Course Reflection 02

I have really enjoyed the past two weeks of class and am still finding all of the information very interesting. In our fifth class we learned about the design process. I believe that learning about this process will help me throughout my life when designing, but it also helped me realize I am often doing one of these steps when i'm just sketching. Also I liked the IDEO video a lot, i think that more company's should be set up like theirs just because how well it worked for them.

The sixth class was about design for accessibility. This is some times a forgotten concept but this showed me the importance of it and made me notice examples of it all around. The most interesting part of this class for me was the video we watched about a new wheel chair design. I never considered how bad a wheel chair is designed until I saw this video and after seeing it I agree that the design should change. The next class was the scavenger hunt, I enjoyed walking around campus with my group and getting to know them a little and learning a little about the different designers.

In class eight, to go along with earth week, we learned about "green" design. I believe this is one of the most important topics in design today and will continue to grow in the upcoming years. Again my favorite part of this class was the videos because they let me see many cool inventions and all the different ways they were created.

A03 Hunting Down Design

Team Members:
Courtney S.
M. Shamma H.
Trevor R.
Tyler B.

Methodology-
This past Monday after receiving this assignment my group walked around campus to find these clues. We knew we could find the Barcelona Chair in art library in the Wexner Center and then used the computers in the Wexner to look up the rest of the clues. I was mainly the photographer but everyone helped set up the shots and posed for the pictures.


Clue one:
Name: Barcelona Chair
Place: Wexner Center for the Arts
Designer: Mies van der Rohe, 1929

This Chair was originally designed for the German Pavilion at the Barcelona Exposition in 1929 and is still being made today by the Knoll Company to its original specifications.











Clue Two:
Name: Red & Blue Chair
Place: Knowlton School of Architecture
Designer: Gerrit Rietveld, 1918
Magazine: Urban Design

This chair was originally painted in primary colors of black white and grey, but in 1923 Reitveld changed the colors to blue, red, yellow, and black to resemble a Piet Mondrian painting. 

Clue Three:

Name: Wexner Center for the Arts

Place: Between College Road and High Street off of the Oval. 

Designer: Peter Eisenman

When designing this building Peter Eisenman wanted to address the 12.25 degree differences of the OSU grid and the Columbus city grid, so this gave the building many of its odd angles. 

Clue Four:

Name: Science and Engineering Library

Place: off of 18th ave.

Designer: Philip Johnson

I found the windows to be interesting on this building because they echo the shape of the large arches in the front of the building. 

Clue Five:
Name:  Thompson Library
Place: The Oval
Designer: Acock & Associates

The library was originally built in 1912 and was renovated in 2009. The library can now seat up to 1800 students at once. 

Found Faces

These are the faces i found through the week.

I could not get the blog to up load some the way I had orientated them.

 sideways face made with the buttons on the elevator 

 upside down face - candy machine

sideways face - fire alarm

 coat hanger

 hinge outside my dorm

door look in Baker Hall

the fives scavenger hunt - all pictures

 

Reading Reflection of Design a Short History

After reading the first six chapters from John Heskett’s “Design, A Very Short Introduction,” I have already learned a lot about design. The class lectures fallowed the book very well and after reading the book I had an even better understanding of the material we had already learned. The first chapter was very interesting to me because it has never occurred to me that everything besides nature was designed. Therefore if everything we have created is design and if our culture is everything around us, then design is culture. Something else I found interesting from the chapter was that design is not influenced by outside factors, rather it is influenced by human nature to improve our lives.

The next chapter of the book focuses on the history of design. This showed me another thing I did not realize before reading this book, I never realized that since the beginning of man design has been there. This chapter touched on the major points of the history like the Industrial revolution up to contemporary or modern techniques.

Another thing I found important from the reading is the discussion of utility and significant. The utility part of design is if it’s practical, purposeful, and efficient. The significant of the design is the role or meaning it will have. The culture determines the utility and significant so therefore there is not one design that works everywhere.

Something else that interested me while reading these chapters was chapter five, about the importance of design in communication. I have been interested in this for a while and this gave me a better understanding and even more interest for this type of design.

Another thing I found interesting was the importance of environments and that they could be so different in different cultures. An example of this is American homes compared to Japanese homes. The Japanese homes are much smaller and therefore designed to use the space more efficiently compared to the American home with large appliances and sometimes having multiple bathrooms and laundry rooms. This has made me notice many wastes of space and makes me wonder if we should make better use of it like Japan. 

Blog of my peers

The Fives: Courney S., M. Shamma H., Trevor R., and Tyler B.

Courtney:  The patterns you found really interested me, they differed from mine in that I found mine on campus, but this worked very well and my favorite was the bean bag chair because I could see myself having it. Also I share your interest in Frank Lloyd Wright and love his modernist approach and that I also can learn a lot from him. Another thing I found similar in us is your want to travel to Stockholm, London, and Paris, I have also always wanted to travel to Europe and these would be some of my top choices.

