sketching tutorial

I have completed a video tutorial on product design sketching and rendering by hand and photoshop.

If you want to watch the video, click -  here 

Bike Lock

A while ago I had a request to design a bike lock, which I have been musing about for a while and now I've reached a point where I'm willing to admit defeat.  It's not that I can't design a good bike lock, but what I can't really do is improve upon existing designs.  So, I started thinking about making the bike become the lock, something that I also think has been done, by turning the frame into a carribena.  But again, maybe I'm asking the wrong question.  All too often people approach designers and ask them to design them an object, not a solution to a problem.  It should not be about designing another bike lock or anything else that already exists, but addressing a problem, which in this instance is stopping a bike from being stolen. Maybe the idea would be to design a bike so light and foldable or compact, that you wouldn't need to lock it up.  You could just carry it into the office and store in under the desk, or put it in your bag and carry it in to the classroom.  Can it currently be done in a staisfactory way? Who knows, but asking different questions and addressing problems, not redesigning current solutions, is the best way to innovate and come up with something (hopefully) better - time to start musing again. 

sneak peek - chopping board

I've been a bit quiet of late and soon you will see why as the latest project is almost finished and ready for launch.  No prizes for guessing its a chopping board, but there's a bit more too it than that.

Product Design, equals watch project is finished

I have finished the last piece of work I will do on the series of watch concepts I've been working on.  It's been an interesting project, I could go on, but I feel I have pushed the project far enough.  Using my check list, I've taken the materials I have as far as I currently can although with the aesthetics, I could go on forever.  The innovative closing mechanism still needs tweaks, but I think I have proven it can work.  The last prototype was made in wood with plastic and metal work and sprayed with car body paint.  To watch (ha ha) the whole story, please go here. 

This week Samsung released their first smart watch, the Galaxy Gear.  I still think watch screens are too small for surfing the internet and reading emails.  It even has a camera and can be used as a phone. I think it's trying to do too much, but what do I know.  These days everything is decided by sales figures, so we shall wait and see.

One thing I have though about with smart watches is if they would be to help people with alzhimers. Could family members set a calendar that is displayed on the watch to help remind sufferers about comon tasks they need to do? 

Can product designers really change the world

Can designers really change the world?  Most of the time all we are doing is churning out the same old stuff with a different face on it (see my post about how many chairs there are, yet everyday there's a release about yet another one, 4 legs a seat and a back, it's slightly different from the last, but not by much).  So, I have been concerned with what actual value (not profit) I can add to my designs, how can designers really change the world? Or at least do their little bit whilst the scientists and engineers sweat the important stuff.

The problem is, it's very difficult to ascertain if what you're designing is good or not. Look at wind farms, they have to be better for the environment than burning fossil fuels, but how much better? They apparently kill quite a lot of birds each year.  They cost a lot in materials to manufacture and they are currently not that efficient.  On face value it all seems good, but delve in a bit and it gets murkier.

Recently we have been experiencing a heat wave in the UK and my car doesn't have any air con, by the end of a short drive, I have had to peel myself out of the seat.  So, a while ago I saw a post about making food coolers for poverty stricken areas in Africa.  Food is placed in a metal box, surrounded by wadding, (wool, or another absorbent material) held in place with wire mesh.  The wool is soaked in water and as the water evaporates in the hot sun, warmth is drawn out of the metal box, cooling the food inside.  The same thing happens when we get out of a swimming pool on holiday and feel cold as the water evaporates off our skin.  I know that it takes a lot of petrol to work air con, so air con is not environmentally friendly.  What if this low tech box cooler idea could be built into a car roof, so when it's hot, water from a bottle could be spread over the roof and as it evaporates it cools down the interior.  Is this environmentally better than air con and if so, by how much?  Does the amount of extra water carried and used on the roof, the extra material etc negate the savings on petrol?  

The problem is as far as I know there's no where to obtain the data.  What designers need is a really clever cost calculator app.  Our connectivity is now sophisticated enough to get real time updates on anything.  Why not an app that reads a CAD file, you state the products purpose and it recommends materials.  The best for friction, UV stability, hygiene, ease of reuse or recycling, longevity of the material, energy to process the material, energy to recycle the material etc.  Then based on your location, it recommends manufacturers.  If you have a supplier overseas, you input manufacturing source and distance to warehouse or shop, then the computer would generate a wealth of data, how many you can fit in a shipping container, or van and (based on weight) how much fuel it will consume on its journey from manufacturer to store, the best route, how many hills that involves, average time idling at traffic lights, material cost of product based on continually updating live market prices etc.    

