Today's natural light brings you Qingyang, a student who applied for the experience sharing of the American Industrial Design Undergraduate Works Collection. She transformed the products designed by her mother to make the tradition more suitable for the present, and thus won offers from six universities, namely SVA New York School of Visual Arts, CCA California School of Arts, MICA Maryland School of Arts, SAIC Chicago School of Arts RIT Rochester Institute of Technology, University of Cincinnati, etc., and scholarships totaling 120000 dollars!
Experience sharing of American industrial design undergraduate portfolio:
There are four projects in Qingyang's collection of American industrial design undergraduate works, of which the traditional lamp transformation project [FEISH] is the project that she has invested most and gained most. Today, let's take [FEISH] as the main project to see the experience of Qingyang!
Qingyang: This project is mainly to transform the traditional fish shaped lanterns. My mother is a Chinese lighting designer. Some time ago, she designed a traditional Chinese fish shaped lantern. The internal structure of the fish lamp is composed of an iron frame, so the body, head and tail of the fish are fixed and heavy, and the cost of transportation and production is high.
I want to make the fish lantern more vivid, so that it can have a flexible swinging body, be folded during transportation, and enhance the interaction with people, so I decided to transform the traditional fish lantern.
This project includes every process of making the fish lamp from beginning to end, such as the design of the fish skeleton shape, the selection of the handmade paper used for the outer layer of the fish lamp, and so on. With the help of the teacher, mother and factory master, the internal skeleton I designed for making the fish lamp was built.
The new skeleton is detachable. After wrapping iron wire on the skeleton and pasting paper, the skeleton can be taken out, so that a foldable fish body can be made, which not only greatly reduces the cost of transportation and production, but also adds a lot of fun between users and products.
The transformation project of Chinese traditional fish shaped lanterns is a challenge for me to implement ideas into products. If I just think about it, I will not know the fun in the production process. Therefore, I named the redesigned fish lantern "FEISH", which is called "non" in Chinese. "non" itself means "no", which means that this product is not only a fish lantern, but also an innovation in the traditional lantern manufacturing industry. The innovative production process of the product can greatly reduce costs in production and transportation.
"The biggest responsibility of design is to solve problems with innovative thinking"
Qingyang's project is designed to solve the problems of traditional cultural products in the current society. It can find problems and think about solutions to problems, which cannot be separated from the development of innovative thinking.
I once discussed the difference between domestic and foreign design education in chatting with colleagues. In many domestic schools, the design major is a theme or fixed product type given to students by teachers. Due to the limitation of thinking, there are many references and imitations in students' design. It is easy to erase the creativity of students in a long time.
But in foreign education, the core of the design profession and the principles of the design industry always revolve around the concept of "people-oriented". That is to say, the identity of designers, manufacturers and users is used to find problems from all angles in the actual use process, and design thinking is used to find the best solution to problems according to the needs of all parties for products. When designers have such innovative thinking, more and more "humanized design" can appear in our life.
Natural light is more in favor of the latter's educational concept. The teaching and research team composed of admissions officers and professors from foreign universities will not only bring us the latest ideas, but also as artists and designers, they have rich work experience in the industry. At the same time, they will also combine the cases in the industry to convey more information, Let students understand the speed of iteration and catch up with the speed of industry development.
For example, the present art colleges and the future society need more creativity. In teaching, natural light attaches great importance to guiding students to constantly expand their creative boundaries, develop their natural creativity, and grow into talents required by colleges and the future society while accumulating.
Qingyang: Among the American industrial design undergraduate portfolio projects, this project is the one that I have done the longest and took the most time. Two versions were made when the fish lantern skeleton was first made. After many times of communication and constant debugging with factory masters and teachers, the final fish lantern skeleton is very similar to the real fish.
It also took me a lot of time to study how to make the folding effect. Because my ability was limited, I couldn't make the skeleton of the fish lantern, so I stuck in this place for a long time.
At that time, the teacher suggested that I could appropriately ask experienced mothers or practitioners for some technical solutions. I asked my mother and the factory's master for help, and soon solved the problem that had puzzled me for a long time. Even in the process of solving the problem, I found some new ways to display works. For example, fish lanterns can be made of hard cloth or wrinkling process instead of paper.
stay sample reels make In the process, I found that many things must be experienced and tried by ourselves, and all the difficulties encountered during this period can help us learn more additional knowledge and know more about our own specialty.
The teachers also helped me a lot. Teacher Xu has been guiding me in the right direction. At the beginning, I did not know much about industrial design, but was simply interested in products, which led me to be a little confused when I first started the project, and I was not very clear that I needed to research, collect relevant data It is also a standard for the preparation work such as the initial product sketch.
