Ideas Into Design Concepts

My design project was addressed the problem of which, I had a lamp head that was too big for the limited space within my room and bedside table. Hence, I started on this project with the intention of creating a lamp of a more adequate size while still providing the light that I needed. First, I started with my Laser Cut Project Plan, where I would need fill out multiple sections in order to plan for my product. Below, you can see my plan.

After having my design plan be approved, I went on to draw my designs out for each face on a piece of paper and later cut them out to tape them together and make a paper prototype. Initially, I thought to have all my faces measure 120mm by 120mm, but then I realized that it would be too small for the light bulb that measure 140mm on one side. So I increased my original measurements from 120mm by 120mm to 160mm by 160mm.

Eventually, I finalized all my measurements, and confirmed with my teacher that all of these designs were possible. I moved on to the phase where I would draw out and design my faces in the program Fusion 360.

Fusion 360: Trial and Error

My experience with Fusion 360 while designing my faces for my lamp were hectic, to say the least. To start off with, I’ll talk about my trials and the tools that I’ve learnt while being in design class. First, I learnt how to create different shapes – rectangles, triangles, circles, etc. This tool allowed me to created many different shapes either to base off of or design on. Some more tools that I learnt were mirroring: where if I were to create one design, click on the mirroring tool, select a line for the axis, and bam – an exact copy of the design would appear to the exact opposite of my original design, this tool was a tremendous help when creating the violin on my lamp. Another cool tool was spline, the awesome part about spline was that, even if other shape tools are restricted to one type of shape and set of lines, spline could help you draw anything. If you want to draw the unique shape of a flower petal, then you could with ease. All of my designs of my lamp utilized spline, so I was extremely thankful for it. Other cool and useful tools that I used in my project were: rectangular pattern, offset, trim and extend, plus more.

Above is the daily learning log that I used to take notes on each new tool I learned, this helped me when I forgot how to use a certain tool. Overall, my experience with using these tools made my whole design process a lot easier, and helped to make my designs more organized.

Now, for my errors. What were the various hardships and challenges that I faced? How did I solve them? I will recount to you, every single challenge and computer error that I had to face. To start with, my Fusion 360 started malfunctioning and acting extremely weird when I was about a month or two into this project. Every time I entered the program, Fusion gave me this:

This led to very unexpected changes to my usual work routine. My Fusion started being extremely laggy and my changes would not save. In other words, I basically made no progress as I tried to troubleshoot this problem with the help of my teachers. Finally, after a month, the problem was solved. The notification seemed to be solved, but the problem of my computer being extremely laggy was still there. No matter what we did, the problem of being extremely laggy was never solved. I tried everything, restarted my computers a few million times, deleted heaps of junk on my computer, I even tried it on someone else’s computer. Spoiler alert, none of this worked.

So, I’ve been stuck in this stage for a while already, unable to progress. However, I am basically done with all of my designs, but the extreme lag has caused me to make any progress at all. Here are the designs I made.

I incorporated skills like rectangle pattern to create all the fingers on the side, used circular pattern on the bottom-most design to make the symbol of lightning that exact shape, with all the three stems being the same. This made my drawing more clean and easier as I only had to draw one part, circular pattern it, and then tweak it a bit more to make it cleaner. Tools like spline made my life so much easier as it’s practically the drawing tool of Fusion, I basically used it for every design of mine. More complicated designs like the boy’s face and the violin used more lines and detail. They were also symmetrical objects so I drew one side then mirrored it. For the boy’s face, I first made the smaller details and more complex shapes into simpler ones like circles, rectangles, etc. to lay the base of the design, then added the details and ornaments later on. It’s just like icing on the cake. But overall Fusion’s tools and strategies that I found worked for the specific designs of my project really helped.

 

Reflection and Sharing

Overall, I believe that even if I faced a mirage of computer meltdowns, fusion errors, and my own fair share of mental breakdowns and such. I think that this project really brought a productive and enlightening learning experience to me that I hope I will experience more within design.

Some advice I’d really recommend to students who will be doing Product Design is manage your time, focus on class, take notes regularly, and don’t be afraid to ask for help. Fusion 360 is a program that is vastly unfamiliar and there’s just so many things to learn about it. That’s why you must focus in class and take notes, otherwise you will be completely lost. Fusion 360 is also a program that may give you a migraine in terms of the computer errors and lag that you may be facing, so when you need help for it, get it as soon as possible.

If I could go back and re-do this project, I think I would definitely focus on doing a harder but more interesting project than a lamp. I think it could’ve increased my productivity vastly. Another thing that I would change is my management of time, product design is something that doesn’t allow for any procrastination, because you will fall behind.

Something I’d change about this course is perhaps offer more projects. The lamps were great, but I think that product design would be so much more fun if we had more things to do. I saw some interesting things that were created but most of them were just lamps. So in my opinion, I think it’d be good if students could be offered more options on what they can do, because for me, it was kind of hard to visualize what I really wanted. Giving students a few more versatile examples could help with their brainstorming and shape their ideas into reality.