ALL ART BURNS

Ran into jwz at the Meat Beat Manifesto show and he posed the question to me, “What does an industrial designer do?”

My smart-ass answer was “make stuff!” followed by examples of what industrial designers make these days: furniture, video game controllers, tools, dashboards for cars, etc.

But I think my answer was biased by what I want to do as an industrial designer. There are a lot of Kareem Rashid and Philippe Starck wannabees out there competing to be the next Name and to be honest, I don’t care to complete with them one bit. Designing-to-be-consumed is just not something I’m interested in. If I make something, I want people to use it until it wears out or is completely obsolete, not just use it until it’s out of style and throw it away. Unfortunately for the planet, much of ID is based around convincing you to get rid of a perfectly good mobile phone, car, bicycle, couch or trashcan and replace it with one that’s simply different. (On the other hand there’s sculptor-turned-designer Michael Aram who makes plenty of things that people will probably replace long before they wear out, and of whom I’m unashamedly jealous.)

I respect the business sense of designers like Rashid and Starck, and there are some things they’ve designed that I wouldn’t mind owning, but making the same things in new styles just to support consumerism is not what I want to contribute to the world. It’s hard to imagine getting excitied about making This Year’s Sneaker when I’m completely happy with my ~10 year old ergo keyboards, ~100 year old ball-peen hammer, and Levi 501s that I wear until they fall apart.

What interests me is practical things that can be used for years: comfortable furniture that looks good, video game controllers that don’t destroy your hands and that can be moved from console to console, displays and layouts for motorbikes and automobiles, or kitchen utensils and household tools that you can hand down to your kids. I’m also interested in mobile computing and how to integrate wireless computing into everyday life, an area where people expect ot throw things out or replace them after only a few months or a year, so I’m sure I’ll have brain-lock any day now.

So, back to the question of what industrial designers make, here’s a few exmaples based on job listings I’ve seen posted in various trade magazines:

• sporting equipment: bicycles and accessories, golf clubs, tennis rackets, safety gear for just about any sport
• branded clothing and accessories: athletic shoes, motorcycle clothing, all the overpriced doodads you see in the display case at the car dealership (like the Jeep or Hummer sport radios)
• medical equipment: next time you’re at the doctor, look at all the fancy tools with integrated computers and displays, an industrial designer was probably involved
• power tools: the design-award winning De Walt boombox/battery charger really made people realize how useful industrial designers could be in what you’d think is a really boring market

Technorati: industrial design

I’ve thought a lot about furniture for awhile now: how ergonomic it is, how long it will last, if it can be repaired or recycled, is it a good value for the price, that sort of thing.

As much as I’ve thought about these things, it’s always been from the perspective of a consumer buying furniture for my use at home or for someone else’s use at an office. It’s only recently that I’ve thought about it from the perspective of someone who makes furniture. Like any thing, once you start thinking about making a thing, you start thinking about the thing very differently. You start to really see and appreciate the object’s individual elements, how it is assembled or subtleties in the design and manufacture. You quickly become the sort of irritating pedant who can’t ever be pleased because you now see more than you should. “This is cheap paint. They stained this pine to look like cherry. This is dyed cotton and not a woven pattern in linen. This chrome is cheaply done and too thin. They recorded this on a portable DAT so you don’t hear the true sound. The Amiga had that feature two years ago. Digital cameras will never replace film.” Well, you get the idea….

On my own, I’ve sketched out a few different things and even started making an artsy furniture rack for my friends Laura and Eric. I’ve made a few mistakes in the design and procedure that I’ve been able to fix but it’s still taking me much longer to finish than I’d like. My measurements were mostly ok, I took into account blade width when making cuts, I’ve got great tools, but every little mistake in design or fabrication order sets me back a half-hour or so trying to fix it. Another problem is that I have to empty out half of my garage to even start to work on it due to the size. (Yet another an error in design and planning — don’t build things bigger than your shop.) Oh, and I prefer TIG/GTAW welding which is slower than any other form of welding ever invented. (But it’s so pretty! So, so pretty! And you can weld pretty much anything to anything!)

