foolfillment: the blog

I’m curious, I ask questions, I look at things and I wonder. I’m trying to get my 4th year Product Design class to do similarly.

Today we were looking at where they might get some inspiration for a radio they are designing. One of my favourite designers for getting conversations started is Phillipe Starck. The man is, quite simply, out of his tree. His work always elicits opinion. One thing I tried today towards the end of the lesson – out of my own curiosity – was to show them a picture of Starck’s Torche radio and get them to write down without discussion where they thought he might have got his ideas from.

I’d like to try it again here: without looking through any comments take a look at the image below and then try to think of an object, shape, motion, idea, or anything else that you think Starck might have had in mind when designing this radio. Once you have something skip to the bottom add a comment saying what you think his inspiration might have been. Then you can have a look to see what others saw in it – I expect most of you will have different answers.

In other news I’m a little disappointed that foolfillment didn’t make it into a list of 45 great blog designs – they must just not know about me yet (via Ewan’s delicious – everything I talk about at the moment seems to have come from there).

I’m on the look out for a camera/camcorder/webcam that I can use in my Graphic Communication classes and would like any advice/ideas people might have.

The idea is that it will be rigged up over a drawing board with the output displayed through a digital projector. How it works is open.

Ideally it will perform well in varied lighting conditions and will have an AV output.

Any suggestions? Could I go with a swish webcam and run it through a PC without losing too much quality? Or I could try to find a compact digital camera that runs from mains and doesn’t turn off automatically when no buttons get pressed for a while? Or should I just try to find the wee bit extra cash to get a cheapish DV Camera?

Or, does anyone have an expertise in making pinhole cameras?

Ewan bookmarked a link to some Escher inspired Lego models today which I enjoyed looking at and reading about, I found my way from there to the official Escher website which features fly-throughs of some of his work.

It got me thinking…

How long would it take a pupil to create something like the movie above? The S1s on Islay are making stuff just as good using Google Sketchup, and it took me about 2 minutes using Inventor to make the impossible triangle below, so, who’s up for the challenge?

It’s almost the end of the first week now, just a half day tomorrow. One bit of advice that kept coming up during our induction days last week was ‘don’t let teaching take over your whole life’ and boy do I know what they meant now!
As well as all of the teaching and preparation that goes with it there is also a whole raft of paperwork I have to be keeping up to date with for getting Full Registration, that is what I think I’ll be spending this weekend doing.

teaching’s taking over my life already, I’ve got lots of things I want to get done tonight and over the weekend, and more long term projects that I haven’t even looked at beginning yet. I’m hoping that these first weeks are a bit exceptional and that soon enough I’ll be on top of it all, but for now I’m busy all hours.

I’m really enjoying it though!

Jim McDougall left a comment last night saying he’d added my blog to his map of ScotEduBlogs.

It go me thinking about my map of Scottish Schools again, there is already a list of ScotEduBlogs with certain pieces of data : blog’s name; blogger’s name; description; tags. If one of the bits of data was a postcode then it should be possible to output that to another application. I suddenly realised that there must be an easy way to get data into Google Maps dynamically using it’s API, how else would all of the mashups work?

So one quick search later and I’ve found this map generator from the Official Google Maps API blog which takes data from a Google Spreadsheet and creates a Google Map. I’ve not tested it yet but hope to find time soon. It should then be easy as pie to make a map for all schools in Scotland from a database that already exists, if I can get access to it.

With flickrvision going 3D this week that sort of toy was nearer the front of my mind than it might otherwise have been, it gave me this idea: what about a dynamically refreshing picture of the latest posts from ScotEduBlogs? While there’s a lot of activity I think you might still be looking for a while before it changes .

So, as I said earlier today there was a session at Campie Primary on ‘ICT in East Lothian’ for all the new probationers. I tried to keep schtuum yesterday when people seemed to think it would be a day on how to get your emails.

Needless to say people were pretty surprised to see just what is going on with edubuzz and I spoke to and heard people who were excited by the possibilities of what the tools could offer for learning and teaching this year. When it came to my turn in the blogging session my cover was blown and I was named as an active blogger, and that of course set the challenge of finding my blog.

Hello to anyone who finds me, why not leave a comment? You can start by saying how chuffed you are to get a free 2gig pen drive!

I said I’d try to, here I am blogging from Campie Primary during lunch of my ICT intro at East Lothian.
Spent the morning playing with Garageband and edubuzz, lot’s of enthusastic people here which was good to see!

Also had chance to have a quick look – pownce works nicely, bodes well for my plans for net year.

Tomorrow is the start of a new life, I suppose.

The first of three induction days for all East Lothian probationers (that’s me), then two in-service days, then a week tomorrow I’ll be a teacher.

How about that for a daunting thought.

I am trying to deal with a question that has been eating away at me: What is the point of Graphic Communication? Literally graphic communication is enormously important, sending and receiving information in graphical means is something that I think everyone needs to be able to do. To me though as a subject taught in Scottish schools it is lacking enough relevance and coherence. I must immediately follow that up with this: I really enjoyed sitting the subject and I really enjoy teaching all aspects of it. I enjoy the course, I just feel a little ill at ease with it and in this post I’m trying to work out why and to illicit some response.

This post is longer than most of my usual ones so I’ll try and reel you in with some questions. I hope they are contentious enough to make you read on!
Why do we bother teaching orthographics?
Why on earth do we teach oblique parallel?
Why don’t we just bin all of our drawing boards and just take all drawings from computer generated models?
Instead of building up a folio of pre-selected drawings why don’t the pupils select what they think are the appropriate drawings?
Why is it not based around a theme of design?

