ALL ART BURNS

I’m not even close to being able to do a project on this scale either financially or technically, but I like the guy’s attitude:

“Considering that a fully sorted nationally-competitive DSR car, whether from Stohr, Radical, Merloy or someone else, would set me back around $60-65K I’m certainly not saving any money by building my own. To me this project is a form of self-expression and a way to learn things that can only be learned by doing. I look at it as an alternative to getting a Masters degree in vehicle design – about the same time, about the same money but a whole lot more fun and I get a car for graduation :)”

In short, he’s building a ultra-light AWD race car of his own design from scratch — think 4/3 scale shifter cart or D Sports Racing car if you follow those. More importantly, he’s documenting his project along the way, including sketches, plans, decision making process, the cost of parts and so on. I’m impressed when someone tries something very difficult and documents it along the way, showing their thinking, their mistakes, their fixes and how they got to the end result.

He’s in the construction phase now but first check out
three years of designing the DP1.

Technorati Tags: design, journal, fabrication, shifter cart, d sports

“Weren’t you going to school or something?”

I really hate not being in school right now but I won’t be pursuing my degree until next fall for personal reasons.

Until I can go back to school, I’m putting myself on a little Industrial Design self-study program. The plan is to focus on reading and reviewing books, spending time in the local museums with a sketchbook, coming up to speed on Vectorworks and Solidworks, and taking classes in both figure drawing and Japanese language classes. (If you know of any Japanese classes in Pittsburgh that aren’t university classes, please let me know). There’s also another furniture project I’d like to work on, but that requires bringing the garage out of the last century and into this one. There’s just not much I can do with a single 15A circuit that’s shared with the lights and garage door openers.

Books to be reviewed:

• The Chair, Galen Cranz
• Industrial Design Reader, Carma Gorman (ed.)
• Shaping Things, Bruce Sterling
• Security and Usability, Cranor and Garfinkel

Anything else I should add to the list?

Technorati Tags: industrial design, books, Japanese, Pittsburgh