The 3rd week of school has passed and again, time goes so fast… and I’m trying to really direct my energy toward keeping things under control because I’m starting to realize that maybe I’m taking on a bit too many things to handle for my no-so-good ability to multitask. It’s not very surprising though given my over-achiever-ish inclination that I’m putting myself in such a situation. ugh… it’s seriously needed that I become a super pro with time management. But a good thing is that I’m feeling refreshed thanks to the things around me that constantly poke me to be awake!

Look at those cute little koala and kangaroo watching the monitor trying to learn the stuff. They are too cute.

randomly came across and screen captured from a adobe flash tutorial http://tv.adobe.com/watch/flash-downunder/3d-inside-of-flash/

Some of the logos I found interesting… I like the first one a lot because it opens the possibilities to be combined with other words, which seems to render this organization (New Museum of Contemporary Art) not as a set and fixed entity, but rather ever-changing living organism…

I definitely want to incorporate some kind of flexible/metamorphic forms in my identity for energy. I think it would works well for visualizing invisible and intangible characteristics of energy.

+ wish the photo quality was better.

An interesting identity project by project projects

I really like how it keeps consistency so that it’s recognized as one logo and yet makes dynamic variations. Maybe I could do something like this -metamorphic kind of looking- with my identity for ‘energy’.

first outline

From the idea of “energy literacy” and “energy 101″ which would be mainly about providing dry information, I’ve shifted my approach a bit so that it’s more about making a personal statement about energy consumption. Whereas the previous approach would require me to do the extensive research since I need to teach myself first about energy, which I wasn’t very excited about, with this new approach, I could focus more on being creative in getting the message across. So here’s my first attempt at putting together what I’ve come up with so far…

As a designer, you have to have at least one thing that you want to say
and one thing that you want to change…
from my notes taken in the first class of ‘Human Experience & Design’
(Aug/30/2006)

PROBLEM
Mindless consumption of energy, low level of awareness.
Its intangible + invisible attributes making it hard for people to be aware.
Plugging in and switching on do not just magically bring you energy, it comes from somewhere.
Few things in our daily life can do without using energy. (using your computer, lightening your room at night, blow drying your hair, washing clothes… etc.)

GOAL
To get people to pause a moment and think about the omnipresence of energy.
To help people learn about how to properly use it.
To make a statement as a designer in a fun/creative way. (more about getting my message across than about creating something to be distributed and used)

APPROACH
1. Branding energy
To make the intangible to tangible + the invisible to visible by giving it a form and presence.
To give a name (identity) and a form (something that can represent energy, tentatively borrowing the form of switches, outlet, power cord… etc, through which people come in contact with energy and control the use of it: interface between people and energy)
2. Informing about energy
To craft the information about energy in a way that people can easily associate with themselves, instead of with numbers and units that don’t make much sense to them.

COMPONENTS
branding / identity / print / information design
3D form / packaging / interactive (tentative)

ACTIONS
Research on energy consumption, where it comes from, ways to conserve it
Study branding, what it is, what makes a successful brand
Content building for the print piece
Think about how the 3D form will be built (learning solidwork? hand crafting?)

STATIC: increasing energy awareness
http://www.tii.se/static/

…As a basis for working with energy in design, we propose the notion of energy as a design material – a material alongside others such as plastics, wood and textile that can be used to craft objects. In this way, we shift away form considering energy merely in terms of technology – something that, through engineering, is always available without us having to think about it – towards treating it as an expressive material in its own right…

Projects: Erratic Appliances (e.g. a radio turning off itself when there are too many objects in the room consuming energy)

wrappin’up my internship

I have half an hour left for my summer internship at this moment…
The first thought that comes to me is that it’s good to be back to school again. Just like the last summer’s one, this internship hasn’t given me a chance to produce some sort of visible outcome… well, unfortunately. But I guess it may be the reality of many of the internships out there. I’m still thankful for having this opportunity though since it wasn’t all that bad, yea, of course not. I’d like to think that there isn’t no such thing as bad experience. I tasted a little bit of what it’s like to work for a not-so-big design agency in seoul and met some nice people and most importantly, realized that I can actually be a qualified person for working at companies like this. Well, having spent 2.5 months in a team whose main projects involves GUI for the most part, another important thing I realized is that I would definitely not want to be juat a GUI designer, but rather a interaction designer in a sense that it’s a job which I think involves a broader range of things as opposed to designing the very front of an interface. So the only regret would be that I haven’t yet had a chance to experience the whole, or even a part of, process including researching, concepting, ia-ing, and wireframing, etc. Only if had I done so, I could be more certain by now about what it is that I want to really pursue for my career in the near future. But I might as well be happy with my summer since I actually did something and learned something which helps me prepare my senior year that’s just around the corner!