Any of those started you grumbling?

For the sake of focussing discussion a little I’m going to look at the Standard Grade, these are the areas of the course content roughly (crudely?) summarised:

use of drawing instruments
reading and interpreting drawings
different line types for illustrating different things
how to sketch/draw different shapes and forms in different views
dimensions;
effective use of scale
recognising and using common graphical symbols
2D computer draughting, including text and common representative symbols

display of information – creating/interpreting graphs and diagrams
colour theory – demonstrate effective use of colour, justify choice
effective use of variety of media – colour pencils, markers, pastels
layout and lettering – achieving visual impact, Desktop Publishing, page layout
modelling – in card or paper or other suitable media

state the advantages/disadvantages of Computer Aided Drawing
identify and understand the function of various pieces of computer hardware
demonstrate a knowledge of graphic software packages

You might have noticed I’ve grouped them together a little. At the top is the content covering drawings; then a section that covers communicating information; then a section of what are, in my view, discrete facts to be regurgitated.
These three sections roughly relate to the three assessable areas which are supposed to have equal weighting, but you will see that the section on drawing has a lot more content than the other two (I said my summary was crude!) which leads me to one of the things I want to talk about : Why do we spend so much time on manual drawing methods? And why do we spend so much time on drawing types?
Another thing I want to discuss is how 3D modelling should fit in to the course. It is a bone of contention for a lot of people, but the software is here and it is changing things outside of school, should we not try to keep up?

Why do we spend so much time on manual drawing methods?
And why do we spend so much time on drawing types?

Perhaps around 70% of time in Standard Grade is spent teaching pupils how to create drawings using manual instruments, only around one third of the available marks come from this.
This could mean certain things
- the manual drawing is too hard/other areas are too easy for the marks available
- we are wasting our time and disadvantaging the pupils by not teaching the elements equally
- or the manual drawing skills pervades everything else, while we only assess part of it directly

So why do we teach manual graphics so heavily? What are we aiming for with this course? Is it to: produce young people who can draw a perfectly neat and accurate pencil representation of an artefact from a given view? Or is it to produce young people who are equipped to communicate ideas to and from other people in a variety of ways, and who are able to select the most effective method of communication, beit graphical or otherwise?
The latter has to be the aim for the course, for that reason my view is that the emphasis on manual technique is too great.

By all means teach the different types of view, but do it quickly and explain that very often they are of limited use. Explain that depending on the situation people illustrate things in different ways. Spend time on the technical drawing types that are of most use and explain why. Teaching the skills to create these drawings is important, it improves anyone’s ability to get ideas across, but teaching how to pick and create appropriate methods of communication allows for much more.

We should be furnishing the learners with the skills that will allow them to communicate ideas effectively in a variety of ways – teach the theory of presentation as well as the skills. Why spend ages on the terminology of DTP packages, or the many different types of site plan, garden layouts, maps, circuit diagrams? Instead get across the importance of clear layout, clarity of information, visual impact, colour theory, font selection, appropriate scale. Get across the bits that really matter to every situation instead of trying to cover every situation and stating the bits that matter. (I suppose this argument is similar to the one about why geography teachers have to spend time teaching all the symbols on a map when a map comes with a key)

The aim of the course has to be to give the pupils the skills/understanding of how to communicate effectively in their lives after school, not to give them discrete knowledge about things that in all probability they won’t come across.

So how do you do this? Well, how about through a folio of work? Each pupil could be given a brief: They are to create a series of items that communicate certain ideas to certain people. Who decides who these people are shouldn’t matter, perhaps the pupils select the audience, perhaps they are given a list to choose from – the idea has to be that the pupil has the task of communicating information to a range of groups of people. They would select and design the most appropriate methods to do that, and justify why.
The folio as it stands puts emphasis on using certain predetermined types of drawings and graphics, this would instead put the emphasis on understanding methods of communication without dropping the skills required to produce the drawings and graphics.

The question about why we spend so much time on manual boards teaching orthographics leads me directly to my next question:
How should 3D modelling packages fit into Graphic Communication?

Why do we spend so long using manual techniques when there is only a very small chance that anyone will use a drawing board outside of a school? (Am I right in saying this?) Why shouldn’t we just start teaching orthographics using a CAD package? Going further, why do we bother teaching orthographics at all? I think that is the question that will rile some people. I’m not actually suggesting that there is no place for drawings of certain views. What I am getting at is this : Is there an actual need to learn how to draw orthographic views anymore when you can make a computer model of an object and then generate any view from that?

I can understand that there is a need to be able to interpret drawings, but do you need to draw these drawings to be able to read them? If the skill is to interpret the drawings could we not give out a set of drawings and get the pupils to model them?

There is a danger though of the course becoming a ‘How to use Autodesk Inventor/Pro-Engineer/etc’ which in my view wouldn’t be desirable. How could that be avoided? What about bringing into the course a strong element of design? Have the pupils design an artefact to fit a brief, then model it and create a folio of drawings to present it to a client? Does this sail too close to Product Design? Is it be a bad thing if it does?

That’s where I’m going to leave it. What do you think? How do you feel about the courses as they stand? Please comment with your thoughts, I’d love to hear them so please comment and encourage others to do so as well.

One last point – please don’t be too negative, we can often be too quick to moan in this country, let’s instead be enthusiastic and constructive. As I said at the start I really enjoy graphics, and I’d like to make it better for the young people who sit it.

Ok, go!