student

Dieter Rams: ten principles for good design

Posted on by Nicholas Jones PD

Good design is innovative

The possibilities for innovation are not, by any means, exhausted.

Technological development is always offering new opportunities for innovative design.

But innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology,

and can never be an end in itself.

 

Good design makes a product useful

A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria,

not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic.

Good design emphasises the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding

anything that could possibly detract from it.

Good design is aesthetic

The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because

products we use every day affect our person and our well-being.

But only well-executed objects can be beautiful.

Good design makes a product understandable

It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product talk. At best,

it is self-explanatory.

 

Good design is unobtrusive

Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art.

Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user’s self-expression.

Good design is honest

It does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is.

It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept.

Good design is long-lasting

It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated.

Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years – even in today’s throwaway society.

Good design is thorough down to the last detail

Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in the design

process show respect towards the user.

 

Good design is environmentally-friendly

Design makes an important contribution to the preservation of the environment. It conserves

resources and minimises physical and visual pollution throughout the lifecycle of the product

Good design is as little design as possible

Less, but better – because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products

are not burdened with non-essentials.Back to purity, back to simplicity.

locking mechanism

Posted on by Nicholas Jones PD

this is the design I came up with for the locking mechanism, I just looked at standard locks that manufactures use already because this would make it easier to product in the factory, also its the strongest.

its just a standard barrel lock with a double sided locking feature at the back which would lock in to the frame of the storage system.

 

Concept drawing and rendering

Posted on by Nicholas Jones PD

I’ve started to bring my final Idea to a point, I like the design I’ve come up with, it’s very sculptural which will make people interested in it, which I what I was aiming for because I think most bike storage is pretty boring and bland.
Firstly I did a sketch of the basic shape I was aiming.

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I then drew the main lines with a thick pencil line so I have a good guide, then went over that with a thick fineliner following that I did the inner lines with a thin fineliner,

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following that I did the inner lines with a thin fineliner to pick out the finer details with out making them to obvious.

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I then rubbed all the pencil lines away, after I did that I started to add the colours and shading to make my product more realistic, for this I used pro markers I also used coloured pencils to pick out certain shading and shine lines,

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After finishing off the colours I thought that it doesn’t jump off the page in the sort of way that I wanted t achieved so I added a coloured box behind the design to add that little but of contrast which hopefully will drag you towards the design.

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the city project; field group; experimenting with shapes

Posted on by Nicholas Jones PD

so this week we started making little pieces and experimenting with shapes and different materials, we are looking for the best way to display the underground city in the tank, here is what we made,

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here are the ones we made from, cardboard, and blue foam, we also made some from clay which in my opinion, and the others in the group, had the best outcome from them all, however im going to make some from wood/MDF, the clay worked so well because you can mould it perfectly to what you want and it will also be easy to hid and se at the same time, the foam works well because its simple to form shape from, however its pretty weak and wont hold much weight and its blue which wont look very nice surrounded by mud.

the city project; initial sketches

Posted on by Nicholas Jones PD

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here are some of my initial ideas for designs, I’ve kept to making my ideas look abit futuristic, however im also trying to keep my ideas close to the present days because in my opinion the tragic state of bike storage in cities across the world needs to be sorted out now. I quite like the idea o the Red drawing because its compact, and can be made from cheap metals or plastic, however I find the design so far abit to bland and not exciting enough so I need to work out what I can do to make this more appealing and more interesting for the users of this product.

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the city project; exsiting product

Posted on by Nicholas Jones PD

so here is an example about the poor design, safety and quality of bike storage within the city centre,
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this is very poor example of bike storage, as its not sheltered which is desired by every cyclist because if you have an very expensive bike the last thing you want is your bike to be parked out side in the rain/snow/hail etc. because all of those things can do serious amounts damage your bike, also this only locks the front wheel which means bike thief’s can easily take your back wheel/frame, and bike theft is rising massively in all cities as more and more people are beginning to ride to work instead of driving, another thing is it isn’t very aesthetically pleasing to the user, it looks cheap and unsecure. I just wanted to show you what sort of bike storage there is within the city centre.

the city project; group idea

Posted on by Nicholas Jones PD

in our field groups today we came up with an direction on which we would like to take our project, firstly we all spoke about what we wanted to do and what we were already doing in our personal field project, and collaborated all our ideas into one, I wanted to do fining storage space in city centres and as you know im trying to improve the safety and quality of bike storage within the city centre, and the others in my group all had a similar idea about making miniature cities and something to do with underground cities or underground buildings which I found very fascinating to talk about, after talking about this we made a few mind maps which we could us to find common ground on which we could start building a idea, and pretty much instantly we came up with a really good and interesting idea which was to build a miniature city underground, and we threw a few ideas around to find the best was to execute this idea and we came up with using layers of mud to build the ground and we were looking at doing this in a fish tank sort of thing, so that’s our idea. also today we had to build a mini model of our idea using only the materials we were given by our tutors, if we had more time we would of executed our model more accurately and more tidier too, however we didn’t have that time to our expense so this is an image of what we managed to do with the materials we were given.

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here is some images of our mind maps and ideas.

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