energy literacy

‘Energy literacy’ seems to make a nice topic for my sr. project. It could be about /educating, informing, and engaging the audience with regard to energy issues… /creating a ‘legible’ and ‘understandable’ new language… /giving a ‘real’ sense that will transform the information people have into something they can act upon… and plus, i simply like the word energy since it makes me think of lots of positive things in life. energy, power, motivation, action, liveliness, strength, force, drive, something that enables you to move… Thinking at such an abstract level seems to always open up many possiblities to me when ideating, which makes me start getting fond of this idea of ‘energy literacy’… ummm… gotta give more thoughts to this.

gettin’ started…

i guess it’s about time to get it started now that the fall semester is just around the corner… I’ve been kind of bothered since the beginning of the summer by that I have to come up with at least three possible topics to bring to the first day of class about what I want to do for the senior project… I don’t think I’ve given enough thoughts to it but there are things I certainly want my project to have:
1. some sort of information visualized.
2. interactive components acting differently depending of who the audience is.
3. colors, images and typography that are simply beautiful and yummy!
These could pretty much sum up what I’ve been taught for the past three years and some of them are what I feel is lacking in my works I’ve done so far.

And now the topic. There are two big words that’s been floating around in my head: ‘emotion’ and ‘green’. I’m now leaning more toward the latter one. This, I think, is largely because of the ‘understanding perception through design’ class I took last semester and the ‘pause before you buy’ project I did for the type studio. From these class and project, it really resonated with me that designers have power in crafting the messages that influence on people’s perception and behavior. This idea is in line with what I think I should do as a designer and made me decide to take on a huge challenge myself. Yes, this will be about being green, again. Although I’m not a bold environmentalist or anything like that at all, I somehow feel like it’s kind of my duty as a designer to do ’something’ about it, since we can’t care less about this ‘green’ issue anymore and yet it’s not getting enough attention I think it deserves. This seems to be just as vague and abstract as are the beginning of any other projects I did. But hopefully, as I start wrapping my head around it through some research and brain-squeezing, my idea will take shape even a tiny bit before I go back to school…

Ready. Get set… now Go!

sidetracked thoughts

새삼스러울 것도 없는 생각이지만, 언제나 ‘…해야지’ 하는 일들의 절반이라도 하고 산다면 참 좋을텐데. 6 to 9 출퇴근을 매일매일 한다는게 어떻게 보면 얼마나 사람을 단순하게 만드는지… 두달 남짓이 지난 인턴 생활을 하며 학교와 사회는 참 너무 다르다는 걸 느끼게 된다. 회사의 일을 평가절하하는 것은 절대로 아니지만, ‘주어진’ 일, ‘시키니까’ 하는 일들이 때로는 사람의 ‘이상’을 잊고 살게 만들 수도 있다는 것. 그래서 뭔가 self-directed 하는 일들을 ‘…해야지’ 하는 마음을 갖더라도, 이내 퇴근 후의 피곤함에 티비 앞에 절로 눕게 된다. 세상에는 배울게 이렇게나 많은데, 즐길 수 있는 것들이 이렇게나 많은데… 나의 일분 일분을 분명 좀더 보람있고 생산적으로 달리 살 수도 있는 건데 말이다… 항상 생각만 하고, 마음만 있고, 행동으로 옮기지 않는 수많은 것들. 그리고 당장 ‘해야만 하는’ 일들 사이에서 엉거주춤 서있는 중이다. 이래서 사람이 정말 하고 싶은 일을 하며 살 수 있다는게 얼마나 축복받은 일인지 새삼 느낀다… + 그래서 지금 학생의 신분으로 하고 싶은 공부를 하고 있는 내가 누구보다 lucky한 사람이라는 것도.