12/Oct/2011

I have been thinking about what I am going to do for my final year projects all the time, day and night. I have only two projects to do, but I couldn't sleep because of it, I couldn't do anything without worrying if half a year later I still don't have a clear clue what to do. 

Generating idea is such a big deal, your project could go smooth as silk if you've done well in this part of the process, or you could find yourself in a dead end after spending a huge amount of time and money just to prove your idea was rubbish if you haven't, and to me, I simply can't afford it, not in my final year. I have to be so careful at this stage.

I have a brief from D&AD student awards, it was a competition brief from last year. Michelin were hoping for a design that could help in a motoring related emergency situation. I thought this was doable but since I first saw the brief- which was about a week and something ago- I still can not think about anything to do with it. Everything I thought about was either invented or technically impossible. Yes this is the very early stage of the project and yes as a designer, I should have an attitude of everything is possible, but saying things like this just doesn't help in any way. 

Then there is a brief from RSA, creating a workplace for tomorrow. I could chose any working environment and design anything to improve it. It reminded me of a project I have done in my first year, I still remember I had a tough time when choosing a working environment at the beginning of that one. So I already have some experience on this and I do have a few ideas for this brief, it will be either a piece of furniture or some sort of device. 

What about making a brief myself? There are a lot to consider, but I am thinking of designing something that exists, but only better. So I will have one design to create something completely new and another to possibly impress people by showing them how good their toasters could be with a better design. Designers should have the abilities to make everyday ordinary objects spectacular. 

I have a few ideas about bringing forgotten products back to life, the ones people would think are so out of date they wouldn't buy them anymore. Hopefully with some nice thoughtful touches, and a sophisticated target group, it will work.

Still, I need to figure out the other project, and more importantly, once I have decided my two briefs, I need to carefully work out which one I will do for the major and which one is the minor. 

I am so under pressure now, with just a few weeks left to make a decision on what to do. Pressure is good, it makes me work harder, think harder. On the other hand, in the end of the day, I know that a designer should be able to handle anything he was thrown at. Pick up anything and carry on with it, maybe that is what I am going to do. 

10/Oct/2011 A little tribute to Steve Jobs

I heard the news a few hours after he passed away, probably. My friend told me the sad news. 

At the time, I was discussing with my group mate on how to make our group PowerPoint presentation more attractive over Skype. 

Then all of a sudden our conversation came to a pause, because of the news.

It felt like the moment when I heard Michael Jackson passed away. Two very different people, from two very different business, but they all left their marks in the pages of history.

I loved Apple products, I own a MacBook Pro and an iPad, i owned an iPod Touch but I sold it. I enjoyed using them, I admired Steve Jobs for his innovation, but at the same time I never cared about his presentation and so on. I didn't care when he resigned from Apple's CEO. 

When I heard that he died, I started thinking what he had done for Apple, what's more, for the world.

Apple made neither the world's first computer nor the world's first laptop, but they did make the worlds first mouse, and the first windows style OS, which Microsoft was later given permit to use a similar thing. I love Apple products, I have my MacBook Pro for over four years now and even though I am getting used to Windows 7 on my VAIO, I still think the Mac OS is a much better OS.

Life in the last century was significantly slower than now. Apple's three products in the 21st century had changed the world one way or another. 

First was the iPod, together with the iTunes service, had completely  re-written the personal music player market. 

Then there was the iPhone, without it, touch screen phones wouldn't have dominated the high-end mobile phone market today. The first generation iPhone was the first touch screen phone that actually worked. The iPhone OS and the fact that anybody could go and make an app were rather the more convincing reasons to the success of the iPhone. Steve Jobs was such a genius on delivering user experience to Apple's customers, and more to the point, he was such a genius because he knew how to promote the advantages of his products, and the fact the more people using them, the more they get better. 

