It's not easy to take an object as familiar and functional as a table or chair and turn it into something new and exciting - but this semester, students in John Baird's Furniture Making class did just that, creating usable and beautiful works of art & design.  

Baird's class had two major assignments.  For the midterm project, students were asked to create a piece of furniture using a 48x48" square of Medium Density Fiberboard and mechanical fasteners. 

L - R: Dylan Box works on his MDF chair;  Charles Samuels - MDF Table

For their more open-ended final projects, students designed and developed chairs, tables, cabinets, and other objects.  They were allowed to follow their interests in fabrication methods and materials, so the finished projects incorporated everything from cement to carbon fiber to fiberglass.

Penn Greene sketches and displays models.  Scale drawing and model making were emphasized in the class.

John Baird meticulously documented the process and the final furniture pieces – modular stools, guitar stands, a fabric filled hanging nest chair and much, much more.  Take a look: click the thumbnails below to view larger images.

In case you've been living in a vacuum (I hope it's a Dyson) for the past couple months you should know about TEDxUofM: an event encouraging CRAZY ideas worth sharing. This one is being organized by students (lots from A&D), faculty, and a couple measly staffers who are bringing the format of the amazing TED talks to the Michigan Theatre on April, 8.  If you can't make the event (which is almost sold out), you can watch the live streaming version at several campus locations and on-line at the website.

My involvement grew out of a heavy addiction to TED injections from the past several years including talks by Ray Kurzweil, Theo Jansen and Mae Jemison.  So, naturally, when A&D undergrad Dylan Box sent out the open call for design team members, I signed up as fabricator for the students' crazy design ideas, including the Michigan-Daily-Frontpage-Stealing Diag Day X-Table which was built by Teshia Treuhaft, Dylan, and myself (with sanding advice from Erika Cross, duh).

This is just one of several custom designs of every dimension which will adorn the Michigan Theatre in just over two weeks.  Watch for updates on the TedXUofM website.  Check out the speaker list and sign up to attend via the link above.

Oh! And quit using facebook to tell your friends when you're dropping a deuce, instead use it to connect to the energy surrounding this event showcasing some of the most wicked-brilliant people who work and play around you every day!

Share your CRAZY ideas!

And one more thing,  START USING THESE BLOGS TO SHAPE THE FUTURE OF A&D!!!  Think blogs are tired, stale, washed up? Tell that to this woman:

Donia, one of your fellow students and TEDxUofM speaker, used a blog to give Egyptian revolutionaries a voice when theirs were cut off.  Maybe you heard how that turned out?  Crazy idea.  Crazy.

Last Friday, I was on my way back to my office with a second cup of coffee when I ran into a group of gladiators, breakdancers and pirates on the first floor - and even here at the School of Art & Design, that is something that just doesn't happen all the time.   I eventually figured out that they were students in Matt Shlian's TMP 1: Construction class, and were in the middle of a performance/critique.  I managed to get a few pictures...

The assignment: Student teams had to traverse the street gallery (the hallway outside of Slusser Gallery), staying at least 6" off the ground. This traversal also had to be performative, keeping their audience (the rest of the class) in mind.

The tools: foam core board and glue.  

The teams of students tackled this assignment in pretty amazingly different ways:

A gladiator, complete with foam core armor, shield, and sword danced across the space in really high platform sandals.

The second team created foam core shades and a boombox, and used them along with the music of… um, Vanilla Ice(?!) to stack, unstack, and dance across a series of foam platforms.

A giant foam core music staff became the platform for the third team's Lady Gaga-inspired performance (as seen from above).

In a Pirates of the Carribean-inspired performance, the fourth team got pretty technical: one student piloted a tiny boat that rocked and pivoted on two cylinders to rotate around her teammate.

The fourth team went American gladiator: in a blue vs. red battle, the combatants advanced and retreated in a series of matches.

Pretty impressive stuff, especially on a Friday morning - and this is only the first project! Stay tuned for more TMP 1 images, coming soon!

On Monday, Mark Fisher from IDEO/ Chicago visited the interdisciplinary class, Design for Social Change, to talk about using prototypes in the design process. The class is taught by Nick Tobier from A&D and Moses Lee of Engineering.

The design challenge for the class is "the school lunch", a woefully lacking meal for most school children across the country. During the past few weeks, the students have been interviewing parents, children, cafeteria cooks, teachers and other relevant parties to assemble some problem statements to work from. They are now ready to start prototyping.

Mark Fisher has been at IDEO for 14 years but hails from the Detroit area originally. Mark was so enthusiastic about prototypes he was practically evangelical. “We make hundred of prototypes when we’re working on a product. We use foam core, clay, anything we can get our hands on. This is how you think,” he says, “through making!” Mark described bringing a kind of ‘beginner’s mind’ to the design process. Surround yourself with people that don’t think like you. Let your potential users design an ideal prototype for you, not because you want their designs but because, in the act of making, they will end of showing you the problems they can’t verbalize.  And seek out the extremes-- the user who would use the product three times a day and the user who would use it once a month.  That’s where you find the most interesting problems to solve.

After Mark’s talk, Nick Tobier handed out plastic fruit and vegetables and other supplies so students could begin thinking through their design problems with prototypes. Stay tuned for more from this class. Next week, they'll be handing in the prototypes they come up with on Wednesday.

Zack Jacobson-Weaver has a moment of reflection with a plastic weiner.

Cripes!  Sorry no updates from the studio for 3 weeks, but the truth is, we're too damn busy right now to stop and take pictures.  If anyone else has some, send 'em in.  Because slow, we are not.  The studio is re...diculous busy right now.  One thing I didn't miss was the esteemed Jeff Han of TED talks fame.  Jeff was brought in by TCAUP who also brought in a delicious rotisserie-ed goat today in a bacchanalian great-Friday feast.  Nice one Lone Star Kennedy!

Mr Han is famous for being one of the first developers of the multi-touch computer screen now almost made ubiquitous via iPhone and Droid.  Everyone was truly engaged in the presence of the source of their incessant IM-ing and F-booking.  Han definitely put on a show, nearly two hours, of his company's recent innovations on the now-expected interface.  For some of us, the highlight was the development of 3D apps, including texture mapping, which is notoriously tedious stuff.  

Han's hardware is underwritten by a marvelously elegant bevy of mathematics.  If there's one thing I think the visual learners in the crowd took away from the evening it was that, compared to mathematicians, we all have second-order jobs starting...in the recent past!  The beauty of Perceptive Pixel's work is in the invisible algorithmic magic happening behind the scenes.  Something I won't pretend to comprehend.

However!

There remains room for observations from other disciplines such as I.D. (Which Han wholly embraced). I thought it was interesting that he acknowledged a shortcoming in the ability of two hands to articulate certain "natural" movements particularly where one hand could not pass around or through the other.  I thought it was weird that their hardware was presented as EITHER multi-touch, OR employing an external element such as a stylus.  It seemed immediately obvious to me that, like alot of hind-sight solutions, the answer lies in the space between.  Try as I did, I was not chosen to ask my question....s: Is Perceptive Pixel considering a hybrid Touch-Tool approach?  Can we gain value from all of the game controllers that have spun throught the market.  The Rock Star drum kit for example.  Is there a combo meal in the works?  Is there a future for the mouse?   And if not, why did you use one to present your awesome talk, Mr Han?

Emma McNally creates beautiful graphite drawings whose intricate lines evoke maps, networks, and many other forms of data representation in their stark complexity. A 2008 essay by Ana Balona de Oliveira discusses some of the theoretical underpinnings of McNally's work, and includes some insight from the artist herself.