Ideas into Design Concepts:
In Unit 1 of my semester 2 Product Design class, I was given the permission to choose and design a small thing for myself that could be helpful, it could be a lantern, a pencil case, or a small box that could hang in lockers. I chose to design a lantern because I think it would be really nice if I had a light source on my bedside table.

The lantern is mostly to have a light source that I don’t need to get out of bed to switch it on or off, it is also nice to look at.In this unit, we learned to use laser cutting for our designs, so for the patterns on my lantern, I chose Chinese window decorations for it, mostly because they have a similar use so there shouldn’t be a problem such as there isn’t enough light coming through.

At the start, I also chose to add in a lot of Minecraft elements such as potions, arrows, crossbows, swords, the conduit, enchantments, endermens, etc.; however, I later made the decision to stop using them because they were too many of them and I wanted a variety of different elements in my design, they were not really the best designs for light to go through, and mostly, they were all made up of squares and I think it wouldn’t show the many things that I have learned in the unit. So I decided to replace them with other designs such as equilateral polygons and circles, but because I think the lantern should really show who I am, I still reserved a piece of Minecraft design and put it on top of my lantern, which is the creeper face.
At the same time, I also was planning to draw pictures of my interests such as rock climbing, golf, and painting, but because they weren’t really good designs in terms of the amount of light going through, I decided to replace them with western window designs.
On the other hand, I was going to use the the symbol for four main elements in the show “Avatar: The Last Airbender” for four small equilateral triangle parts of my lantern, but because of the same reason as before, I replaced it with the symbol of the Deathly Hallows in the Book “Harry Potter”.

These are the Chinese window designs:

Growth In Skills:
In this unit, I learned many skills working with different lines in Fusion and transferring files into LightBurn and giving them different colors and then to the FabLab to laser cut. I also learned how to tape my prototype, stain my wood pieces, and where to go to to sand them.
To be more specific, in fusion I learned about the crucial tools of using the ViewCube, creating a Sketch, changing lines to construction lines, and exploding texts. In the “CREATE” tool category, I learned to draw lines, rectangles, circles, other equilateral polygons, fit point splines, texts, mirrors, circular patterns, rectangular patterns, and sketch dimensions. In “MODIFY” category, I learned to use fillet, trim, extend, break, sketch scale, offset, and move/copy. In light burn, I learned that for laser cutting, red lines are trim, black lines are drawn, and blue lines are filled.

Here are some pictures of my design:

One super challenging thing was that I always forgot to check if there were overlapping lines in my design. But later while Ms. Kim was helping me she told me a few ways to tackle this. One way is to observe the lines, lines that seem a little thicker and unusual are usually overlapped. Another way is to click of lines after the file is exported to LightBurn. Normally, if you click on a line in LightBurn, it would become dotted and the dots will be sliding; however, if it is not sliding, it should mean that a line overlapping and blocking the dots and movement.

A super cool thing in fusion I believe is the extend and trim tool, when I delete or trim a part of my design line and added things to it after to see if it looks nice and I want to add it back again but can’t command z because I added things earlier, I can use the extend tool to add the part of the line back. On the other hand, if I wanted to delete something I could just use the trim tool to delete it. The most cool things about these tools is that the trim tool only deletes to the intersecting points, and the extend only extends to the “will intersect” and intersect point. I think it’s actually very nice that the trimming doesn’t only trim to “will intersect” point and trims to intersection point instead, because trimming requires the mouse to move to the exact trim point, and it can be very annoying once there are many lines. While for the extend, the mouse only needs to stay at one place and click multiple times, so i think it’s very nice that Fusion put these small but very useful mechanisms on their tools. The two tools makes it super super nice for working on details in the design, which I like a lot.

One strategy I used when I was stuck on what to draw for my decoration designs on my lantern was to just look in the tool bar on what I am capable of doing and just do it. For example, I looked in the tool bar and decided to add equilateral polygons and circles as two sides of my design. Each of my iteration changed usually because of two things. I was adding new things, or I thought something before didn’t look nice. But most of the “doesn’t look nice” changing happened in the planning stage. For example, as I said before in paragraph 3, “At the start, I also chose to add in a lot of Minecraft elements such as potions, arrows, crossbows, swords, the conduit, enchantments, endermens, etc.; however, I later made the decision to stop using them because they were too many of them and I wanted a variety of different elements in my design, they were not really the best designs for light to go through, and mostly, they were all made up of squares and I think it wouldn’t show the many things that I have learned in the unit. So I decided to replace them with other designs such as equilateral polygons and circles, but because I think the lantern should really show who I am, I still reserved a piece of Minecraft design and put it on top of my lantern, which is the creeper face. At the same time, I also was planning to draw pictures of my interests such as rock climbing, golf, and painting, but because they weren’t really good designs in terms of the amount of light going through, I decided to replace them with western window designs. On the other hand, I was going to use the the symbol for four main elements in the show “Avatar: The Last Airbender” for four small equilateral triangle parts of my lantern, but because of the same reason as before, I replaced it with the symbol of the Deathly Hallows in Harry Potter.”

It only happened a few times after I had be done with my plan and was actually drawing in Fusion, and was usually because of minor details like the cut out part being too thick, the cut out space was unbalanced, or it was very abrupt compared to the other designs in the sketch.

My original plan vs my final design:

Reflecting and Sharing:
Some tips, tricks, and advice that I would give to the incoming students would be:
– When running into a problem ask friends before asking the teacher. Usually, the teacher has a very long line behind with many people wanting to ask questions, so it might waste some time. But more importantly, it is likely that the teacher has covered the answers in the lesson or previous lessons, and you just forgot, so asking friends would be quick and easy.
– Pay close attention in class, if you pay attention in class, you would have a lot less questions. Most of the things that are needed will be told in the lessons. So paying close attention is very important.

Some things I would, individually, do differently if could go back and do the class over would be:
– Keeping up with the schedule and even over achieve. Not keeping up with the schedule I think was the biggest thing that I regretted in this unit. I used a lot of time to make things “perfect”, which caused me to be behind the original schedule. This caused me to not even finish my project until now (when the new unit has already started).
– Checking for overlapping lines every time. Overlapping lines was a very annoying part of my design process and I always had to check for them when it was in LightBurn.
– Think more about my designs in the planning part. I sometimes changed my plan even after it was signed by Ms. Kim. So I think I should’ve thought more during the planning before it was signed so that I wouldn’t continue to change it and waste time later.

Some things I (the student) would want to be changed about the course so I (the teacher) can make improvements to the course would be:
– I think maybe giving specific homework for certain times could improve students that are behind on the schedule.
– And maybe posting DX posts more could notify people to keep up with the schedule