Tuesday, November 17, 2015

Project: Wedding Window

The Story

A few months back two very dear friends of mine James and Tracey asked me to build something special for their wedding day. They wanted a backdrop for their ceremony and I was very honoured that they would ask me to build it. Early in the process they invited me along to view their newly found venue with them. The venue, Drury Buildings in Dublin, is a new-ish bar/restaurant/venue in the centre of Dublin just off Georges's st. This area has recently been marketed as the "creative quarter" of the city and this venue certainly had a lot of creative design flair in their interior. The bar and restaurant below were tasteful and classy without being too ostentatious and the venue above had a very relaxed vibe with mid-century modernist furnishings, parquet flooring and a mild post-industrial finish with rough plaster walls and exposed services.


Saturday, July 11, 2015

Sketches: Mandalas

In this post I'm going to talk about something a little different. While most of this blog so far has been about making this one is going to focus on sketching. I've showed sketches before from different stages of the design process but the sketches here have little to do with the design process. They are, however, important for completely different reasons.


Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Prototype: Concrete Jewellery

So for the past week I've been waiting for a delivery from the US of a product called Rockite. This is a type of cement mix that I've been hoping to experiment with for the Stephen's Green model base. I've seen it mentioned on Architectural model-making blogs many times so I ordered a small box of the stuff to give it a try.


Friday, March 6, 2015

Research / CAD: Stephen's Green Pavillion Model

So for the past few weeks I've been working on the early stages of a new model-making project. Late last year I got a few weeks experience of model-making in a company in Dublin called Modelworks Media. The project was huge (See: Frank Ghery and Norman Foster's plans for Battersea Power Station phase III) and there was an incredible team of people working on it. Most were temporary hires like myself, mainly recent graduates from either model-making or industrial design courses, but the main staff of the company were a really skilled team from whom I learned a lot of new skills in a relatively short time.


I've had an interest in model-making for many years and decided to scratch that itch with a project of my own. I've started work on building a reproduction model of a minor landmark in Dublin city centre, that being a Victorian Kiosk by the lake in St. Stephen's Green, precisely the one pictured below.


Monday, December 1, 2014

Model & Sketches: Work Stool

Today's post deals with another offshoot that arose as a result of the workshop. I wanted to create a portable perch stool to accompany the workshop. I needed it to be able to be stable and comfortable but also compact so it could be stowed along with or inside the workshop. I had the idea to use a bicycle seat for a stool head after trying out a number of perch stools, both at the IMM cologne a few years ago and after a talk in NCAD in dublin by Simon Dennehy from Irish design firm Perch. I had the pleasure of using a few more recently when I interned in Oslo for Peter Opsvik and used a version of one of his own designs the Capisco chair while working in the office.


Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Internship: Peter Opsvik AS, Oslo

This will be a very different sort of post. Today I'm going to talk about the internship I completed in June this year with Peter Opsvik AS in Oslo. The internship was organised by the German-Irish Chamber and their sister organisation the Nork-Tysk Handelskammer (Norwegian-German Chamber of Commerce). It is part of an EU Lifelong Learning Project called Strengthening the Capacity of Managers. This is a Leonardo DaVinci Mobility Project which involves the interns travelling to another country and culture to practice the use of their acquired language skills and immerse themselves in the culture of that country. The project sends people to Germany, Spain and Norway, searching any of those titles brings you plenty of links should your want to learn about any of them. Sufficed to say the project is funded through the EU and organised by the organisations I mentioned above.

Wednesday, October 1, 2014

3D Model: Toolbox

So, today I'm finally getting around to posting images of the 3D model I've been using for reference during the building of the toolbox. The first set of pictures below are taken directly from Solidworks and were rendered in a quick and dirty way using Photoworks, the inbuilt rendering engine of Solidworks. The four images below show the box going from it's initial closed configuration to it's open configuration.

Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Documentation: Toolbox

So at this stage construction of the toolbox is well under way and I'm happy to report that while it's going a bit slower than I would like it's going quite well. While I promised a post detailing the 3D work I've done that will be saved for my next post. The post after that will show some of the construction work so far but for now I'd like to share an important part of the process that got me to this point.

While generating design documentation isn't a particularly sexy aspect of the work of design it is really important. You never really hear about designers being lauded for their magnificent spreadsheets but as a designer we spend a lot of time working on these sorts of documents and they are really valuable resources. They help keep costs lower, keep schedules shorter and most importantly ensure accuracy and correct detailing in the products produced. I also think this sort of exercise is often overlooked with bad consequences. The documents I'll be discussing today are a bill of materials or BOM, an aluminium extrusion calculation, an interactive ply cutting list and two simple cutting diagrams.