Me in a nutshell

With visual means you can explain a whole wealth of words, therefore negating endless babble.

Via Mushaboom Movement

Ordered

In my architecture discussion section we have idealistic conversations about nature and the built environment. My fellow students try to wax poetically about how the world would be better if everyone did x, y, and z. "If only people knew about being environmentally friendly, if only people were informed..."

I'm not necessarily pessimistic, but I am a realist. People know smoking is bad for them...yet they do it anyway. People know driving gas guzzling cars is bad for the environment...but they continue to drive anyway. The fact of the matter is that we do not see immediate consequences for our actions, so therefore we continue in our set ways. /End rant/

My real reason to post was these images I found via one of my fav blogs Goodmorning & Goodnight. Which he took via here.

We idealize and romanticize nature all the time. Both of these pictures are 'nature' but with two very different patterns of organization. We (as in my fellow architecture discussion student collectively) love to say over and over again that we have to get back to 'nature' and be more balanced with 'nature', yet no one has defined exactly what nature and natural means. How can we have a discussion when we are not even defining what we are discussing in the first place?

Design Process

I have never been happier for an acrylic box. 

I was smiling all the way home as I held it on the bus from Rapson Hall on East Bank to home last friday. No one understood why I was clutching my box so tenderly. The tall man in tan exited the bus to the right, and only glanced at my wonderful creation. I wanted to stand up in the middle of the bus, arms outstretched holding my box at arms length spinning around like those cheesy lovey dovey scenes in moves, then I would slowly and tenderly hug my creation and continue to spin in dizzying circles. I felt like announcing to the whole bus of bored blank faces of ipod-induced-coma college students “LOOK! My beautiful creation! Yes it may look like a simple acrylic box with circles cut into it, but it’s so much more don’t you see? I made it! I took it from an idea, a sketch on paper, and now it’s a thing! I’m made something! Isn’t it wonderful?”

Okay…even though I wished to do all those things I sat silently with my heavy backpack in my lap, balancing the box on top. Then I slowly made my way home. Not really anything theatrical. But why would a simple box give me such joy? A simple creation? Well, because it really is so much more than that.

It’s more than a box because it’s part of the whole design process. Taking an abstract idea and ultimately making it into an physical thing is wonderful. For example, I am currently fabricating a luminaire (fancy design talk for a light fixture) for my lighting class. This project is coordinated with my interior design studio work where I designed a coffee shop, and now I am making a luminaire that would be placed in said shop.

A Cabinet of Curiosity by Domenico Remps

I start with an abstract idea or an image, such as the above image which I used as an inspiration for my coffee shop design. Then how does that get translated into a physical thing? I make many hasty sketches on notebook paper, sketchbooks, the back of class assignments, and post it notes. Eventually I come to drawing out specific dimensions. 

After that I mock it up with paper, then a crescent board model, where it really helps me figure out the exact size I want. For this luminaire specifically I wanted to see the size of the box in relation to the light bulb that would be placed in the acrylic box to be made.

I figured out the perfect size! After that I put the design into AutoCAD so I could bring the file to the workshop and cut it into acrylic on the laser cutter....

Presto! After about a half hour I had this wonderful object which I carried home one the bus (as noted above). It took little time to glue it together.

While I was home on Easter weekend, I put the lamp kit in, and screws....and that's where the process ends for now! I'm going to finish the luminaire this weekend and present this coming week!

Now you can see into the world of a wonderful design student! Things don't just magically come to be because there is so much that happens in between an initial idea and a finished product. 

Maybe I'm strange, maybe I'm crazy, maybe I have no life (well as a design student homework=life), maybe I'm a nerd, but I LOVE school. I love learning,and curiosity really seems to be a major theme in my life recently. There's so much to know about the world, things to make, inspiration to be had. 

I'm just enjoying the process.

Interior Design

My dear reader, it is that time in the semester when I do nothing but homework, and feel guilty event to take the time to write a blog post. So what exactly do I spend my time doing?

Interior Design. That’s what I’m going to school for. People don’t really get it.

I’m not going to school to learn how to paint walls, or to make things look ‘pretty’ and decorate. I often have to defend what I’m going to school for when people ask because people discount it to my face, or just have no idea what interior design actually is. After I say I’m going to school for or my major is interior design, I get reactions such as: “Ah, inferior design!” “Oh cool! Could you help me decorate my house?” “When you graduate you can come and design my place!” “Oh yeah, interior decorating, that’s great…” “Do you watch HGTV?” *sigh* I’ve even heard of certain people saying: “Have your kids go to school for something worthwhile, not something like interior design for example…”

Sure you may think that I’m wasting my time going to school for interior design, but do you know what it actually is? Do you know the choices that designers make in the environments that you spend a majority of your time in? (The statistics say that Americans spend almost 90% of their time indoors now!) Why do you return to your favorite coffee shop? Or restaurant? How come you like shopping at one clothing store over the other? Why does it seem so much easier to study at the library? It most likely has something to do with the designed environment.

