Thesis Notes

Pieces of Words from Carl Liu

I recently re-read Carl Liu Design Book, the first sketching book I bought when I prepared to become an industrial designer. I used to read his ideation sketches or story boards, I tried to learn his skillful and humours, cartoon style handwork. To my surprise, his words about design thinking is also insightful. I want to quote parts of his words here,

Give a new description and definition of what we design. For example, a camera can be called and understood as an image capturer or picture taker. If you compare these two descriptions you would fina an image capturer is a lot of broader than a picture taker. Suddenly you have more options and broader views for new ideas. Therefore, giving an object general and looser descriptions can help designers to redefine the object.

When you look at an object, imagine yourself getting away from it and eventually you would see a small dot or imagine yourself get close to the object and even get inside of it. This excise gives you a macro and micro view of an object. Apply the same theory when facing a problem.

Posted 12 months ago

carl liu, problem solving philosophy,

A responsible design should consider the real need around you.

The Terra campaign is launching in 10 parks in Mexico City, which is turning into a veritable goldmine for people with excess trash—trade in your dog poop for Wi-Fi, andtrade in your recyclable garbage for credits at local farms. It almost makes you want to have trash to throw away.

resource is from here: http://www.fastcoexist.com/1679774/insert-dog-poop-get-free-wi-fi

shanshangao:

Such a good idea, we also need it right here at NYC

Reblogged 1 year ago from shanshangao

1 note

dog, wifi, poo wifi, Mexico, recycling,

Entrepreneur Designers: What's the most important thing I can be doing right now?

speckledwords:

This is a thought provoked by Jon Kolko, a designer I have greatly admired since entering undergraduate school. I recently had the opportunity to meet him. As I partially joke, I “twitter-nagged” him into coming up to New York. The situation and the multiple parties involved…

Reblogged 1 year ago from entrepreneurdesigners

10 notes

thesis thinking, ixder,

Everything you know lost in translation

bobulate:

The forest of symbols,
The eye beguiled:
Tree of smoke
Through the language glass,
Everything you know
Lost in translation.

That’s Stan Carey with a #bookmash, visual poetry via book spines. Adjacencies change the reality of how people see in the world. A more tangible example from Deutscher’s Through the Language Glass:

Japanese used to have a color word, ao, that spanned both green and blue. In the modern language, however, ao has come to be restricted mostly to blue shades, and green is usually expressed by the word midori (although even today ao can still refer to the green of freshness or unripeness — green apples, for instance, are called ao ringo). when the first traffic lights were imported from the United States and installed in Japan in the 1930s, they were just as green as anywhere else. Nevertheless, in common parlance the go light was dubbed ao shingoo, perhaps because the three primary colors on Japanese artists’ palettes are traditionally aka (red), kiiro (yellow), and ao. The label ao for a green light did not appear so out of the ordinary at first, because of the remaining associations of the word ao with greenness.

But over time, the discrepancy between the green color and the dominant meaning of the word ao began to feel jarring. Nations with a weaker spine might have opted for the feeble solution of simply changing the official name of the go light to midori. Not so the Japanese. Rather than alter the name to fit reality, the Japanese government decreed in 1973 that reality should be altered to fit the name: henceforth, go lights would be a color that corresponded to the dominant meaning of ao. Alas, it was impossible to change to color to real blue, because Japan is party to an international convention that ensures road signs have a measure of uniformity around the globe. The solution was thus to make the ao light as bluish as possible while still being officially green.

Linguistic-political history changed up, in blue.

Reblogged 1 year ago from shanshangao

33 notes

shanshangao:

What I love in my prototyping class

Reblogged 1 year ago from shanshangao

2 notes

prototyping, physical computing, video prototyping, storytelling,

体味 . 细节 Sensing . Details in life

曾见宗白华《我和诗》里说：“我小时候虽然好玩耍，不念书，但对山水风景的酷爱是发乎自然的。”又，“湖山的清景在我的童心里有着莫大的势力。”转头一想，我年幼时几乎没有这样的概念。家山虽亲，我眼里也稀松平常，大概觉得人世本应当是这付模样。如此心境维持到去外省读书为止。负笈京都的某一年，看高尔泰忆他父亲，为写书各地跑资料经旬不归，回来刻一章，曰“湖山还是故乡好”。看在旅人眼里，尤其人同此心。我想起每一年的客居，每至清明，立夏，端午，中秋，怀乡病隐隐发作起来，山林的风啸如圆月夜的潮音。