Right as my frustration was starting to peak, I saw a listing in The Crucible‘s flyer for a furniture making class. If nothing else, maybe I could finish the rack there, where they have plenty of space and a wider collection of tools.

(Many words about The Crucible.)

My First Furniture Class

In most of the Industrial Design programs I’ve looked into, classes in furniture making are only offered to Juniors and Seniors. There’s probably all sorts of good pedagogical logic behind this, but I think there’s also a lot of value in learning-by-doing and worrying about the theory later. Rather than wait two or three more years to take a class on furniture, I signed up for a 16-week class at The Crucible. The title is “Furniture Fabrication and MIG Welding”, it’s taught by a professional furniture fabricator, we get to use damn near every piece of gear at The Crucible and there are only 5 people in the class. The only down side so far is that it starts at 10am on a Saturday and it takes me about an hour to get there.

The instructor, Gomez, has a great background and is a really good instructor. He’s a professional furniture fabricator, but he also has a MFA in Sculpture. He can also pack in the information — our first class included visiting a metal supply house, checking out the Bruce Beasley retrospective at the Oakland Museum, and a refresher on MIG welding. In our second class we dealt with laying out patterns on metal, brakes, presses, more MIG welding and grinding. We were instructed to have projects ready to start the next week. I had some rough sketches I could show him and we gave me enough feedback that I could go off and start buying metal right away.

It’s clear that Gomez has made a lot of furniture and seriously knows what the hell he’s doing. I showed him my rough sketches and he was immediately asking the sort of second-iteration questions I ask junior UNIX(tm) geeks when I want them to find and fix their mistakes. “What’s this side drawing going to look like from the front? Do you know how heavy this will be? How are you going to finish the legs so they don’t scratch the floor? What are these bits going to be made of? How do you plan on fastening these other bits together?”

Furniture making is really different than I expected it to be — design and layout can be tricky and some of the fabrication methods are really tedious. But I think I was right that getting my hands dirty without having much design theory is going to help me when I start learning the theory.

(I’ll update this soon with photos and sketches soon of the various works in progress and a review of Galen Cranz’s The Chair: Rethinking Culture, Body, and Design.)

Technorati: furniture | industrial design | welding | The Crucible

(Note: This is a reference entry that I’ll cite in the future, that’s why it reads like a footnote.)

It’s hard to describe The Crucible without using their phrase, “An Educational Collaboration of Arts, Industry and Community”. The Crucible not only offers classes in a wide variety of industrial skills, the arts, and practical knowledge; they rent out studio space and work areas to artists and provide a venue for all manner of entertainment.

When I first took a class at The Crucible they were crammed into a horrible little building in Berkeley and our classroom was a storage room with a table in the middle. To be honest, I didn’t really notice or care — I was so absorbed in learning the tricks of working with electroluminescent wire that minor issues like lack of proper ventilation, noise from the power hammer in the main room, or rickity chairs simply didn’t register .

Now The Crucible is in a huge building in Oakland with wonderful classrooms, designated areas for various fabrication methods, plenty of power, light, and ventilation, and just about anything you could ask for in an industrial arts facility. More amazing, classes and studio time at the The Crucible are cheap. Cheap, cheap cheap, even when compared to something like the Pittsburgh Glass Center, located in a town with roughly half the cost of living as the Bay Area.

The Crucible is an amazing resource and other cities should be envious enough to fund similar ventures in their industrial districts. You can learn everything from neon to tig welding to blacksmithing to kinetic sculpture, share workspace with some truly inspiring and creative people, and not spend much money in the process. If you’ve ever wanted to build outdoor art for Burning Man, make a tricked out bicycle, blow glass, make sculpture out of scrap industrial equipment, or do damn near anything involving fire, metal, glass or electricity, head over to The Crucible. If you’re just wanting to pick up some useful life skills they also teach classes on basic metal working, motorcycle repair, sewing, and other skills useful to the modern DIY type.

