Clay Day

Today I returned to my second-grade self to do some clay work. I was excited to get started because I took art classes all through high school, but didn't make time for art in college. It was fun to tour the pottery studio and the kilns - I had no idea we even had facilities like that on campus, or that PSU is known for having a good ceramics program. It's pretty awesome that students get to build and use those kilns.

After we toured the facilities and saw the 3D clay printer, we started making our own creations using the coil method. I decided to just have fun with it and not care how my pot turned out. What I found most interesting is that you can make pretty much anything using coils. When you're a kid, you usually just use coils to make pots, but Tom pointed out a lot of different pieces that used coils as a base.

Overall the clay experience fun and relaxing. In the future, it would be cool to do a lab with wheel thrown pottery because it's really challenging and probably new to most of the students in the class.

Here are my answers to the reflection questions:

What about your design worked well/didn’t work well?

I was pretty ambitious in trying to get the clay coil layers to widen and narrow significantly throughout the pot. This naturally causes some instability because the coils are only resting on a portion of the coils beneath them instead of being directly on top of each other. I also made relatively thick coils, which meant that each coil added significant weight to the structure and took away from its stability. If I did this again I would make thinner, more uniform coils and transition into protruding layers more gradually.

One part that did work really well was my smoothing process. I used the slip to smooth out the layers until it was no longer obvious that the pot was made from coils. It was fun to get my hands dirty and it made my pot look better!

Did you gravitate toward a particular shaping/making process? If so, why?

As I mentioned earlier, I used coils to build my pot. I chose to use coils because that is what I learned in school and Tom suggested we start by using coils. I also talked earlier about how versatile coils are in making any kind of clay structure, which I started to appreciate during this lab.

Was the making of your object informed by the tactile feedback of hand working?

Definitely, I changed my process a lot from start to finish. I got a lot better at making my coils from the beginning to the end, which led to gradual improvement moving up from the base of my pot. After I had been working for awhile, I went back to smooth over the spots I had done earlier.

Can you make connections between craft, design, industrial, and scientific applications of clay
and ceramic material?

My grandfather is an artist and he mostly does oil paintings, but he also has created a number of bowls that we use in our house. It's always been interesting to me that his art is both beautiful and functional - allowing us to cook and bake. Before exposure to his art, I saw things as either practical and useful or beautiful (not both). It's pretty amazing that clay can be used for so many different things and I have come to appreciate (through this class) that we can design things that are both beautiful and functional. I am really interested in industrial design (despite being an engineer), so it is awesome to learn about how to combine these aspects to create consumer products that are desirable and feasible.

Inkscape Exploration

I have done a lot of design work previously in Photoshop and in Pages, so I was very excited to try out this lab and learn more about graphic design. The first thing I learned was the difference between raster and vector graphics. Raster graphics, like those found in Photoshop, rely on a compilation of small dots that, when you zoom out, form a completed image. I like to think of raster graphics as similar to pointillism, which creates images out of small dots. Like if you were to go up to the piece below in a museum, when you zoom in too far on a raster image, you will find it to be very blurry and hard to discern. This is one of the downsides of raster graphics.

Vector graphics, however, use math and reasoning to fill in the blanks and create objects. While less detailed, raster images are more versatile in that they can be enlarged easily. They also have smaller files and can be edited later.

After I was armed with this knowledge, it was time to give it a try! Like many of us in this class, I consider myself a do-er, so I first checked out Inkscape without looking at the tutorials - just to get a feel for the program. I found very early on that I liked the 3D box tool.

After exploring on my own, I decided to try the tutorials. My favorite one was the one about Bezier curves, which I had used before, but had not thought about much beyond the fact that they allowed me to make curves.

I liked how Inkscape, like Photoshop, lets you work on multiple layers. This makes graphic design work a lot easier and solves a lot of problems that I have had designing in Powerpoint or Pages. I am so glad I learned about Inkscape because it came in handy when I was making my spirograph. I was able to use a built in function to create interlocking gears, which I then laser cut to make my final drawing machine.

It was great to apply my newly-gained knowledge to a new area. I now feel more comfortable working in vector based software (although I still prefer Photoshop).

Learning Factory

Earlier this week, I had the chance to visit the Learning Factory and become certified in safety, power tools, and machining. It was great to check out another resource on campus and learn about how to operate the machines safely and effectively.

