#designandtechnologyreflections

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Robert McCaffrey - Graduate of Product Design 

Products for Purpose

“life is like riding a bicycle, to keep your balance you must keep moving.”

Robert shared with us the insights and experiences he had that led him to his clever and classic designs. Having become a footwear designer, specialising in smart shoes for commuter cyclists, he has successfully designed for a real context and filled a hole in the footwear industry. His creations are designed for a very specific function, smart cycling. A smart shoe with a rubber panel in the soul to stop your flat-bottomed smart shoe from slipping of the pedal when wet, using materials that allow feet to breathe when the body is exerted. I ‘popped-collar’ style heal to make the shoes reflective when in the light at night. And my favourite feature was the show that made use of the patterned leather and underneath was a reflective layer that was so subtle you could only tell when the lights were off and we all got our phone torches out. I found this lecture very interesting, not only because Robert was engaging and had an interesting story to tell but because of the market he was selling to. After spending a semester designing for ‘the cyclist’ I have a pretty good idea in my head of who my customer is, someone very different to Robert McCaffrey’s customer. It opened my eyes and reminded me that despite being under the same umbrella, ‘the cyclist’, it is very important to remember the many different types of people you could be designing for and to not lump them all together within the same title. Robert highlighted just how important it is to have an image, and solid idea in your head of who it is your designing for and why.

“everyone is a genius. but if you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

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Matt Marais - Graduate of Product Design Engineering 

The Power of Kickstarter

Matt Marais is the creator of the camera equipment that sits under the company name Loki; which he started developing as his final year project when he was a student at GSA. He told us about the journey he took, after graduating with his masters, to get his project to market. Matt gave us one of the most inspiring and interesting talks that we have been given as part of out Design and Technology module, he spoke about a very important lesson in design; knowing when not to give up on an idea, and learning from your mistakes and failures. What struck me most was the way in which Kickstarter dictated many of the steps, both forwards and backwards, that he made.

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A very thought provoking short talk from Ben Craven on the importance of approximate calculations from the very beginning of any project.

Using extremely vague and roughly estimated numbers, we were shown how doing the most simple of school-standard sums can allow you to get a very quick insight into the feasibility of your suggested project. It also brought to light a factor of sustainable energy that I hadn’t thought too much about previously. Ben spoke about the difference between large energy savings versus small energy savings, he questioned the promises of companies that would be ‘solely powered by wind’ without calculating what percentage of the country they would need to cover in wind farms in order to make this possible, how car companies planning to produce solely electric cars without mentioning that the solar panel required per car would need to be the size of a tennis court. I think people have extremely unrealistic, skewed and optimistic views on ‘saving’ energy (I know, to some extent, that I did).

We were set the question of ‘How many cups of tea can be made for the energy equivalent that of flying a single person out from Glasgow to Singapore and back?’ 

I have always been told to only put as much water as I need and no more to boil in the kettle. And whilst this may reduce your energy bill by a couple of pence along with a few more ‘green life hacks’ and allow you to feel good about saving the planet, the impact is infinitely small. I, by all means still agree with this way of using a kettle. It is estimated that we, as a nation, guzzle 165 million cups of tea alongside 70 million cups of coffee every single day. Based on our approximated values from today, for every one cup of boiling water made, it takes 80 kJ of energy. If you so much as use half a cup too much, you’re essentially wasting 235million x 40kJ, and no estimations need to be made to work out that that’s a lot of wasted energy.

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Plastic Mouldings, Irvine 

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Urban Spaceman - a BBC documentary about the Australian designer Marc Newson.

It’s funny, I watched the documentary about this ‘great designer’ and I don’t really recall much work that I liked, to give him his dues I want one of his Ford concept cars, that thing was cool. As someone that is yet to learn to drive, the idea of a simplified car with minimal and ergonomically pleasing controls is certainly appealing, and is achieved perfectly in my opinion. 

Despite the majority of his work not being to my taste I would still argue that Marc Newson is a great designer. The sheer range of stuff he has produced is nuts. He has managed to apply his design thinking to so many different applications, products and furniture. All the while while I don’t necessarily like the stuff; I can more than definitely appreciate the thought and execution behind it. 

When I first saw the well known Lockheed Lounge, I instantly decided I didn’t like it (it reminded me of the characters in the video game WORMS). Part of me doesn’t agree with what appears to be a worldwide opinion, that these ‘great design chairs’ are worth up to £650,000; when their main function, to be sat on, cannot be fulfilled as they are ‘not comfortable’ and they are ‘too expensive to be sat on’. 

However, after discovering the intention behind the chair, attempting to create a piece of furniture that replicates the appearance of liquid mercury, I was able to appreciate the meaning and work that had gone into creating it. Maybe all design should be sold with its’ story, but then again, maybe it shouldn’t need to be explained. 

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A weekly assignment with the intention to broaden my understanding behind design: I will be giving my reflections on the events and discussions covered in our Design and Technology Module. 

‘The Demise of Skilled Traditional Manufacturing - What are you willing to pay for?’

Above is a photograph of one of the skilled craftsmen that works on the Brookes saddle production line. His job is to, by hand, chamfer the edges of the saddles to give them a gradient along each edge. This job requires an enormous amount of skill and experience along with hours and hours of concentration every day. It is a job that has taken years of watching, learning, practice, and experience to perfect. This can be said for many apprenticeships, a path way in life that is becoming more and more obsolete. 

Renowned for their longevity and the personalised fit that comes with longterm use, Brookes produce a product that is arguably one of the best in the field, one that takes 3 days to be made by hand, and one that is going to last you a long time. The question is, ‘Is it the meticulous, perfected hand-production of their product that is the reason for all these features?’

In a time of additive manufacturing, more and more products are made by creating a digital version on a machine, programmed to another machine to create the parts, another machine to put the pieces together and onto another to package it. The only human contact being fingers to keyboard and mouse at the initial computer stage and at the very end when the customer takes it home. While this is all very impressive, that man has created machine to do all these tasks, there is definitely something in having someone spending their day pouring over your product, paying attention to the little details, applying the human touch. Is there a point where machines do too much for humans? Don’t get me wrong, machined production lines have their place (I distinctly remember watching a documentary where it was someone’s job to put the caps on toothpaste tubes). It is a way of keeping costs down for large batch lines of the same product, for having less employees and staff, and in someways is probably more reliable than real people (in the way that humans can detect cracks by observation and touch, but only to a visible scale, whereas technology like lasers and radiation can detect mirco-scale cracks.) At this point it seems that the only truly human parts of all manufacture is in the design stages. 

After our last project, I have had a very personal experience working with leather by hand. I got to design a leather product from the very first sketch, making iterations, trying out prototypes, discovering different ways it could be made, failing, doubting the idea, seeing what was in my head in my hands, creating a miniature hand-crafting production line, right through to handing them to the shop they were sold. And I was able to be proud of what I had provided. Maybe you don’t get that, as a designer or creator when you design on such a large scale, that enjoyment of knowing someone has chosen to pay for something you spent time, care and attention on, maybe you just get money.