Technorati Tags: art | Burning Man | industrial design | sculpture | welding

Been awhile since I wrote much about anything, so I’m going to lump a bunch of stuff into one big post.

Blobjects and Beyond
The “Blobjects and Beyond” show at San Jose Art Museum of Art is worth checking out if you’re in town. It has a bit too much Karim Rashid for my tastes, but the consumer electronics and furniture displays are nice. Too bad you CAN’T TOUCH ANYTHING except a couple of demo items.

However, I disagree with the premise that “blobjects” are some new and innovated design element. 20’s and 30’s streamlining certainly predate/predict the Corbin Sparrow and Marc Newson’s beautful aluminum couch. It wasn’t simply about form — then-moderm metal casting and shaping techniques favored swoopy, curved shaves with only critical work edges machined flat. I argue companies like South Bend were making “blobjects” back in the 30’s. Check out the protective cases and structual components of the South Bend 10 Heavy or the
South Bend Light 10.

This Semester
The one studio class I’m taking is still going really well. I’ve got a good instructor who really wants to help us develop a broad range of techniques and who provides really good feedback about our work. There are a lot of people in the class who draw better than I do, but they can only draw in one or two styles and are having to unlearn/relearn a fair number of skills. Because I can’t draw to begin with, I think that I’m having an easier go of it in some ways.

We turned in our mid-term portfolios last week and while putting mine together I could see a marked improvement in my ability to draw. I actually am a bit ashamed I haven’t been trying harder given the improvement I’ve shown with only moderate efforts.

Applying to a Big Name School
The BNS called the other day to say that they’d inform me of my status between 15 Mar 05 and 15 Apr 05. I’m not really that anxious or panicky, I either get in or I don’t. I did the best I could on my portfolio (which I’ll put online soon) and my application and now I get to wait.

If I get in and want to go to school full time I’ll need around $200K to cover tuition and living expenses for four years. Let’s say I do it entirely on student loans, that means I’ll be 41 or 42, $200K in debt, and looking at jobs that pay $60K-$80K a year. If I’m lucky, I’ll have my loans paid off around the time whatever’s left of SSI kicks in. My other option is to delay enrollment for a year and try and get a job at the university. After six months I’ll be eligible for two free classes a semester, but that means I could be 44 or even 46 before I graduate, but I’d also be debt free.

Career Stuff
I’ve been paying more attention to job listings lately for various parts of the ID world. Even if I don’t get into school, there are plenty of design-related opportunities out there that I might be able to use as a entry point into becoming a full-time industrial designer. I have some basic model-making and metal fabrication skills, enjoy solving hard software and hardware integration problems, and have a strong work ethic and track record and the references to back it all up.

I’ve also discovered that my natural ability to flip between macro/big-picture thinking and micro/detail oriented thinking is something that needs refinement and that I can show in my design and art work. In the past 20 years I’ve worked with plenty of software engineers who could only see the big picture or the little one and ended up being difficult to work with as a result. How many times have you been in a meeting with someone who refused to agree on a design unless it could be proven to resolve any case anyone could dream up or who refused to discuss anything else until all the low-level data structures had been codified in a schema that was then written in stone? I’m neither of those people, and I often find myself negotiating between the two and translating’s one language to another. It’s a skill I’ve developed for the software world, now I need to learn how to apply it to art and design.

design | college | blobjects

Keita Takahashi spoke at GDC this year. I didn’t get to go, but I found some online coverage at
Gamespot (http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/03/11/news_6120232.html), GameSpy (http://www.gamespy.com/articles/595/595110p1.html) and 1Up (http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3138803).

Some of the best games out of Japan have been designed by artists and industrial designers, and not by engineers or marketing types. This is encourages me — when I think of things I’d like to do with a Design degree, video games and controllers are on the short list. (Also on the list: controllers for teleoperated robots, new displays for motorcycles, giant fighting mecha for robotwars like duels, and kendo practice automata for folks who don’t live near a dojo.)

Technorati: Katamary Damacy | GDC | kendo | design