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When picking your A Levels there are many choices and many different options to pick. When I was doing my A-Levels I picked 4 A-levels. Product Design was my favorite of the subject and I would like to give an example of my A Level work.

What happens during my aqa as product design?

During your first year of your course you will notice a big step up from GCSE product design. The course will be broken down into 3 sections

1. Materials and Components.
2. Design and Market Influences.
3. Processes and Manufacture.

You will not be taught these on there own but as a more ‘holistic’ overview. At the end of your AS you will create a project, in retrospect my AS product sucks, but the vision and ideas behind it were clear. My product was let down by the manufacturing technique (Ply Board).

What happens during A2? Exams?

For my AS project you get a lot more chance to explore deeper Ideas, along with a final year product you will also have a couple of exams. One in Materials, One in Electronics , one in mechanics and 4 hr Design Challenge type exam. For the design challenge you will get a brief at the begging of the exam, and you will need to create a product solution for the exam.

For my final project I create a new design of mountain board. Potential ATB.

For your final year project, I would reocmmend getting as much third party help as you can. You will most likley not have the training to weld, or play with epoxy resins.

After A levels, What I wish I had learnt during my time at 6th form.

1. If you want to do Product Design, improve your sketching.
2. Pay more attention to you basic electronics, stick with it and it will come in useful.
3. Learn to Design before you Learn to CAD.
4. Have fun, this will be the most enjoyable learning experiance of your life.

I would recommend checking out the AQA AS /A2 Design specification

Mike was a 3rd year Middlesex Product Design Student. I only took a few classes with mike, but want to wish him the best of luck with his product release.

2008 Update -

I have had a lot of web traffic looking for Mike. If you want to get in touch with him contact.

Michael Hsin Yu Chen
07727293150
Futurestatedesign@googlemail.com

(Good luck. Mike)

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/see-me-turn%21/reactiv-cyclist-protection-jacket-is-safe-looks-coolish-291003.php

“How do we deliberately add more emotional qualities into the products we design?”. First i would recommend reading Donald Normans “Emotioanl Design”, this is a very easy read an a good introduciton to the subject. I don’t really belive in all of Mr. Normans views, and thing “the design of future things should be more interssting”. The other book i would recommend is Design and Emotion, from the 3rd 2002 design and emotion conferance. It may be 5 years old, but the book contains papers all based on emotional design. Split into subsections, which are

Generative tools,
Evauative Tools,
Emotive Effects of Visual Properties,
Emotive Effects of the Other Senses,
From Design to Emotion,
Affective Usabilty,
Attachment,
Product Character,
Theoretical and Ethical issues,
and
Emotion in Design.

There is a paper for just about everthing, and there are only 4 - 5 pages long. There website design an emotion .org Has many resources for free.

Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things £4.20

Design and Emotion £48.67

Phidget Starter Kit #1

PhidgetInterfaceKit Package #1 - A PhidgetInterfaceKit 8/8/8 with an assortment of sensors:

I found this today from www.active-robots.com This will be the ultimate kit to start anyone with any interaction design project, I hope to get my hands on one and will be doing some writeups soon.

On my bouncing around the internet I found this VisoinUnion. They posted my energy Tree, It is only avaible in chinese but you can translate it in Google.

I came across some great resource for design sketching.

How to Sketch a MP3 Player.

Sketch Rendering.
A Awesome Photoshop Tut.

Powered by ScribeFire.

I have been doing some PC cleaning recently and stumbled upon these old photos. These are for a ergonomic kettle poorer. The Kettle tipper addressed the problem of not being able to get a steady flow of hot water as the kettle empted. I used a cam motion, the product didn’t really work, and was made pretty badly.

This project taught me a lot, and was my first real introduction to CAD. Using Pro-Desktop for this project.

A Active Prototype

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The Golden Ratio

is approximately 1.6180339887. This number is the basic ratio of making stuff look good. It can be in Type, Buildings, Products, but most importantly its constantly seen in nature. When creating a product, I would recommend thinking about the golden ratio and how you could use it to complement the form.

As part of a second year university module I applied the Golden Ratio to my class mates faces. You can see the results bellow, I have also included my own Layered TIFF with Overlay, So you see how beautiful you are.

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Lavatio: Washing Machine of the Future.

Download Lavatio Overview PDF Overview.

Redral: Freezer + Microwave.

Download Redral PDF Overview.

I found this device today, why is that this 5 year old technology has never been used will the iPod removes Sony of PMP. Check out the pattern reconistion interface, point to play.

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