Week 1

Assignment #1.1

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GOOD DESIGN

Here’s a simple artifact that I love and that makes my life easier every day: bamboo salad “hands”. When tossing ingredients for salad or pasta, ordinary long-handled tongs or spoons are frustratingly hard to manipulate.There is always the temptation to drop those narrow instruments on the counter and sink one’s hands right into the food. But that’s unsanitary, messy, and even painful (in the case of hot pasta.) These inexpensive tools allow you to get in close to the ingredients– the next best thing to your own pair of hands. They are sturdy and so cheap that I keep several sets in my kitchen at all times.

Salad Hands

Assignment #1.2

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FIND THE GAP

My ten gaps:

  1. A way to keep the slippery laces of my running shoes from untying themselves.
  2. A way to keep the sheets tucked in at the bottom of the bed on warm nights when they are not weighted down by a quilt.
  3. A way to keep squirrels from raiding our bird feeder.
  4. A way to archive the many, many, many unwieldy sized pieces of artwork our kids made when they were young.
  5. A system for organizing the hundreds of tangled cables, storage drives, and other electronic stuff in my office closet so I don’t keep re-buying the same objects.
  6. A solution to the annoying problem of where to put my purse so I can access it while driving if there is a passenger up front beside me.
  7. A system for keeping track of our cars’ milage so we don’t forget to change the oil and inadvertently void our warranties.
  8. A way to do a Renga chain electronically.
  9. How to keep plastic water bottles from turning into hot, toxic, BPA cocktails when I leave them in the car on a hot day.
  10. A way to keep socks from losing their mates in the wash.

Assignment #1.3

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VISUAL EXPRESSION I 

Submit a sketch of a chair that fills the page, uses dark lines and annotations where appropriate to explain certain parts of the sketch.
tobias-chair

Assignment #1.4

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My Gap: create a (really) squirrel-proof bird feeder. The idea was to use a simple wire pulley to suspend the feeder between two trees, so that the feeder could not be reached by the squirrels.

squirrel-proof-diagram

pulley-photo

Note: I did not have a wide enough angle lens to capture the trees on either end of the pulley, but you can see the approximate distance in the drawing above.