Finally there was the iPad. Before its announcement, tablet PCs were normal laptop computers with screens being able to twist. Everybody looked at the specification sheets of the iPad and ran about telling it would be rubbish. After just 80 days of the release of the first generation iPad, Apple had sold 3 million of them. Again, it was all about the user experience. With an iPad, you do many jobs a proper computer could do, and at the same time it provided convenience as it was light and thin and you didn't have to wait forever for it to start, as well as the amusement you get from the whipping and tapping on the screen with your fingers. So the result is that all the tablet PCs from all the manufacturers you see on the market today, were more or less inspired by the iPad. 

So with Steve Jobs gone, could Apple carry on their magic? The answer is certainly yes, because in the short 56 years of Steve Jobs' life time, he had inspired and opened the eyes for so many young designers. 

R.I.P Steve Jobs (1955-2011), the man who inspired our generation of young designers so much.

Image from the official UK Apple website

09/Oct/2011

As my final year kicked off, it is time to get cracking. For my final year projects, we were asked to produce only two projects, one minor and one major, so you get the sense of how professionally and carefully they need to be produced.  

We can dream up any brief as we want, or we can go on a design focused website and enter a live competition. 

I have temporarily decided that for my minor project, I will be using a brief from the D&AD Student Awards 2011, to make a range of packaging designs for The Body Shop. However this is not the final call, I can change it until the last minutes, in about two weeks time. 

Still, I have no idea what to do with my major project at the moment, I wanted to do consumer electronic product design, since this is a field I always wanted to work in, but it is dangerous because, for me, it could be easy to find myself following the trend created by Apple half way through the project. Then it won't be creative or innovative, it will just be another Apple-wannabe product and I don't want it to happen.

So a couple of weeks to go before I have to make decisions, serious considerations and proper evaluations are needed, good luck? We will see.

02/Mar/2011 BeoSound 9000

If you have seen one of these in real life, I promise you, that you won't forget it. It's called the BeoSound 9000. In the UK, it costs a staggering £3,475, which is a lot for a CD player.

In a range of David Lewis designed Bang&Olufsen products, the BeoSound 9000 is by far my favorite. I first knew Bang&Olufsen was from a brochure on my stepdad's book shelf, a picture of the BeoSound 9000 made me remembered its name and it has somehow made me choose to study design.  

Looking at the BeoSound 9000 is like observing a beautiful piece of modern art installation. Every line is straight, every edge is perpendicular, every part is made from aluminium or glass. While the black bit with mechanisms inside has lots of lines to make it look rather complex, the CD cabinet is only covered by a single piece of glass showing its pure simplicity. Put it in any environment, it will stand out from the crowed. 

I can't afford to own one, I have never used one, but however, I have seen one working before, about four years ago, and I still remember it. The glass cover swings open and close silently and beautifully, the CD clamper moves between the six discs quickly with elegance, as the CD starts spinning, the sound starts flowing out immediately. Its detail to attention is another reason it makes people having the desire to own one. Insert a CD with the graphic and texts upright, after the machine finished playing the CD, the graphic and texts on the CD will be back to upright again. 

While other electronic product makers trying to make their products as unnoticeable in an interior space as possible, but all Bang&Olufsen products are designed to be standing in front of the furniture, they want to be seen. Their products are not only nice to look at, they can also be used to help arranging better visual effects of the space it's being placed at, which is why most of Bang&Olufsen products have so many ways of installations. Take the BeoSound 9000 for example, it could be installed on the wall, on a stand or just simply placed on a top surface of a table or cabinet. 

I really think glass and aluminium go very well together, they all have their different natural beauty as well as giving people a feel of cutting edge technology, polished aluminium has an advantage of reflecting colours from the surroundings, which I think is a reason David Lewis applies it to so many of his designs for Bang&Olufsen.

One thing staggers me the most when I first knew the BeoSound 9000, was that it was designed in 1996. 

28/Feb/2011 Water tap

British water tap is a catastrophic design failure.