M. Shamma: First of all I found her post "How it all began" very interesting and really shared who she was. The patterns she found were for me the most interesting I have seen from this assignment. I liked how the patterns were from many different sources showing her ability to find patterns all through our world. My favorite of these was the green leafs, like in several of mine it showed a naturally occurring pattern and this is very intriguing to me.

Trevor: I liked these patterns that he found because they are similar to mine in the aspect that he found them himself and because a few are similar to mine. Also I believe he has a firm grasp of everything we have learned so far and summarized it nicely in his course review. I really like his use of the quote “You can’t know where you’re going, unless you know where you’ve been,” when talking about the history of design. 

Designer Investigation

Ferdinand Porsche - longer review

The first designer I have selected is Ferdinand Porsche. I initially selected him after learning that he started one of my favorite car companies, but after finding out that he also was the first to make a hybrid car, and that he created the Volkswagen Beetle and the Mercedes-Benz SS/SSK, I believe he has had a very big impact on the automotive world and is a very interesting person. Ferdinand Porsche was born in 1875 in Mattersdorf, North Bohemia, which is now part of Czechoslovakia. Early in life he helped his father in his mechanical shop and by night attended the Imperial Technical School, showing great skill in both. When he turned 18 he got a job in Vienna at the Bela Egger Electrical Company. While in Vienna he would sneak into a technical university at night to sit in on classes, this was the last of any “formal” education he would have.

In 1898 Porsche would get his first exposure to the automotive world when he got a job at the Jakob Lohner & Co factory. This company mainly produced high end coaches but in 1896 began construction of automobiles. Here Porsche helped create an electric car, running on two electric motors powered by batteries. This was built for speed but did not do well on hills because the large batteries and the batteries gave it a very limited range. After this in 1900 he created the first hybrid car, he replaced the batteries on his electric car with an internal combustion engine which powered a generator and was assisted by a smaller battery pack. Despite Porsche being drafted in 1902 into military service, over 300 of these were sold until 1906 and it broke several speed records.

After his time in the military the company Austro-Daimler recruited him as their chief designer and by 1916 he had advanced to the Managing director. His best car he designed here was his Model 27/28, better known as the Prince Henry and it won the first three prizes at the Prince Henry Trial in 1910. In 1917 he received an honorary doctorate degree from the Vienna University of Technology. He left this job in 1923 and became the Technical Director at the Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft company and for his work here he also received another honorary doctorate and the honorary title Professor. His work here was also in producing race cars and his most successful was the Mercedes-Benz SSK which was at the top of its class in motor racing in the 1920’s. This company joined with Benz & Cie in 1926 and they began producing Mercedes-Benz. Porsches designs were not pleasing the board though and left the company for another but soon the great depression left him unemployed.

After all this Porsche decided to start his own company and in 1931 he started his consulting firm where he recruited several of his old co workers to work with him. They had several commissions and his business grew. This lead him to start working on his own car designs again and after losing several sponsorships he started another company, High Efficiency Engines, in 1932 to produce race cars. This lead to his design of the P-Wagon, which weighed less than 750 kg which is about 1650 pounds.

In 1933 at the Berlin Motor Show Adolf Hitler announced two new programs for his country. The first was that every German should own a car, and the second was to develop a “high speed German automotive industry.” For these Porsche received two projects and lead to more projects for Nazi Germany over the next decade including military vehicles. These initial programs lead to Porsche making the Volkswagen Beetle which was produced in what is now called Wolfsburg and the Volkswagen Company is still there today.

After the war Porsche continued his work on the Volkswagen in France but the French government did not support what he was doing and in December 1945 he was arrested and jailed for 20 months. His son Ferry continued the company and got the money to get him out of jail. After this the company started work on the first Porsche brand car, the Porsche 356, which was built by manual labor. He began to sell these cars to Volkswagen dealers and after gaining financial stability he started producing more of these and over the next 17 years 78,000 were made. He later died of a stroke in 1951, but his Porsche 356 and the royalties from the Volkswagen Type 1 made him very financially successful. He was inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame in 1999 and won the award of Car Engineer of the Century.

All of his work has leads me to conclude he is one of the most influential car designers ever. Making the first hybrid car was ground breaking and will help many future generations. Also his contributions to Volkswagen and his development of the Porsche Company established two major car companies with great influence on the automotive history.

 

Norman Foster

The second designer I have selected is Norman Foster, I became interested in him because of his very unique architectural design. Foster was born in Reddish, Stockport, England in 1935 where he attended private and grammar schools.  At 16 he left school to work for the Manchester City Treasurers office and later joined the Royal Air Force. After his service in 1956 he went to the University of Manchester’s School of Architecture and City Planning and later on to the Yale School of Architecture and received a master’s degree. After college he made his own architectural practice called team 4 with Richard Rogers, who he meet at the Yale School of Architecture, and the sisters Georgie and Wendy Cheesman. Team 4 quickly got a good reputation in high-tech industrial design, but in 1967 split up and Foster and Wendy Cheesman started Foster Partners. A year after starting this Foster started to collaborate with the American architect Richard Buckminster Fuller, working with him until Fullers death in 1983 the two displayed a very environmentally sensitive approach to design.  

