First talk of the afternoon was from Steve Stott of Autodesk. Several of my year had seen Steve present a short session at a conference in Dunfermline last year, this session was an extended version of that. He has a background in engineering where he worked in workshops for around 15 years, he has also been a university teacher and a school teacher. His role now is with Autodesk - the company who make AutoCAD, Inventor, various other Computer Aided Drawing/Modelling/Manufacture products. The chances are that wherever you are you can see a product or building that was worked on in some wy with Autodesk software.
The main points throughout his talk were on trying to encourage teachers and pupils to get away from designing products by looking at existing products. To stop pupils going straight for catalogues for their inspiration. Rather to take inspiration and ideas from elsewhere and to change them into something different.
One thing that stood out for me was the superb quality of his images. He showed a huge number of drawings and photos of anything and everything, much of them at the start abstract things, beautiful shapes that could be anything. What do you feel? What emotion does this throw up? What is it? These questions so often just fall on their face in schools but with images like these the job is much easier.
He took us through a couple of products that he had designed right from the initial stages of looking for inspiration. One of which was a table top lamp which started out from images of starfish, another a toothbrush holder from images of athletes.
One theme throughout was the idea of an iterative design process rather than a simple linear approach. This is something I really agree with but is not something that easily fits into most design projects that are out in schools I have been in.
What allows such an approach in the way that Steve taught it is one of the big differences between Scotland and England - in England there is far more opportunity for computer aided manufacture (CAM). This in itself does not mean that an iterative approach couldn’t happen in Scotland but it does mean that in a project that is going to be made using CAM all the designing must be done before the manufacture starts, where as in most schools I’ve been in the design part is a folio that gets completed alongside the manufacture, thus removing most opportunities for creativity.
There was a big selection of the models he had made with classes, and a lot of images showing the designs evolving and these were pretty inspiring. They were almost all CAM made plastic models though and while they looked pretty good and showed a lot of creativity, I did feel that they were all a little too form based with not a lot of functionality. That’s perhaps a personal point of view, and maybe there were other projects that were towards the function end of the spectrum. He did take quite a bit of time talking about how he came up with the toothbrush holder and how it was made stable, but as far as I could tell (I didn’t get chance to see the model close up) it wouldn’t have been stable at all in the way he was saying. It would have been nice to see other models that had been made, ones with other materials perhaps.
I found it interesting that even though he was there with his Autodesk hat on he made very little mention of the products and showed very few screenshots of it in use with his designs. The majority of the design process that he showed us was of good old fashioned pencil renderings and annotations. This is really important because the designing is what’s important. We shouldn’t be throwing our pupils into a 3D modelling package too soon if they’d be better just drawing on paper - let their imagination be the limit to their creativity, not their ICT skills.
