movie, Alive in Joburg, I had a look at their website. I love how in depth it gets & that there is so much info to take in, I got totally immersed in the experience of finding out more. That is the sort of feel I want to give my fourth year work. Anyway, here is the Alive in Joburg movie:

Movie Madness!!!

As a lover of science fiction & general action films, I had a cheeky look at some upcoming films on imdb, and became very excited at this line up!

District 9 (coming out on the 14th of August)
Surrogates
Gamer
Zombieland
Inglourious Basterds
9

So it looks like it's gonna be a good couple of months!

And tomorrow I'm going to see Moon, a psychological thriller based (obviously) on the moon. It's gonna be goooooooooood!

My New Read...

After just finishing The Man in The High Castle (which is very philosophical & I can't fully understand it) I have now started "The Drought" by J G Ballard (who recently died in April).
So far I'm loving it! Here's the blurb:

The world is threatened by dramatic climate change in this highly acclaimed and influential novel, one of the most important early works by the bestselling author of 'Cocaine Nights' and 'Super-Cannes'. Water. Man's most precious commodity is a luxury of the past. Radioactive waste from years of industrial dumping has caused the sea to form a protective skin strong enough to devastate the Earth it once sustained. And while the remorseless sun beats down on the dying land, civilisation itself begins to crack. Violence erupts and insanity reigns as the remnants of mankind struggle for survival in a worldwide desert of despair.

Podcast

I was listening to the Guardian Technology Podcast on the way to work this morning & I was amazed to find out that the course director of Product Design Dundee- Dr Jon Rogers- was on it promoting our course! That's good publicity!

The other topic on the podcasthas been a long running interest of mine: Freemium - a way of making money by giving away a basic version of a program for free & charging people to buy the premium version e.g. iPhone applications.

So overall, a smashing podcast!

To listen to it click here.

Amron Experimental

A great collection of work by American company Amron Experimental. So simple & cheap!!!

The Website!!!

Finally my website is up & running!

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

Tell me what you think...

If it aint broke...

"There, I Fixed It" is a fantastic blog of people coming up with "ingenius" solutions to problems. Although a lot of it is hilarious, some of it is actually very clever - the best designs come from the people who have to deal with the problem at a daily level.

Andrew Rae

His illustrations of imaginative characters are crackin'! Great stuff!

andrewrae.org.uk

Red MacGregor

Yum!

You can't not like it!

As I frequently enjoy learning ridiculous facts, I thought I would post up one of my favourite pseudo educational programs, Mythbusters - a brilliant mix of entertainment and hard(ish) science. So I say WATCH IT NOW!!!

Also, here is a TED Talk by Mythbuster presenter Adam Savage. I thought I had too much time on my hands!

U.F.O

I have just discovered an amazing exhibition called "U.F.O: Blurring the boundaries between art and design", but unfortunately it is based in Germany. For me, it is essentially a who's who in the design world and the standard of work that I aspire to make. I love it!


"Where does design end and art begin? Charles Eames, the most influential designer of the mid-twentieth century, said that ‘design is an expression of purpose. It may (if it is good enough) later be judged as art.’ Contemporary young designers see the matter more pragmatically. According to the Spanish designer Jaime Hayon, ‘there is no longer a clear border between product design and art.’ The most recent answer to this question is inherent in the new phrase ‘design-art’."

Sophie TV

A genius short film by Hans Lo - created for his eight month old niece to teach her about how different things in life work. I love the use of dated graphics and music; it reminds me of the BBC comedy series "Look Around You" - a hilarious take on educational science videos for schools.

The Man In The High Castle

I'm currently reading Phillip K. Dick's "The Man In The High Castle" as I absolutely the premise of alternate realities and science fiction. I'm so curious about the future and the unlimited paths the world might take, so this book was right down my alley!

The Future...

I do believe the wheels of my website have been set in motion! So hopefully a prototype should be online in about 2 - 3 weeks, hoorah!

Anyway, I've successfully finished third year unscathed and I'm ready for the final 12 months! To prepare I've completely immersed myself in information - websites, podcasts, newspapers, magazines - learning about pretty much everything.

I'm also back on the drawing wagon doodling away trying new techniques and such just to keep continually improving my skills.

Most importantly I'm trying to identify my own personal style by making mood boards of the people who have inspired me. I can't believe I haven't mentioned him before, but German designer Deiter Rams is an absolute product design god! His work is the pinnacle of industrial design, combining form with semantics creating beautiful but functional objects.


But I just don't want to create the exterior, I want to get my hands dirty and make the innards too, both mechanical and electronic. So here's hoping whatever comes out of my final year of studies is along the lines of that...