Design Passport: To be signed off, completed and handed in 31 May
Luke Messina
Visit a museum
On the 8th of March 2011, I chose to visit the Powerhouse museum with the intention of broadening my horizons in an effort to understand more about design in our history. As I walked through the museum, they had many sections, which now focus on sustainable design and ‘green’ design. Such products, which I found extremely interesting, included many products like ‘Bambooware’, which successfully reduces plastic waste by making a cheap set of cutlery and plates which can be reused.
Visit an exhibition
I visited the HSC DesignTECH exhibition, which was on show at the powerhouse at the beginning of the year. I saw a number of my fellow students work and was interested to see how most of the design’s that had been chosen for this exhibition included sustainable and/or green designs.
Read and comment on a design blog
I read and commented on a design blog from a website called Ambidextrous and its article about the amount of surplus goods that are wasted every year and how a company called RAFT is collecting these surplus goods and then allowing teachers to come round and pick up whatever materials they want for as cheap as a dollar a bag. It talks about wastage, and its impact on the environment and how even this little act of collecting these surplus goods could help keep millions of tons of waste out of landfill.
Read and comment another students IDES1122 blog
I commented on Oskar’s blog and told him that his post, which was about refillable paint canisters with 4 different types of colours in one, would be an excellent idea to reduce waste and harmful toxins in our environment.
Read three design magazine / journal
I read an article that was posted in the magazine INDESIGN about how a lady called the police because she thought a building was about to fall over, but the building in question was specifically designed crooked in order to prevent movement in the higher levels by the strong wind around the area.
Another design article I read talked about how the best designs are the ones that have the least design, emphasizing the quote ‘less is more’ which is a particular characteristic of the Droog design company.
The third design magazine article I read had the title ‘weightless timepiece’ and talked about the reasons for wearing a heavy watch when ‘time is an abstract and weightless entity.’ The watch I read about weighed only 11 grams and brings together ideas of design innovation, playful aesthetics and the quality of sustainability.
Do the UNSW Library induction - ELISE
Finished the ELISE quiz and completed the survey and I’m glad to get it out of the way as I have so many other assessments to do at this moment in time.
Visit another Library – COFA, Fisher, etc?
During one of our projects for Design Fundamentals my group and I visited the library at COFA. Our movement project, which required us to research the movement roll and provide a number of pictures of this movement led us to COFA library, however, as we could not find anything we had to find relevant images mostly on the internet.
Listen to ABC Radio ‘By Design’ Podcast
After listening to a few podcasts on the ABC radio I found a few that were quite interesting to listen to. One of which talked about will their still be jobs around for architects and designers in the year 2025 and another which talked about the trends in society, which included Carbon Neutral Timber apartments and was even more interesting as the project was located in Melbourne.
Watch a TED talk [http://www.ted.com/]
I watched a few TED talks quite a while ago and one I found extremely interesting was the use of robotics to give people extra strength when carrying something heavy and to even allow paralyzed people to walk again. It was interesting to know how far technology has advanced and even more interesting to know that people are coming up with new and innovative ideas not just for profit, but to help people improve their lives.