Since I love definitions so much, I’ll throw this one out: "Interior design includes a scope of services performed by a professional design practitioner, qualified by means of education, experience and examination, to protect and enhance the health, life safety and welfare of the public." from NCIDQ (emphasis mine)  

Or this: "Interior designers need to be creative, imaginative and artistic. They also need to be disciplined, organized and skilled business people. Combining aesthetic vision with practical skills and knowledge, interior designers work with clients to develop design solutions that are "aesthetically appealing, technically sophisticated and pragmatically satisfying." from ASID

Or this is a condensed version of what NCIDQ says interior design is:

creative and technical solutions are applied, solutions are functional, enhance the quality of life, aesthetically attractive. Designs coordinated with the building shell, acknowledge the physical location and social context, must adhere to code and regulatory requirements,environmental sustainability, follows a systematic and coordinated methodology,research, analysis and integration of knowledge, creative process, needs and resources of the client are satisfied.

Hmm, that sounds like more than painting walls to me...

Okay so I can give you the textbook definition of interior design, but what is it really to me? In the long hours that I work on projects I ask myself that all the time. It's artistic, it's visual problem solving, it's multitasking, it's thinking about people's needs, it's shaping the environments that people move through in their day, it can be designing people's lifestyles, it is installation art, it's a marketing tool, it can help people relax and heal, it's what gives your favorite restaurant character, it's shapes people lives.

Like you, I would love to spend the majority of my time outside enjoying a limitless sky above, and no walls at my side. But the fact of the matter is that in our modern world we work, play, eat, learn, heal, sleep, and live indoors a majority of the time. Interior design is what makes the spaces we move through beautiful and functional. It's the backdrop of our lives.

Off to New York City

I was considering not writing today, but I thought I could squeeze in a quick post before I hop in a car and go off to New York City for the week.

Here's some things for you to explore, they are things that I check on often online, all great stuff.

This is an amazing blog that I check all the time.

I find these guys hilarious.

I find the sermons available from Mars Hill Church very helpful.

I will be sure to update you on all the wonderful things I see and do in New York!

Cabinet of Curiosities

This semester I have to design a coffee shop for my Interior Design Studio class and I think I will base my concept for the project off one of my favorite things: a cabinet of curiosities.

I have always been fascinated by the idea of a cabinet of curiosities (Also known as a cabinet of wonder, Kunstkammer or Wunderkammer in German). It may spring from all the nature center visits of my childhood, tapping on the glass pane separating me and snakes, picking up pine cones on nature walks, or simply being enthralled by even the simplest natural object.

I visited the Bell Museum of Natural History right here on the U of MN campus after my last class for the week. I cannot believe that I have not explored the wonders held within that building until now. Having a lecture in the large auditorium connected to the museum this spring and last, I have been mere steps away from a whole world of  wonderful objects without even knowing it. 

A cabinet of curiosities is literally a window to the world, a visual delight, and sometimes a visual overload. Basically they came about during the Renaissance period from rich guys who had time and money on their hands to collect cool stuff, though humans have been collecting intriguing objects throughout the ages. They bring to mind great adventurers and explorers who went to the ends of the earth and decided to pick up a few things along the way, or the anthropology professor who has filled his old creaky office shelves with peculiar things. They are a delight the eyes and the imagination.

I am particularly interested in the cabinets because they house such a variety of not only objects, but stories. Being an aspiring collector of curious objects myself, with every object there is a story and a history. The rocks on my bookshelf were picked up on the shore of Lake Superior last fall, the piggy bank a gift from my parents, and the feathers from a collection of my grandfathers.

We are accustomed now to searching out the latest YouTube sensation, the next big musician, or the up and  coming artist or designer on the internet, yet we are still taping into the age old search for something that fascinates us. I think we need to remember that there are curious things all around us everyday if we just step out our door. 

In the Bell Museum Touch and See room, it's like a cabinet of curiosities was strewn over the entire room. There are animal bones, antlers, rocks, seashells, animal pelts, live snakes and turtles, and many more objects that you can pick up and investigate closely. I felt like a kid again as I knelt on the floor and stared into the red eyes of a turtle, or when I lifted the various antlers to test their weight. In the room there are also cabinets full of various natural history objects, and I could spend hours gazing at the wonders within. For me, looking at the various treasures is more aesthetic than scientific because I could not tell you the difference and names of one bird or another, or identify what animal skull graces the shelf, but it does not diminish their intrigue.

I drool over books such as the 636 page volume of Albertus Seba's Cabinet of Natural Curiosities. I spend hours perusing photos of fellow curiosity hunters, such as Curious Expeditions Flickr page. I long to have an array of objects like ones you can buy here from a store in New York. I could spend hours in the Touch and See room at the Bell Museum. Some people collect the same object when they travel such as mugs, t-shirts, or snow globes, I buy something that is unique and will add variety to my collection. I cannot help but be curious about the world around me, I guess I still am that little kid who thinks they found a great treasure when I pick up a perfectly shaped rock, a piece of driftwood, or a fascinating seashell.

Google Earth

I spent the majority of my day typing a paper about the uses for Google Earth. It's actually quite an amazing program, and if you haven't downloaded  it and zoomed around the earth, I strongly encourage you to do so. In my research I uncovered some unique ways people have used the program like a skydiving simulation!

Or what about looking at 13,000 satellites around the earth in real time? Check it out here.

Have a bunch of time to waste? Check out this website. It has a bunch of images that people have found in their hours of searching Google Earth images. 

This one also updates with the newest info about Google Earth, right now they have aerial images of the protests in Egypt. 

Okay, so this one uses Google maps actually, but I thought it was so cool! A graphic designer from Turkey came up with the idea. Make an envelope with a map on the inside. you can type in any location in the world, and it will put the Google map of it, then just print it off, cut it out and enjoy how awesome looking it is!

I know this post is super link happy, but I thought I would share some of the things I found.