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

This is my review of a gesture program called Strokeit. My configurations can be found here

Mecha pron mmmmm
District 9 was a ninja movie.

Tek4 tools have been hitting Home Depot stores. It was a very eye-opening set of challenges. I am interested in seeing how consumers will react to the products. We went for a more machined, high metal design. It is good to have a development team that trusts the ID team.

PS- Highly recommend the flashlight which is solid and bright as heck.

Updated Maxwell render that shows the bowl a little clearer. The idea here was to freeze a splash in time. I actually ran some cloth simulations to get some iterations, but decided to manually sculpt the surfaces. It might be cool to run a few sims and then sell the SLAs/resin casts. If anyone would like to donate a Z-corp print I would love to print this sucker out :)

Rough sketches for the Kamaz Dakar 2022 Competition
Sketchovers welcome :)

Wow- brilliant example of connecting the dots. Kudos to Microsoft. I never thought that I would say that. My impression of Microsoft has been fast follower with not much creativity, but Project Natal has given me a whole new impression of the MS team.This is a brilliant execution and idea.

I was just talking to a co-worker that if I were to do a Master's degree it would be in HCI- Human computer interaction, and learn some programming. Indutrial design really trains students well in design thinking, so that we can design the physical world, and come up with ideas.

For example back in 2003 I had an idea for a touch screen 3G telephone (which unfortunately I only have a thumbnail of from the waybackmachine). I am sure that a 100 other students had the idea too, but none of us had the wherewithal to implement the idea. So it is not enough that you have an idea, you need to have the tools or staff to implement that idea. Many schools teach that you need a well rounded education, but I always feel that that is never deep enough. There are too many idiosynchrosies in the tools that we use.

Guys like this really impress me- able to combine physical and software design to create elegant solutions.

So many things to learn....

Learning Dynamics in Houdini. Hopefully I can do some product animation in the future

I dont understand how military programs like this are documented in such detail. I am glad that it is they are-as the design methodologies are super cool to observe. The only thing I can think of is that the current Black programs must be super advanced if they can talk openly about the JSF design proces.

Photoshop composites