Start of the Last Semester!

I hope everyone had a lovely start to the new year! My New Year’s resolution was to productively and efficiently concentrate on important aspects of my work and not get caught on minor aspects of a project and waste time.

Throughout the holidays I had to think about this project quite a lot. I wasn’t really happy with the object range I had chosen (a table, a plant pot and a frame) and I realised that I had two problems with the range. Firstly, there was no particular reason for why I selected the plant pot and the frame and because of that they did not seem well thought through. Secondly, I felt like creating a range would limited the time I had to develop each product and thus limit the overall quality of work. Therefore, when I started off the week I sat down and tried to find a solution this issue.

I realised that I would like to only focus on one product without compromising the time I spend on developing the design and prototype. Secondly, I looked at the three products and started to define why I was producing them. It quickly became apparent, that the only product that actually fit my intention was the table. I want something long lasting, that people will not throw away after a few uses. Furthermore, I did a small ethnographic research and looked into different living room environments.

I realised that there are typically two different types of tables in the living room: a coffee table and a side table. Therefore, I will focus on creating one of the two.

After deciding to solely create a table, I then went on to talk to the workshop. I did not want to focus on the manufacturing process too much, but I wanted to just double check that what I had in mind would work. The advice I got was to not use resin and small plastic pieces. Resin is a harmful chemical substance that will make recycling even worse, since the plastic pieces are enclosed by a different chemical material. Additionally, the approximate ratio of resin to plastic would be around 3:7. This means, that I would not be re-using a lot of plastic and would require large amounts of chemicals.

That resulted in me researching companies that sell recycled plastic boards. I had previously looked at this alternative, but I was put off due to how expensive it was. However, I was advised to look into sponsorships. For some reason, I had never considered this as an option. The company ‘Smile Plastic’ really intrigued me. Their designs are amazing visually and they do not look like plastic. I’ve ordered samples from them to get a feel for their material. I additionally looked at other companies and ordered a few samples from them too. Hopefully, seeing the material will help me to decide on how to make my product.

Since I know a great weakness of mine was to concentrate on the manufacturing process rather than the design itself, I tried to make sure this would not happen throughout this week. I started off looking for design inspirations and collected a collage on Pinterest, that can be seen here: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/alunaruben/honours-project/ . From there I used certain images as inspiration for a range of quick sketches of designs. Below, you can see a small selection of the total of 17 sketches.

Next week, I will evaluate all sketches and then determine how to move on and hopefully narrow down on one design to start creating proper prototypes soon!