Destination: Design

Having a new gadget facing you everyday is pretty distracting. Imagine this, waking up on a beautiful Wednesday morning when it’s slightly drizzling, cool and nice and the first thing that you see is a rectangular object that is bound to keep you from completing tutorials, attending lectures and spending your lifetime at a design studio. Laptops are frustrating! It’s ironic though; theseb things you avoid wouldn’t have been possible without it.

Anyway now that I have the power to surf the web like nobody’s business and to procrastinate in every IMPORTANT thing I have to do, I figured that I should at least provide an insight to my life as a student of Industrial Design.

Well, basically the class consists 36 students, many of them from polytechnics. Oh man, I tell you the poly students are pros in tech drawings. Shit! The rest of us have NEVER taken design formally before as we’re all really into science. Shit!

Okay, for our first assignment we were supposed to test 10 different writing tools on 24 pieces of writing materials. Basically it’s a no brainer-just-do-whatever job so we did. I was up till 3a.m. to complete my last box though. We also had to finish up some technical drawings (they’re basically 3D drawings that are based on the plan, front and side views of an object.) That was cool too.

Work started to get a little frustrating when it came to the painting assignment. Sounds easy? Hell no! We had to get flat colours, with no paint strokes or the slightest difference in tonal quality whatsoever. They had to be flat, like PRINTED flat. What worse, we had to make 6 (SiX! ENAM! LIU GER! LOK CHEK!) of these little bastards and match another 6 grey tones of the same intensity to them. Get it? Man THAT was a real pain. I say it was more of a test of patience and endurance than a test of colour sense. Patience can’t be worth that much!

Well, for this week we’re supposed to choose a shape of any kind, deform it, and then use those deformations to create repetitive patterns, sort of like wallpaper or something. Yeap, I’m almost done with that so cool. We’d also have to finish TEN different telephone prototypes by next Thursday; which really sucks cause all the models are supposed to be made with blue foam. That material kills your nasal tracks like no other. (When you file and sandpaper them, lots of little blue foamlets float around so you naturally breathe them in) Some senior got nose cancer for inhaling too much of that a few years back. Scary shit.

I’ve already made one model and am en route to clogging up my trachea. Woo hoo!

Oh yeah, I’ve been sleeping at 3am every goddamn day!

Sorry, design makes people blurt out random stuff like I just did.

Despite all the hell I have to go through, I’m enjoying almost (ALMOST) every bit of it. I’ve gotten to know really awesome, cool people from design; people whom I truly respect and admire. I also don’t need to give a rat’s ass about revising my studies, (other than my French; which I’m so dead!) and that online reference is usually stuff like sketches and inventions. It’s a huge contrast from searching the difference between carbon molucules and crap online. Thank god for that one.

Still, my journey down the annals of the design world has just begun. I have yet to explore the ID workshop; which has friggin’ cool machines that can laser-carve anything you want on wood and plastic. And oooh, let’s not forget the powder sculpting machine that just sculpts any 3-dimensional object out of, well, erm, powder. Design on computer is uber fun too, I can basically create anything I desire, the options are limitless! I love all these awesome tools! But like my lecturer Prof. Christian said, “Zhe true tool that iz going to help you is your mind. Keep it open, alwiz.” (He’s French by the way) So with an EXTREMELY open mind, I will boldly stride forward, to be the best designer I can be.