Week 10 - mastery over the wheely chairs
I'm so glad that this class had such sick chairs to wheel around the room on when I needed to move from place to place. I feel like I'd finally been granted true freedom via a beautiful, four-legged plastic carriage of true comfort and ultimate mobility. I'll forever miss gracefully back-pedaling into the sides of the tables when I wasn't looking where I was going, and painfully smashing my kneecaps into the metal bars under the tables.
In all seriousness, I genuinely really enjoyed this class, and I felt like I was given a wonderful opportunity to experience the full design process. While I feel like it would been slightly more immersive if we took one single product through the whole process, I still feel I successfully grasped all the ideas and built myself a strong understanding of the different design stages with each exercise.
I was initially quite uneasy about the class, as my sketching ability was pretty nonexistent to begin with - however, this class has shown me that while having sketching ability is definitely a bonus, you can absolutely convey your ideas in other ways through rough and 3d models, brief and stylistic sketches that don't have to be perfectly accurate like my brain used to tell me.
This course has really helped me to especially develop my modelmaking skills, particularly in the stages between initial ideas and further refinement - Weeks 6 and 7 felt so productive, and blue foam modelling is probably my new favourite prototyping method. Previously I would have just jumped straight into Fusion and spent hours changing the smallest things, then waiting for renders, etc...
It surprised me at first, but one of my favourite exercises was actually the perspective drawings. I'd done them in the past in a chaotic and messy way, which had always driven me away from trying them again, but once we were shown how to draw in perspective to the correct measurements my mind was genuinely blown. As someone who loves to work with precise tools like CAD, seeing all these random lines joining from two points at a seemingly random position on my page to create such a precise geometric object was super satisfying, and I'm really glad that I now have the tools to do it myself.
Making these tumblr posts and seeing other people's progress through the term has also been an absolute treat, especially when you consider that this is the alternative to exams. I've just loved seeing how everyone comes up to solutions to all these exercises in their own unique ways, and then how everyone has presented them in their own unique style. It's super interesting, and I'd love to see this style of assessment again in the future.
Most importantly, I just want to say a huge thank-you to Gonz, Sarah, and Rob for running such an enjoyable course. This is easily the one I feel I've gotten the most from during this degree. I also want to say thanks to everyone else for leaving such insightful comments and posting such wonderful work for everyone to see.
See y'all next term.
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