Balmoral Plastic Project

With the excitement of last semester over and in the past, it is time to move on and look foward to the future. What better way than the start of a new project. Like the Ponoko project, this is going to be a live project as we are designing for a company. The company is "Balmoral", an Aberdeen based company that has been providing solutions to the offshore, engineering, building, chemical and plastic sectors since 1980. Balmoral Tanks, which is a branch of the Balmoral Group, is a leading tank design, engineering and manufacturing company. The company provides the most comperhensive range of tanks products avaliable from a single source across Europe. Balmoral tanks use roto-moulding to produce their tanks as it seem to be the most suited process to use for the scale of their products.

Our breif is to desgin for one on the following senarios:

1: Design for a UK Refugee/Homless Shelters and Storage

2: Design for Water Adaptation & Conservation

Ponoko - Final Output

This is my final solution for the Ponoko project. I was want to experiment with sound and the different way to produce it. I looked at how the accoustic guitar uses its hollow frame to amplify the sound of the strings, and tried to incorporate this method in to my design. The final output was this sond box that the user assembles themself from the laser cut boards recieved from Ponoko. The box is separated into different volumes so when they are played (hit with a drum stick) they produce different notes. The sound box also comes with a flat pack drum stick.

Ponoko - Open_Soruce Project

From one project straight into another one. As the NCR finishes we are presented with a new challenge to over come. This new project is entitled Open_Soruce: Democratic Design and the client that we are designing for is a New Zeland based company called Ponoko. Ponoko are a company that bases their entrie business on providing a service from designer to send their design to be produced. Anyone can use this service but you have to design something that can be cut from a flat sheet of material that is provided by Ponoko (flatpack).

The outline of this project is to design smething using the facilities that are provided by Ponoko that is based on a design studio, garden or office enviroment.

NCR - The Results

It was a long few week but the NCR project has finally drawn to a close, and the winner is........

Gray's School of Art (of course). Steve was crowned the over all winner with a powerhouse presentation about Ikea.

I do not make it into the final 7 but I tried my hardest with the idea I had. Boards are displayed above. The idea was to add value to digital downloads to make them more appealing to me. This is because I don't download music and prefer buying cds for the tangible object. I designed a service that would be added as an extra when downloading music which would let the user download more media (such as bonus tracks or artwork) relating to the band if they listed to that band enough or visit locations relating to the band.

NCR Project - Selfish Self Service

The gloves are off. Both fighters have entered the ring. The NCR competition between RGU and Dundee is offically underway.

For the start of the project we were asked to produce an A3 sheet that displays what inspires you, your hobbies, your drives etc. For my board I decided to show that music is my main infulence and also what is going on inside my head (displayed with the random asortment of lyrics).

Digital Natives Project - Unsocial Factor

Mobile phone are seen as a socail tool that helps us connect with the rest of the world. In this video we wanted to highlight the fact that they can also be unsocail to some degree. The idea behind this was to show that if you are part of a couple (you and girlfriend/boyfirend/friend/) and one of you gets a call or a text then the other person feels isloated.

Digital Natives Project - Competitive Environment

For this project the class was split up into group and each group was given different research methods to use for gathering information about how "digital natives" interact with modern technology. My group had to role-play scenarios to display and redefine out findings. In this video we tried to highlight the competitive environment of online gaming and the fact that anyone can join in the fun in a familiar environment (as show by the design studio). This video was enspired by a banned xbox 360 advert and also the fake gun fight that is featured in Spaced.