Normally on a water tap, there are two knobs for controlling hot and cold water, and hot and cold water goes into the same pipe so you can adjust the temperature of the mixed water by turning the knobs to change the flow of the hot or cold water. However on the British ones, there are two pipes, one for hot water and one for cold water. That means you will never have the running water in the temperature you wanted, you have to mix the water in the sink. 

How annoying is that! 


I was discussing this with Kiu Yu Ho today when we were visiting B&Q and saw a large selection of those stupid taps. We couldn't think of any advantage of having two separate pipes instead of one. 


I just hope that nobody would buy them anymore, 

27/Feb/2011 Teasmaid

We have a project of designing a teasmaid for the modern world.


I have never heard of such a thing before, on the brief, it says 'the teasmaid is a product of a previous century', then I did a bit of research, I found out that it is a machine that makes tea automatically when the timer reaches the time the user sat. 

I was talking to Lee Tsz Yan about this product, we both agreed it is a bit useless as we can make a tea easily by ourselves and nobody wakes up in the morning and desperately needs a tea anymore, we need to brush our teeth first.


Is that the reason why this product is now disappeared and nobody of my age had never used or even heard about it?


What I'd really like to talk about, is that if designers can make an old concept come alive again.

I searched in my head for some examples. Now because I don't have very good knowledge about the history of design, I only have a few answers, the Mini Cooper, the Fiat 500, the Volkswagen Beetle. Weirdly they are all cars, and that makes it very different from the case of the teasmaid, because teasmaid has been proved to be functionally useless whereas people can't really live without cars since the Model T was introduced. What the designers have done to those cars, are that they have modernised them, to fit them into today's standard while kept the essences of their classic design elements. 

Can a designer make the teasmaid popular again by giving it better functions? Why coffee machines are so popular? I think that professional coffee makers make much better coffees, but professional tea makers make the tea to be no different from teas made by ourselves, however there are some obvious drawbacks about the teasmaid. First it doesn't add sugar or milk automatically, which means you still need to spend time adding milk and sugar. Second, you need to clean it everyday. Last, it makes noise when it is working. What we find here, are exactly the drawbacks a coffee machine has. It's not because of tea is a less popular drink either, because English people keep drinking teas. Now I am in a massive confusion. Why I want a coffee machine but not a teasmaid? I drink as much tea as coffee.





I am going to find it out by doing this project, hopefully.

26/Feb/2011 Random thoughts

Haven't really thought about a topic for today yet, maybe just talk about something random?

In a few months, I will finish the second year of my university study, which is quite sad because I will probably be going on a placement year, or if not, I will be going on third year. Either ways, I won't be able to see most of the people I am seeing now and my life will get much busier, I think my life is already very busy now. 

In fact, we don't spend much time in class, which I think is so different from China. I was never a university student in China, nor have I finished my high school over there. I only have a rough idea about how university life is in China since I have friends over there and also I spent a few months living in a university studying an English course some years ago. 

In China, we spend a lot of hours in classes, but now I can't remember almost anything happened in those hours. What I do remember, is everything happened outside the class. What I mean is that I didn't learn anything from classes. Maybe I was one of the stupid students who had no understanding of knowledge, but what I could work out was that maybe only 5 out of a class of 60 were not stupid students. To anybody in the world, that's not good efficiency. 

So I am glad that I am now studying in the UK, especially for studying a product design course. We do a lot of practical things here, teachers throw us a project, we gonna to work it out ourselves, step by step, from which I have really learned a lot and enjoyed most of the time. 

When I was comparing my work now to what I have done when I was in foundation course, the difference is huge. I can't believe such change can happen on me. I certainly feel that I can produce work in a much more professional manner now than before, even though I am aware that my work is still not professional enough to be real professional. I feel happy about the fact I have actually learned so much during the time I spent in university. 

For this reason I will continue to work hard, maybe even harder, and find a placement in or near Nottingham because I like here. 

One thing though, I don't feel confident when it comes to materials, I know I am supposed to know more about them, but without systematic class I found it hard to actually work on it myself. Self-study is a hard thing for me.