XB2002 - Quick Recap on Modelling

Upon return to university from summer I was tasked with creating a bin, similar to a skip that I had completed last year, just as a quick recap on my skills of 3DS Max. Thankfully not much had left me and modelling the bin was fairly easy.

The basis for the bin was similar to the bin below.

Then below is the bin I created, modeled and textured. The modelling went very well and very smooth, I felt very confident whilst modelling. However unfortunately my laptop at the time didn't have photoshop so I was forced to texture using paint, which of course looked horrible, although I did try to keep it stylized so it didn't look too ridiculous.

Though I will admit, that I did maybe go overboard  on the shapes, although on the other hand I felt that it did indeed help make it look more stylized.

XB2001 - Paper Based Design

XB2001 started by taking a brief look at our tutor's past work, and promptly beginning our work for the semester.

To being we were to create a paper based designed game in groups with each group given a different task. My group received the task of created a 2 player game with the rules that it must be turn based and on a tiled board, similar to the way in which chess is basically set up.

The result of which was a board game called "Chicken Cross" which pitted 2 players at the task of crossing the road before the other chicken sitting on the opposite side of the road with a grid overlay.

The game's rules were as follows:

• Players draw 5 cards from a shuffled deck, each with a special effect on the game. 

• Players then roll at the start to determine who goes first.

• Player movement depends on dice roll. They can move left, right and up as many units as possible determined by the dice roll.

• Before a player moves they can place down a card which may have one of the effects listed below.

•   First player to reach the other side of the road wins.

• Additionally a dice will feature 3 faces coloured red whilst 3 are green to signify if a cards effect is positive or negative.

 Card                                        Effect

Cone                              Player places small obstacle taking up 1 grid on the board

Barricade                       Dependent on barricade type, blocks player movement

Traffic Jam                     Coloumn of cars cross the board for 2 turns blocking movement before
                                       moving on.

Oil Slick                         Area of 2x2 grids is placed on the board where a player either is granted +2
                                       moves if the player gets a green dice roll, or -2 moves if the dice roll is red.

Chicken Flight               Grants a player the ability to fly over barricades and other obstacles.

Citizen Help                   Enemy player misses a go.

Vehicular Drag Back     Roll dice, if even number appears the enemy player's next move will be
                                       halved, if however it's odd the card effects the other player.

Truck Smash                  When used the truck will either knock back the enemy player on a red dice
                                       roll, or knock the player forward 6 spaces

Once we had physically made the game we play tested it a couple of times to test how fun it was, and it was actually good fun. However the board was far too wide which made it very easy to avoid obstacles and it ended up being quite an easy and uneventful game. Although that is why you play test these things.

DD2000 - Objects of Design - The Bad

Push Pull Doors

Push pull doors were invented by Chiu and I-hsin (according to United States Patent 502991) in 1991. These doors I feel are a horrible piece of design, as they have to physically tell you to either push or pull on the door, which in my opinion is just troublesome, as people will be walking through an office in mid thought, or perhaps someone is entering a shop after a long walk and aren't as aware as they'd normally be, and end up coming across an obstacle that requires though.

Doors are important objects in our world, they allow privacy and shelter for rooms and buildings whilst also allowing us to enter and exit at the same time. Doors are a very common thing to come across, they are at every entrance and exit to rooms and buildings, and so you would think that someone wouldn't use such a literal way of labeling whether a person should push or pull a door because it requires conscious thought instead of some subconscious thought. For instance the design below would require slightly less thought, however it is entirely possibly that someone on the pull side will just push without realizing, I know myself that I have done this as well as plenty of other people in the world.

Really doors should require much less thought such as a handle that would feel awkward or ward to try and push on, or additionally, we could implement more automatic doors which require no thought at all.

DD2000 - Objects of Design - The Good

Egg cartons were originally invented by a newspaperman called Joseph Coyle in British Columbia in 1911 to solve an ongoing dispute between a hotel owner and the farmer who supplied him with eggs, most of which were broken, every day. Successfully, Coyle designed and developed a structurally secure carton which not only safely housed the eggs and prevented them from rocking around during transport, but also firmly and easily stacked up on each other.

Coyle developed these cartons out of paper and made them by hand for years until he developed machinery and eventually mass-produced the Coyle Egg Safety cartons that are now sold worldwide.

I chose this object because I feel that it is something that it is worldwide, well known and something that most people would take for granted. They are very simple in design in that there are small little holes to house each egg a child would understand that the eggs, objects of similar size to the holes, will fit firmly within.

Looking further into the shape of the carton are the struts that stick up in the centre of each group of 4 eggs separating them apart from each other and further preventing them from knocking around and breaking. Although these struts then also help stack the cartons as the struts are hollow, and were the cartoons to be stacked the struts would fit into the hollow struts of the carton above it. Finally, evidence of how well the egg carton was designed can be seen by how little the design has changed in over a century.