This could shift the way things are designed.  Designers could tweak their designs and based on live data, get more accurate feedback on how a tweak here and there would really improve their design, to actually change the world!  At the moment the crux when designing is that you start out with the best intentions, but you really don't have a true picture of whether or not you are really doing any good and quite often the best intentions are misguided.   

Car design finally...

This weekend I finally completed the car project I have been working on for... too long.  Its been a difficult project (every thing that could have gone wrong did), so I'm not sure how I feel about the end result - if I had to do it all over again... I'd probably walk away.  Of course there are loads of things I'd like to have done a lot better and things I'd completely change.  As usually happens half way through this project, I came up with a much better idea for another car, its a real humdinger in the sketch pad.  Unfortunately it was such a radical change that I couldn't incorporate it into this design.  So I was faced with the tricky descision of scrapping several months work or pushing on.  Much squinting and tongue chewing later, I decided to push on and so now, at the end, I'm glad I did - although this could be the wine talking! 

All I have to do is polish a few images, edit a video and release it on the web to begin its new life on its own (fly my pretty).  I have learnt a lot whilst doing this project that I am sure will benefit me in the future, especially techniques for covering things in paper, which is a great for quickly covering over unsightly mistakes - it feels like the motto of this project should be, if it's unfinished, glue some paper over it and it will (hopefully) be ok.  Other mottos would also include, don't try and make round things without a lathe, dont decide it would be fun to make the interior as well as the exterior and do decide how the doors are going to open at the start, rather than thinking 'Oh I'll resolve that minor detail later on'. Yee Haa

design ideas - Pan lid

Loading the dishwasher after a recent meal, I was struck by how much space a frying pan lid takes up in the dishwasher.  The problem is the handle, which annoyingly always seems to be in the way.  In the past I have designed pan lids to lock to the pan, so that the pan can be drained with one hand.  Following recent experiences, I think a far more useful feature would be to have all pan lid handles fold, twist, lock or generally get totally out of the way for ease of storage and dish washer loading, so have sketched out a few concepts.

design ideas - don't dredge...Sledge!

Last year I had an idea for modifying trawl doors so that they fished just above the sea bed, reducing destruction to the sea floor, so I made this short video:

Then recently I watched the fantastic Hugh's Fish Fight.  One thing the documentary focuses on is how scallop dredging is destroying habitat and sea life (see video on the fish fight website).  The best way to catch scallops is to hand dive for them, so being a designer and having also recently seen programmes about advances to artificial limbs and computer controlled drones, I started to put things together and came up with the idea of drones with artificial limbs being piloted by computer whiz kids either from the boat or from the shore to harvest scallops.

Is this the future?

But also (thinking around the problem) very few areas are currently zoned off for hand diving only, so better commercial solutions need to be sought for areas where dredging is still allowed.  One piece of behaviour I have seen, is that when the scallop is touched, it's response is to try and flee by propelling itself away:

I wonder if this behaviour can be exploited so by slowly pulling a sledge over a bed of scallops, with dangling ropes at the front of the sledge, they can be tickled/nudged into fleeing and then be collected in the back of the sledge?  This would greatly reduce the damage caused by dredging.

design idea - safety syringe

I've been playing around with ways to make simple everyday things safer.  Whilst looking at how needles are disposed I wondered why the lid couldn't be made into a disposing feature. 

When the lid is placed back over the needle and firmly pushed on it locks, making the needle safe and the two parts very difficult to separate.  The assembly can then be safely removed from the syringe and disposed and a new needle and lid fitted by pushing the syringe into the needle whilst holding onto its collar.

design idea - Wash your mouth out

Whilst brushing my teeth, I was wondering if you could simply combine a mouth wash bottle with an optic (that dispenses measures of alcohol in bars). So you could either fill the cap, or drink from the bottle, but each time it would be a measured result.  I spent about an hour doing a very quick doodle of an initial ideas (obviously not fully resolved!).

The images show a section of the bottle, so imagine a round bottle was cut in half and the exposed faces couloured in. 

The bottle has a inner assembly ultrasonically welded into it (in blue, green and red).  The idea being that you shake the bottle (as you would normally), then turn it upside down (2) and depress the raised button in the cap.  This forces a rod to act against a sealing valve (in red) opening it and allowing mouthwash to flow into a reservoir.  The cap could be clear so that you can see this happening.  Once you release your finger, the valve would close and you can turn the bottle the right way up. 

The air trap (2) is important as it means that the reservoir cannot be filled completely, so when the bottle is turned the right way up, the liquid will not be level with the top (3) so it won't spill when you unscrew the lid.  You now have a system that will always give you an exact measure that can be poured into something. 

