Contemporary Design Presentation

What is meant by Contemporary Design?

Instead of drilling boring lectures into the heads of the students, Edwina Riddell has found a creative and effective solution to deliveing the information. She assigned a particular design era to a group of 2 - 3 students, and thus transferred the engagement of the topic to the students.

I find this to be a a brilliant idea! The students get Public Speaking experience, they perform their own research, and in the end student presentations are usually listened to more attentively, than teachers, due to a feeling of solidarity.

Each student group presented on the chosen design era during the class (one group per week). Afterwards, Edwina filled in any of her extra knowledge and provided comments.

For our presentation, Gina and I selected Contemporary Design, an exciting and relevant period of design, which is still affecting our choices today.

Click the image below to view the PDF of our presentation:


Semester 1: Intro to Studio Practice, taught by Edwina Riddell

Moshe Safdie: Seeking Beauty

Moshe Safdie is an architect who designed many well known architectural spaces. These include the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, and the Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas, set to open in 2010.

He spoke at the TED conference in 2002, when he discussed what makes the building unique.



In his talk, Moshe also shared a beautiful poem he wrote, which for me clarifies some of the internal struggles I face as designer-in-the-making :)

He Who Seeks by Moshe Safdie
He who seeks truth shall find beauty,
He who seeks beauty shall find vanity.

He who seeks order shall find gratification,
He who seeks gratification shall be disappointed.

He who considers himself the servant of his fellow beings
Shall find the joy of self-expression.
He who seeks self-expression
Shall fall into the pit of arrogance.
Arrogance is incompatible with Nature.

Through the nature of the Universe
And the nature of man we shall seek truth.
If we seek TRUTH we shall find BEAUTY.

Nokia Morph Concept

Today we learned how to do concept rendering using Copic markers, black pen and white gouache. We produced a rendering of a metal fork with small fish on it. It turns out that it's actually not that difficult to achieve a realistic look of an object, if you know where to apply shadows and highlights. The main points to remember are to work in layers, from light to dark.

One of the brilliant recent applications of concept rendering was used by Nokia to communicate the idea behind Nokia Morph, the future of mobile (at least according to Nokia, lol). Here is the video of the rendering:



One thing to notice is that the phone itself is drawn in great detail, while the surrounding environment is more rough. This brings attention and focus to the phone itself (note to self: you can use it in your work as well).