Mr. Xu took pains to guide me step by step, telling me what conditions a product that can be made should meet, what factors should be considered when designing, and how to conduct data search and market research. She would continuously send more than 50 WeChat messages to explain a definition to me. Sometimes, in order to respond to my questions in a timely manner, she would directly draw a diagram on the car to help me understand. Sometimes, she would even go home to personally demonstrate how to deal with some materials I did not understand.
Teacher Liu in the basic course is responsible for my hand painting and software. Since I just entered the natural light, I have never used software at all, and now I can use software to help schools, relatives and classmates make some posters and logos. Hand painting class is not just painting. Teacher Liu will also find various materials from the classroom to spread my understanding of art.
For example, today he found a roll of wool, and today's course is to use wool and nails to "draw" on the board. This interesting way of teaching allowed me to try all kinds of materials that I had never touched before, and also increased my interest and confidence in learning art.
In class, Mr. Liu will often explain the art of Europe to me. With his own photos, I have gained a lot of knowledge and hope that one day I can go to Europe to experience the local culture.
"Thinking and doing are totally different. Potential is always stimulated in practice"
We mentioned above that the responsibility of design is to solve problems, but there is actually a kind of design called conceptual design, which covers many fields, such as games, architecture, products, etc. The purpose of conceptual design is to make many or new ideas in a short time, and the specific implementation does not need to be considered.
We exclude the category of conceptual design, and other designs should eventually consider the feasibility of landing. In the case of Qingyang, we can see that she encountered some difficult problems in the process of turning ideas into reality. Because we need to solve these difficulties, we learned more and gained growth.
This is the importance of practice. If you don't do it, you will never know what problems exist in the early conception, nor will you know the knowledge involved in production, nor will you have new creative inspiration brought by new things. Therefore, natural light has always emphasized that students should practice more, and has always tried to provide more opportunities for students to participate in the actual projects that need to be implemented.
For the larger ones, such as the interdisciplinary camp landing practice project held every summer vacation, the instructor led the students into the mountain to build the house designed before. This process is very difficult, but it is also very interesting. Students will find that doing and learning are not the same thing at all. In practice, they can learn what they can't learn in class and drawing.
The smaller ones are various workshops on weekdays and weekends. For example, Qingyang also mentioned that her exposure to new materials has given her more confidence and interest in art. Almost all workshops in natural light are mainly made of multi materials. Each kind of material has different color, texture, smoothness, transparency, reflectivity, refractive index and luminosity. Contact with various materials will lead students to realize the material itself or great or small differences, stimulate more ideas, and stimulate students' potential in practice.
"Get efficient learning ways from the guidance of industry leaders"
During the production of Qingyang's industrial design portfolio project, because of his limited ability, he encountered problems that were difficult to solve in technology. Through consulting his mother, who was also a designer, and a factory master with rich production experience, he broke the bottleneck.
Qingyang's mother played a role of a senior in the industry in her industrial design portfolio project, which is actually a very efficient way of learning for students without any foundation. Just like if you don't have work collection experience, you don't know how to complete the process of survey, conception and design sketch, which requires teacher's guidance. Each step of the collection may encounter different problems. At this time, we should seize every opportunity to seek advice from experienced people.
But not every student has senior resources around them. In this case, we can communicate with teachers and students more, just like the previous one Royal College of Art The students with double offers in the pure art major said in the interview that their works focus on many interdisciplinary projects, so teachers in each major have been involved.
More than one student said that he felt that the overall atmosphere of natural light was very open. Teachers and students were like friends, not only their own professional teachers, but also every professional teacher loved to communicate with students and give them some advice or help.
In addition to its teachers and classmates, Natural Light has always maintained good cooperation with various art institutions, art schools, artists, designers and brands. In admissions officer activities, portfolio review activities, brand cooperation projects, and artist/designer workshops, students can get close contact with many experienced practitioners, ask them questions or discuss problems with them, and obtain opinions and help from multiple perspectives.
Today's summary:
To sum up the problems encountered by Qingyang in the production of the American undergraduate industrial design portfolio, they are typical problems that most students will experience. First, there is no concept of each step of the work collection, which leads to some confusion and is not clear about how to do it. Second, we encountered some technical problems from the concept to the actual production of the product.
Through the guidance of teachers and family members, Qingyang also worked hard to solve these problems one by one, and won six offers from top universities and scholarships worth more than 100000 dollars. Foreign colleges and universities attach great importance to the production process of student portfolio projects, because it can show students' logical thinking and problem-solving ability, and hope that Qingyang's problem-solving methods can inspire more students.
Natural light shares more topics for you:
What is studying abroad in industrial design? What is the difference between studying abroad in industrial design and studying at home?
How to do the collection of industrial design overseas works? Magic Tutorial of Product Design Works Collection
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