Vive La Vida = Live the life.

In this spatial design project, I explore the juxtaposition of adrenaline and relaxation on a single villa.

This villa consists of:

2x swimming pool

1x carpark

1x wheelchair accessible ramp

3x levels

4x rooms

1x bridge

2x pvc roofs

Reflection for this semester:

I was completely clueless about how to do ideation sketches, isometric, orthographic drawings etc when the semester started. I always felt that I did not have a eye for detail, which I forced myself to challenge that self-perception. In this final project, I decided that learning comes from putting forth your biggest idea and working towards that. Along the way, I faced many difficulties. I felt that the cardboard was almost impossible to cut nicely, my scissors gave me a hard time and I had a sore hand after I finished the project. Ideas felt limited, and I thought that I couldn’t shy away from building a conventional house instead of a place specially designed for relaxation.

All in all, I felt a sense of achievement for having learnt how to work with various materials and mediums in forms and visualization. I am pleasantly surprised with my works as I did not have much expectations at the start of semester. Mr Ka wai encouraged me to step out of my comfort zone and transform a simple lint roller to a giant prototype, then lastly to this villa. I would take this module again if given a choice as I believe there are always things for me to learn from this module.

Reflections

The process of making this lint roller was tedious. Every step of the way required much thinking, especially when I decided to cut a compartment in the roller casing and then sanding down a slope/triangular shape. I faced many problems on the way and somehow it allowed me to think of unconventional or ingenious methods to solve them. Due to the scale of the object, I had to cut the roller casing into 4 different parts so that i can sand the inner compartments. Afterwards, I had to piece all of them together and sand them again. I was happy with how the model turned out and definitely satisfied with not having taken the shortcut of leaving out some intrinsic details and changing my sketch model to simplify it. The sheer scale of my object meant more work for me but I can now confidently say that I can achieve what I set myself to do. Being practical was very important as I rationed my work into days, knowing that I would need ample time for the putty or glue to dry so that I could continue to my next step. Overall, my inexperience in form made me despise the process but enjoy the outcome. The inability to deal with foam in an efficient manner was really disturbing to me and I constantly use the google search bar to find better methods/solutions to my model. I have learnt a great deal through this project and am excited to do more challenging assignments in the future.

My process to break apart the lint roller.

We were tasked to create 40 individual thumbnail sketches from our Assignment 1 item;

which happened to be a lint roller for me. On hindsight, I did regret choosing lint roller as

my object of choice as it was too simplistic in design and lacked the intricacies of other

objects such as hair dryer or vacuum cleaner, or even a drill. Thus, starting on Assignment

2 felt like a mounting task as I really struggled to come up with new ideas and kept referring

to existing objects to help me come up with my ideas. I really disliked THAT process and I

felt no sense of ownership of my drawings as they fell way below my expectations. Why

would anybody find my idea interesting if it was simply based on another invention?

 

Thus, after 26 painful sketches… I decided to redo the entire draft. This time round, I looked

long and hard at my previous sketches and used elimination to the sketches I felt were OK

over to my new sketches. After a few youtube videos for inspiration and listening to talk about

how ‘limitless’ and interesting it is to come up with ideation sketching, I picked up my pencil and

marker and just kept going at the paper, erasing from time to time to make sense of my sketches.

What I felt was really intriguing was that I would lean back and try to connect the dots after sketching out.

This kept the process very fascinating and to be honest the hours spent drawing the sketches didn’t

feel as long.

 

I was really glad to have thrown the old sketches out and start over, instead of ‘salvaging’ it. Breaking

apart the archetypal components of the lint roller allowed for much more creative space.

Picture of lint roller


Drawing of lint roller


2 point perspective drawing of lint roller

We were tasked to produce a 3rd angle projection of a select household object, an isometric drawing of the object and also a 2-pt perspective drawing of the object. I choose a lint roller for the assignment as it was different from the usual household objects that can be easily found, and although it seems like a very simple object, I’ve come to find that it was intricate in design. I took awhile to resize the images into photoshop and editing them from there, but I was happy with the work I produced. I have learnt to see products in a more sophisticated manner and now have a deeper understanding on how products are designed.