I had an informative and fun experience during this Aesthetics of Design course. I signed up for this class to step outside the standard mechanical engineering curriculum and to learn more about aesthetics, something I feel that I am very unfamiliar with. I learned quite a lot about different aesthetics such as mid-century modern and minimalism. I found an interest in minimalism, which influenced both of my projects, more so my final project. I really enjoyed being able to complete engineering projects that were more focused on aesthetics, rather than doing engineering analysis and crazy calculations, which has been my college experience so far. 

The first major project I made was a picture frame. A key project requirement was to use recycled or reused materials. I found some wood on campus and I used some scrap metal I was saving for a future project. I chose to use mid century modern as the aesthetic because I liked how it looked and the principles behind it. A feature in my picture frame is metal and wood layering. I thought about how I wanted to resemble the MCM look, and I thought the use of various materials was nice. 

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to complete this project, but I was able to get a good foundation down so I can finish it in the future. A main issue that’s stopping me is that the metal frame is not square. Something happened during welding and the frame is off at an angle. I couldn’t solve this problem at the time of the project, so I’ll save it for later. 

Heres a link to this project: https://www.aesdes.org/2024/02/21/picture-frame/ 

For the final project, I designed and created a cooler fan. This project’s requirements had very loose requirements, the main one being a dynamic aspect, but it was still very challenging to culminate a semester’s knowledge into one project. I decided to rework a little prototype I made that really only focused on the function of it. This idea turned out to be a great idea because the aesthetic design principles I learned in the course helped tremendously in improving the fan. 

I chose to use minimalism for the design because I wanted to minimize the size and look of the artifact, and minimalism was a good aesthetic to choose. By the end of the project, I was very happy with the final result. I was concerned about successfully 3D printing it, but it turned out to work on the first try. There are some cosmetic issues with it, but I think it still looks great. I went off the minimalism track a bit to add metal covers. I just wanted to learn some more about metalworking and I thought it would add a better look to a 3D printed, plastic part. 

Heres a link to this project:

Part 1: https://www.aesdes.org/2024/04/24/minimalist-cooler-fan-final-report-part-1/

Part 2: https://www.aesdes.org/2024/05/01/cooler-fan-how/

I had a really enjoyable experience in this course, I was able to work on projects pretty much of my choosing, and I was able to learn a lot about aesthetic design. I signed up for this course thinking that this will help me in engineering and design, and I definitely believe it did.