－转自《宋天乐日子》链接见此

This Friday I watched Muji’s ads again, which touched me soft part of heart again. I lost into deep thinking, it reminded me such good memory in Hangzhou, where I lived there 3 years before going aboard. People living there love make dedicate food. They are skillful using the natural things to create food in seasons. Even the food in dinning hall are cooked so dedicated, but that time I haven’t cherish it, I thought it was normal.

an autumn snack made with honey, Osmanthus petals by native Hangzhouinese，photo from Album of Mr. Song

Thanks for this beautiful video, I recalled my good memory and those lovely people. I won’t treat life roughly, I will closely taste every piece of life no matter how push it will be.

Posted 1 year ago

2 notes

muji, details,

This is an inspiring project done by a team at London. Reblog from Core77 article . (Don’t go through it if you feel disgust with insect.))

Here is team instruction,

Aran Dasan, Jacky Chung, Julene Aguirre-Bielschowsky and Jonathan Fraser are studying the Innovation Design Engineering MA/MSc double masters course at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London.

I admire their encourage! And the info-graphic are awesome.

Posted 1 year ago

3 notes

info-graphic design, insect food,

Video Editing Weekend

This weekend I am editing a video for my one of Entrepreneurial Assignment, plain English.

As this semester, part of prototyping class was discussing how to use video to telling the story of design, I realize it is a powerful tool for we presenting the idea. Here were several design agency had done pretty good job of video user journey.

http://sandwichvideo.com/

http://www.rga.com/

At the beginning of this semester, I saw a bunch of photos introducing how to binding a books by a Chinese amateur artist which inspired me a lot. I started to study book binding and addicted to it. So I decided to using video to explain “how to binding a book”, which telling book binding in a clear but interesting way. I studied a little bit of the online book binding videos, among which most are either too serious or too complicated.

So before I shooting the video, I was thinking about how to make book binding more feasible. I choose the most achieve materials, like the paper, instead of using professional paper, I choose the normal printing paper, and they work pretty well. Also, I choose the most simplified way of sewing. And I love the result I made.

After I documented all the process. I wrote a script of my first video script, thanks my new friend Yongru, who’s a computer art student at SVA, she gave me several suggestion of the scripts. I re-edited again make the story more concise and clear.

One more exciting thing was that I finally kicked off Final cut pro. Although most of time, imovie is good enough to cover some basic need, like chopping, adding text, final cut pro is much better which allows me realizing a various of windows play in a screen, editing key scene and fancy text results. Thanks the great help from Yongru, again, I figured it out pretty quickly. The picture was shoot in the computer art department studio.

Posted 1 year ago

3 notes

video prototyping, book binding, school of visual art, computer arts,

A new start: my thesis journey

Last Tuesday, March 13,2012, Thesis Preparation, a couse, lead by my department chair Liz Danzico, started. The content of the course is really fruitful, we’re provided several inspring readings before class, will have a special topic for future thesis every week, have a guest speaking on class, have opportunity to practice design beyond studio, and plus we’re aslo required to document our thinking weekly.

The exceptions from this course is generally like these, which I quote here

1 - Connect you as mindful observer and you as mindful designer.

2 - Provide you with an understanding of entire thesis framework.

3 - Give you the tools for taking ownership over your ideas and how to act on them.

I kind of love this journey and the way Liz help us to frame the future thesis. On one hand, it will be a great design thinking class which I have opportunity to touch with various interesting topic and explore with it a little, which will potentially become my future thesis inspiration. One the other hand, I always believe that the process of making a design is worthy to design, actually it could be more valuable than the outcome of a final result. I believe that a way approaching an idea, a thought developed behind a visualization design, a method used in realization the design will definitely influence my thinking, aspects and finally future design. Also, all the people, story, effort, failure, struggling, argument behind design will be treasure for my whole life.

In my reasons, I decided to hug this special journey during my life, cherish the time I am experience and share it for more people.

PS: I recently discovered an interesting design award hold by core77 whose idea is basically encouraging people speak out story behind design.

Posted 1 year ago

thesis, preparation, design, journey, interaction design, school of visual arts, Shanshan Gao,