Even though I had a frustrating start to my design process, struggling to decide what to make and what to make it with, I had a fairly straight forward design loop until I hit a dead-end. I had decided to use cardboard as my raw material. I settled on the idea of making a piece of furniture with it as I lot a lot of it. I made a various sketches before I converged on a single idea. Truth be told I was really excited about the prospect of getting a new furniture that I had overlooked an obvious flaw in my design. All the cardboard I had were single layered and there was no way they could be stable enough to support more than a couple of pounds. I could buckle down and make a piece just for the sake of aesthetics. But what’s the point of making furniture if you’re not able to use it as one. So it was back to the drawing board for me. I came up with a couple of ideas until I finally decided on making a night lamp which one could still argue is still a furniture. However, in my defense I was thinking on a much larger scale albeit being unrealistic. Now I am in the prep stage cutting the boards, leaving a lot of litter in my wake and having to deal with the angst of my roommates. Cleaning up after this is going to be some work but I hope it will be worth it.
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I like how you were able to be flexible in your design loop once you realized that the initial design would be unrealistic. I think this is an important part of the design loop to make sure that the initial idea doesn’t wall you off from a different outcome that you may enjoy more. Hopefully the mess isn’t too difficult to clean up.
Gautham I really like how you sectioned off your design loop process into individual ideas and showed the results of each one. Usually the loop does not show how many iterations a designer went through before delivering a final product or even a prototype for that manner. I also like how you chose a medium and stuck with it throughout the process. Excited to see how your night light turns out!
Design limitations can be really frustrating sometimes, but it seems like you found a feasible alternative that will still express the furniture concept that you were originally interested in. Cardboard is the kind of material that could be imagined into anything: I’m really curious as to what your lamp looks like. Do you intend the lamp to be functional? If so, how will you prevent the cardboard from getting too hot? You having to change concepts may have been a result of beginning with questioning the materials rather than the product. Was this an important step in your design process that ended up defining your project?