Before going to the Learning Factory I didn't realize how many opportunities and resources students have access to. I think it's really great that the university is taking the initiative to encourage students to build things and giving them the resources to do it. One of the recent trends that I have heard about is that many engineering students come into college without a lot of building experience because they grew up with electronics and other devices that were harder to take apart (and probably more expensive to replace when they couldn't be put back together). I definitely can relate to this and it's one of the reasons I didn't enter college initially in engineering. I thought that I had to have a lot of building experience to be successful. Luckily, there are places like the learning factory where I can gain that experience.

In the future, I am looking forward to using the learning factory to do more hands on work and am grateful that our class was encouraged to go check it out. The possibilities there for art and engineering students are limitless and I am so excited to do some making!

Learning to Laser Cut

A broken and dirtied lens

This week I got laser cutting certified at Stuckeman's Digifab Lab. It was interesting to use Rhino for the first time and see how it differed from Solidworks. In Solidworks, you select icons to complete different tasks. In Rhino, you can do that, but you can also type in the command at the top in a formula bar and make adjustments (like setting dimensions) through there. It felt like a combination of Excel (because of the formula bar), Solidworks, and Photoshop (because of the use of layers and different settings for each).

Clean lenses

When designing our name plates, we learned about the differences between raster, which creates an engraving, and vector, which cuts directly through the material. We also learned how to change the settings in order to be sure the laser cutter would be able to penetrate a specific type of material (i.e. loading a setting for chip board, masonite, etc.). It was also interesting to see how the laser cutter works and how to maintain it.

I look forward to using in the future!

Getting ready to load the laser cutter

The laser cutter area

Make Something to Sit On

Today's challenge was to create something to sit on. The added bonus of having it potentially count as a lab 2 got us all motivated to go hard and I quickly reunited with some friends from EDSGN 100H to complete the challenge.

I have to admit that I was intimidated by the task ahead of us. After seeing the chair Matt made using compliant mechanisms, we felt we had to make something that was not only functional, but also aesthetically pleasing. Early in the process, we had a lot of trouble communicating our ideas. Someone in the group would start to describe their idea while all of us would look at them blankly. Then, someone else would chime in that they understood what that person was talking about and suddenly it didn't matter that no one else knew what was going on. I found myself nodding along without really getting what someone's idea was. I initially thought sketching our ideas would be a solution to this issue, but I quickly learned that our group was not super good at sketching either. Once we got the actual wood in our hands it was easier to show the other group members what our ideas were, but I think going forward, we need to spend more time in the early part of the process making sure everyone knows what the idea we are considering actually is. If we understood what each of the other people was proposing, we might have been able to better build off each other's ideas and come to a better design idea.

Our chair!

After several ideas, we settled on a stool that was ridged on either side. We started making the chair, but again, communication issues made it difficult for multiple people to work at the same time since we still didn't all have a sense of what was going on. Stephen ended up doing most of the building work while the rest of us supported him by retrieving supplies or haggling with other teams to get more wood. While this system was probably more time-efficient, I think it went against the nature of the task and I think we would have gotten more out of the experience if we shared responsibilities while making the chair.

We finished the chair with 30 seconds to spare only to realize that it was really high off the ground, so that only someone as tall as Matt could sit in it. Also, because we included no back support, I doubt anyone would have decided to sit in it for very long. In this exercise, our group focused more on what we thought would be aesthetically interesting than what would be comfortable. In doing so, we made an object that was pretty uncomfortable. This leads me to my first takeaway: be careful when prototyping for one specific quality (in this case aesthetics) because you may sacrifice other more desirable qualities. Also, if we had conducted more user research, we might have learned how much we should value aesthetics over ergonomics.

Trying out the stool

My second takeaway was: there's value in building an interdisciplinary team. I immediately gravitated towards the engineering group because I had previously worked with (most) of them before and I figured we would have a better shot at getting the lab 2 credit if we worked together. But, the whole point of this class is that having different perspectives makes you a better designer. The members of our team all had depth in engineering, but not in architecture or art, which could have been helpful when designing this chair for aesthetics or comfort. Going forward, I plan to make more of an effort to get to know (and work with) the students in the other departments.