http://jnd.org/dn.mss/technology_first_needs_last.html

Don Norman reaches the conclusion that design research does not really result in breakthrough products. Pretty good read and this jives with my own experience with product development. Product research seems to be working for incremental developments- Integrative/Design thinking though seems to be far more potent in coming up with something new.

I have been on a few research trips and they ground your ideas really fast. You quickly realize what ideas may or may not be crap. They give you fuel for more ideas. But I get a lot of fuel from simply keeping my eyes and mind open (well..trying to anyway) My own experience is that you need to stew for a little while. That means new ingredients need to be added to the mix all the time. You need to be trying multiple approaches to product development- and that unfortunately a bunch of cool ideas will pop up on completely unrelated projects and tick off designers and managers when you suggest something that might delay a project with those good ideas :)

Little warmup in Photoshop

Pretty satisfied with this render.

I refined the battery materials a little more as well as the lighting.

Finally figured out UV mapping, and layered material creation in Modo. Really confusing paradigm compared to programs like Maxwell. There is a wierd hierarchy that is somewhat like Photoshop, but a lot more confusing for texture creation. Rendering a turntable tonight. Will proceed to do an exploded animation after that- at least the top coming off to show the circuit board.

Headed to App State Nov 7th. Should be fun

Modo Test Render, and as you can see youtube is not really the place for a smooth repeating loop. I will need to add a few more cycles to this loop and then upload. Edit- Oddly watching in HD seems a little smoother.

A while back Citroen ran a competition where they uploaded CAD files of production vehicles and concepts for people to reconfigure and re-arrange. I started assembling some of these components together back into something pretty informative that gives you a nice feel for Class A surfaces and how they are put together. It would be interesting to hear some of the reasoning for these patch layouts, but you can learn a lot simply by untrimming some of these surfaces. Files here

I've finally had some breathing space and uploaded an obj file of the Splash bowl here