Fosters first breakthrough building was the Willis Faber & Dumas headquarters in Ipswich, United Kingdom. The outside of the building is all glass up to the ceiling and here Foster made the first open-plan office floors. After this Foster designed many more buildings including one of his most famous, the Swiss Re London headquarters nicknamed “The Gherkin.” This was known for its all glass façade and its ability to let in air for cooling and to vent it back out after warming. In foster’s earlier work he shows a sophisticated and high-tech vision but later in his work he moved more toward modernity with sharp edges.

Foster sold his share of his company in 2007 and is currently on the Board of Trustees of an architectural charity, Article 25, which makes innovative, safe, and sustainable buildings in rough regions of the world. For all of his work he has received much recognition including being knighted, winning the Stirling Prize twice, and the Minerva Medal.

I found all of Fosters design to be very interesting because of its futuristic or very modern look. I like that’s most of his buildings are not a typical square or rectangle but they are rounded or have many curves or corners.

 

Poul Henningsen

The third designer that interested me is Poul Henningsen for his unique designs of lamps. I had never seen a light fixture that looked like this or be designed in this way before so they immediately interested me. Henningsen was born in 1894 in Copenhagen, Denmark where he grew up and in 1911 he started his education as an architect.  He never graduated though and then tried to become a painter or an inventor.

After this Henningsen was well on his way into design and had started a traditional functionalist architecture practice. His focus soon changed to lighting and he formed a lifelong collaboration with Louis Poulsen lighting and with this he released his PH-lamp. This was a simple light that hung from the ceiling with several layers to reflect light in different directions. In designing this and all his work he strongly supported the functionalism of the piece, and the structures, shadows, glare, and color reproduction of the light. The income from the PH-lamp created some economic stability for him and allowed him to make his later works. Some of these include the PH Artichoke lamp, the PH 1941 lamp, and the PH Lampan, all of these similar to the first with emphasis on the function and the bending of light.

Another thing he was famous for was his edited of the left wing periodical, Kritisk Revy, in which he showed his negative opinion on old fashion style and cultural conservatism. This gave him a literary breakthrough and lead to him editing many other papers with left wing views. He also edited the Louis Poulsen company magazine “NYT.”

I really like Henningsen’s work because I like things that are designed not to look like the norm and like how he improved a simple thing like light which some people would not even address. 

Journal 02 found patterns

1.                   

The pattern I found in is tree was that all the branches are pointing up to the sky in somewhat of a uniform way. I liked this because it was a naturally occurring pattern but it didn’t have the perfect uniformity of a man made pattern. I found this tree in front of Smith Hall one day after class this past week.

2.

I was drawn to these windmills because of the sun ray like pattern they formed with many lines extending out from the circle in the middle. I found this pattern on the south oval while walking through it on Sunday.

3.

The pattern I found in this was a stripped pattern, alternating grass then concrete. But also the seats are all curve in a uniform way around the stage making another pattern. These are the seats to the amphitheatre in the south oval, I noticed this pattern last week when walking home from the mirror lake creamery.

4.

The pattern I found in this building was in the windows, they are uniformly staked in three different columns going up the building. I was drawn to these windows because I liked the architecture of the building and because they are not a typical square window. This picture is of the side of University Hall that faces the oval and I found it on my way to class this past Thursday.

5.

These flowers, which I found in front of Bricker Hall, form a pattern because of the way they were planted. I was drawn to this pattern of the rows of flowers because it combines nature and a human element. These were obviously planted this way but it shows uniformity in something that is rarely uniform.

6.

This picture is of the art installation, Fetch, at the Wexner Center and the pattern I found in this picture was the continuous spiral of lights going down the center. Ever since I first saw the light show I have loved it and when I was going by it on Sunday I realized it was a good example of a pattern. Also the framing of white bars around it form a pattern because they are all perfect squares equally spaced apart.

7.

The pattern in this wood grain is in the reoccurring shapes of the grain, I found this in a cabinet in the basement of my dorm. I was drawn to it because like the flowers the wood is a natural thing but without the help of the human hand we would never get to see this pattern.

8.

The pattern in this is a striped pattern formed by the alternating windows and concrete pillars of Baker Hall. This pattern interested me because the architecture of this part of the building is very unique and stood out to me because of its modern look

9.

I took this picture close to Mirror Lake on the steps going up the hill towards Tompson Library. I like this pattern in these bricks mainly because it is not the usual rectangular shaped bricks like most other places on campus therefor giving it a unique look.

10.

This pattern of alternating curled iron bars and then two not curled bars was found in the railing of Mendenhall Lab. I was drawn to this because of the classic look to it and the detail put into it.