Tangaroa College Bespoke Shelving Project

14 lessons

Bring your ideas to life!

In this lesson, you will start generating your own ideas. Using everything you have absorbed so far, you will complete at least 10 quick, ugly drawings of potential storage solutions.  

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Equipment

  • Workbook
  • Pens/pencils/paper
  • Computer/laptop

Guiding questions

Think about these questions as you work your way through the lesson:

  • What can I steal from my examples?
  • What should I avoid from what I have gathered?
  • What storage solutions am I drawn to from what I hunted and gathered? 
  • How can I include my inspiration in my own design work?
  • Am I thinking about the Technology Block when I'm designing - or just reacting to what I've found?

Lesson content

Time to translate what you have evaluated and hunted and gathered into some quick, ugly drawings (working drawings). At this stage, you should take the time to stop, breathe, and observe what you have liked about what you've looked at so far.

Answer some questions about what you have gathered so far in your workbook:

  • Straight off the bat, what do you notice about your stimuli? 
  • Are there any physical or functional properties that are repeatedly present? If so, this is likely to be something you need to pursue in your ideas. 

Once you have reviewed what you have gathered so far, it's time to use what you evaluated to get some tangible ideas out.

The trick for the ideation stage is to create idea generations that are FAST and ROUGH and deal with the ‘bigger’ aspects such as your storage needs and functionality. Thumbnails are the fastest and easiest way to do this. Push past the fatigue and try to generate 10 ideations - push yourself to add/remove things you wouldn’t usually consider.

Instructions

  1. 1

    Using what you have hunted and gathered, generate 10 basic ideas of GENERAL storage solutions - these ideas are just to get you thinking/started

  2. 2

    Label with questions that will help you develop your ideas like: 

    • How could I move this? 
    • How would this be locked? 
    • Could this be made out of other materials? 
    • Should I add surface design? 
    • What joinery should I use? 
    • What objects could this store? 
    • Do I need to simplify/or make the design more complex?
  3. 3

    Get feedback from your classmates and teacher. Ask them to write directly onto your pages in a different colour so it stands out.

    Ask them:

    • What they like and why.
    • What they would improve/change if the design was theirs.
    • Any other suggestions (including questions they might have like 'how does this open without a handle?')
  4. 4

    If working digitally, photograph your pages of sketching and add to your portfolio

    Note: Hollie's examples are found below.

Hollie's ideation

  1. Hollie's ideation

    Hollie's first design ideas

  1. Image example 2

    Hollie's first design ideas

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6

User + Object Considerations