It would be good to try and reduce the part count further, but the added tooling complexity would probably prove very costly.  It would also be good to replace the spring with a plastic substitute as this would be an expensive part when the production is viewed as a whole, but shelf life has to also be considered if the bottle is stored in a stock room for a year before being sold.  Metal spring force remains constant where as plastic memory means it looses efficiency over time. This has probably been done before, but hey.

design idea - watersaver 02

Why not have a storage tank for filtered water that would otherwise go down the drain.   Once again a stop cock could divert water away from the filter once the tank was full.  If the mains burst etc it would mean the household still had a source of clean drinkable water.

design idea - watersaver 03

Have a wash and grow your own.  A little tenuous I admit, although not un-achievable.  Apparently we are taking longer showers, which is using in some cases almost as much water as a bath, this water could be easily filtered from soap and go straight on the garden.  Wash your spuds, then water them!

design idea - improved dust pipe

A quick bit of work with the saw and the design prototype has been improved.  It does give advantages over the dust mask as your lips create a seal around the tube so no dust can get in.  With nasal plugs you would avoid the risk of breathing in through the nose, but as discussed in the last post.  The draw backs are still the same.

design idea - dust pipe

I've been making a lot of models recently, but the disposable masks I wear to stop breathing in all the dust I create, never seem to properly fit (could be the masks or just the shape of my face).  The problem is designing something that fits properly around everyones nose and mouth.

Whilst pondering this problem, I came up with a dust pipe concept, like a smokers pipe with dust mask parts covering the intake.  Initial experiments prove that it is not ideal.  It works as long as you remember not to breath through your nose and it needs an inbuilt reservoir to collect all the drool you breath down the pipe.  Also shortening it so that it fits much closer to the face away from what your working on will help or an adaption to a divers snorkle? It's a work in progress!

Please consider the idea and not be distracted by my freaky monkey hand.

mugged

All the mugs I own are of different shapes and sizes and I've been musing about ways to make them more easy to carry, without using a tray, so I've been looking at designing one with a non slip rubberised area, that stops the other two from slipping and spilling, or designing mugs with ribs, that lock together when picked up, to make it easier to carry 3/4 cups to a table without a tray.

design idea - plugger

I have a friend who works for the NHS.  She told me that none of the sinks in hospitals have plugs for infection control. Washing in a sink is carried out by leaving the tap running, which wastes huge ammounts of water (throughout all the hospitals in the UK) and makes it very difficult to control temperature if the sink has separate taps.

I started thinking about making a disposable plug from starch based plastics, until I realised that all I really needed was a disk of card - the waxy variety used for coffee cups.  It wouldn't need to be very robust to withstand 15 minutes of one sided immersion, then be pulled out and put in the bin.  It would also be very difficult to be used twice, because once water logged it would start to degrade and it would be very cheap to produce.  I'm sure the problem and solution is not as simple as a disk of card, but something like this could give greater patient experience and cut down on wasting water.

design idea - Ski Boot

Tis the ski season! Last year I was a beginner who kept falling over and then couldn't get back into my bindings, because the soles of my boots were jammed with compacted snow.  So I started thinking about a beginners boot that the snow couldn't stick too.  One idea is to have sprung sealed rubber discs in the soles so snow is compacted into them and then pushed out, when you lift your feet, reducing the surface area it has to adhere to.  It would also give better grip when walking back to the chalet after a busy day.

design idea - torch light

Recently I've experienced a series of powercuts.  The first time I couldn't find the torch, the second time I realised I hadn't recharged it.  So I though about designing a table lamp that was the torch and recharged it everytime it was used.  Depending on brightness and power consumption, it could use two different bulbs, one for table lamp mains power and one for torch light battery power.

design idea - Squash bottle

A thread on Core77.com discussed a new packaging design, where a consumer buys a spray pump with a bottle of concentrate, to which they add water. They then buy more concentrate as necessary. This cuts down on weight during transportation and saves throwing away the bottle. It got me thinking, if you could cut down on weight, you could also cut down on volume, making more environmental savings. I did a quick sketch for a collapsible bottle, something that has been done before, but not applied in this way because the volume always had to be 100%.
This started me thinking..... does reducing the volume of the bottle actually make any cost/environmental saving and if so , how much? Is there a tool to help designers easily calculate this? I couldn’t find one, so I’m now working on a calculator that I will put in the download section as soon as it’s finished.

design idea - Grilling

This evening after my evening meal I was thinking what a pain it was to clean the grill tray and the wire rack, they don't fit in the washing up bowl or my dishwasher. I dont like to line the tray with foil because it's bad for the environment and even if I do i still have to clean the rack.  Wouldn't it be great if there was a silicone tray that you could put in the dish washer.  Easy drain ribs and a pouring lip would help to pour out all the collected fat.  If you were grilling for the whole family you could put two side by side or just use one if cooking for two.