YourDesign

Ronen Kadushin - Your Design - Your Way

Design as an adventure - in every part of life.
95% of work is open design
Problem with academy and open design: basically saying that university is no longer relevant.
Fab Lab designs are often strange for designers: cables on outside etc. You would be executed if this was your design product.
The specific language of "Fab Lab Design" is neglegted in the Fab Lab discussion. How fabbers make boxes has a specific "way" of expression (Ronen impersonates an object, but nobody takes a picture).
Design in Fab Labs often comes from computer engineers.
Ronen collected Raspberry Pi boxes (on Thingiverse) and almost cried... if the thing works and you can plug, it seems to be alright.
Design features (of stuff that comes out of Fab Labs) are
  • Designed inside out
  • practical
  • improvised
  • exposed
  • raw
  • naive
  • reliable
  • robust
  • vistible tool paths
  • sober and serius: "fabbers: you are too serious, you don't show that you're having fun making objects ... maybe because you try to convince otheres that you are serious (except maybe the purple of meny 3D-printed objects)"
  • tight
  • a problem solved
All products are extremely authentic: made by people who have knowledge.
Ronen is here to add "a layer of design" (i.e.), and this process is fun. This process is "storytelling". Communicating something through all the features of an object: hardware, function, process, material, technology, color. Parts, funciton, material, process, technology, color ... are all characters in a story. These characters relate to each other and the world to communicate a story, "written by YOU".
It is not about becoming Philip Stark wannabes, since industrial design / producht desigh has not a good reputation – it feels profit oriented, cold, not authentic. 
The design world (the church of industrial design) is not reacting (or not reacting fast enough) to the developments of "everything networked" – they still are able to squeeze money out of traditional approaches
Constraints should be your imagination - not just wat solves the problem.
Your design:
Who are the characters, How do they intereact? What is the story? What makes them and the story special, new, funny, cool.
Timeline:
20 min intro
60 min ideas
20 min break
60 min storytelling, emerging products
20 min summary, reflection, next steps
Examples of Rones own designs:
"it is just storytelling"... But a story does not necessarily to be long (no novels), maybe it's just a message.
Referencing: Ronen says designers in the Fab Lab should also do online research, have a look at existing designs on google images. 
Side note: Ronen also offers 2day workshops, that can be held in your FabLab.
Citations:
  • "Today's Rasp Pi cases look as if they don't work."
  • "You can not just color something purple: it's pretty aggressive". "And purple is not just a color, it's a statement - it has a shape"
  • "I talk to chairs and chairs talk back to me."
  • "Ideas are 10 for 1€."
== Design excersize ==
A case for the Raspberry Pi
  1. Ronen: how would you describe the character of the Raspberry Pi
  1. cheap, open, complete, radical, 
  1. Now we start from "Radical" and transform the word into context. How can we communicate that?
  1. color: yellow / lemon
  1. strong contrasts: black/white
  1. associations with radical: 
  1. Napster
  1. Terrorism
  1. radical has association with danger in it / duality
  1. points/spikes: 
  1. it will stand on a corner.
  1. looks like a porcupine
  1. (talking about Apple at this point is like the water tap thing: "Apple is radical because they don't give discounts...": Doesn't really bring us forward.)
  1. Another important point: the openness
  1. can we design something open, where you could almost see inside, but not really
  1. How does the object touch the world?
  1. like bars, in a jail/cage
  1. we need to reflect the thing that is inside the cage: a gorilla cage looks different from a bird cage
  1. it's a safe (thick, heavy, secret)
  1. floating in the air: connected to a lot of cables and could hang from them. Or the cables could be used to hold the RaspPi in place.
  1. Other
  1. the unneeded connectors (USB, sound,...) will be covered and only the ones used can be seen (power)
Another possible way we could go, starting from "smell"
  1. It's all about smell: 
  1. the more it works, the more it stinks
  1. RaspPi sounds sweet
  1. perfume
  1. connect a fan, then it can hover
  1. it can do everything, very techy: it's the pi 3.0c extreme...
  1. use plastic, that changes color with temperature
Stories are often very simple and short (1/10th of a second to understand what it is, 3-5 secs to understand the story).
It's important, that the designing of the object is fun, not boring.
How do you stop the idea process? Once you have found something you like, there is no strict rule.
Book remark: The maker's bill of rights (http://blog.makezine.com/2006/12/01/the-makers-bill-of-rights/)
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