Syracuse University « College Fashionista – College Fashion, Street Styles, and Trends

Syracuse University « College Fashionista – College Fashion, Street Styles, and Trends

On Monday, one of the girls in my class brought their pet bunny to studio. It was probably one of the cutest things I have ever seen. He was gray and his fur was extremely soft. He was also very well behaved. She had him on a leash with a harness. He sat in the room as we critiqued each other's floor plans for our up coming designs.

Yesterday, my partner and I were rewarded a prize for our design for the sandbox client. This was a project due in the beginning of the semester. The clients were great they even brought a cake for the class. It was nice for our design to be recognized.

Real-life clients are a PAIN!

Well I am happy to state that my finger has fully grown back. It now looks like a finger again just in time to start another model, oh joy. So this project that we have a "real life client" for hasn't really been a client. He has failed to show up to most of our meetings and we are running out of time to complete our project so ... now we are making it our own project. One that hopefully we will be able to use for our portfolios.

Since the client has not told us what he wants we are designing it with our own color and material palette (which is nice, because we have better taste). The only rule is make it sustainable (which should always be a rule). The client has wasted about 2 weeks of our class time by not showing up and it is frustrating because this is a big project. My teacher gave us the go ahead because we can not afford to wait any longer. We can't afford to wait because we have to build a model of the entire building! Yeah... the entire building and it has to have all of our materials and furniture in it. When I first heard this I had nightmares of cutting my finger off again. I guess I have to get over my fear of cutting and this project will certainly provide me with a lot of opportunities to do so.

Ok I forgot to mention an important thing about this project and that is... that we were broken up into groups, thank goodness. My group consist of two other people. Its nice so we can break up the work load a little more and the model, if possible, seems less daunting to complete with two more people helping you.

The design aspect of this project is definitely exciting but I have to admit the model continues to haunt me. Hopefully once this project is over I will be able to sleep soundly once again, but that is a lofty wish.

DONE!

Thank goodness it is almost spring. The week is wrapping up and by the end of today I will be completely done with all of my academics. However, this has been one stressful week. We had our first ever presentation to a real client yesterday. I am usually good about keeping my nerves under control in situations such as these but I actually started biting my nails, I was that nervous. It ended up going alright. Some of my classmates when they were done were upset because they forgot to say things that they wanted to. I did not want that to happen so I formulated a note card with key phrases on it so I could just glance and keep my thoughts. I was nervous about using a note card because I did not want to read off it. A couple of my classmates read straight off their paper barely looking up. So I used key phrases and important words on my note card, therefore, I would not be able to read off full sentences.

We take a lot for granted in our class critiques. For example, we rely on the rest of our class mates to know what a floor plan is and a perspective. My class mates understand how to look at a design and translate it. Real clients, however, have no such knowledge. When we were describing our design to the client we had to go into such detail and do a lot of finger pointing to get our ideas across. We had to take him little by little through our design and some of the drawings he could not understand what relation you were in from the overall design. All in all, it was a good experience and it is something that will help me get better at my presentation skills.

spring break just a week away!

How times flies. Next week is the last week of classes till spring break.
I have regrettably suffered from an injury this week. I have recently sliced part of my finger off while cutting a board for a model that I was building for class. While it is not terribly bad it is more of a nuisance because now I cannot use it to hold anything while I cut. It is just very inconvenient to say the least. Somehow I managed and it took me quite a while longer than it should have, but I finished my model. Beforehand, we built a model of stairs and for this last project we had to build walls around those stairs. It may sound simple, but this was one of the most difficult things I have done. We not only built the walls, but constructed them as well. My professor took an entire studio day to give us a lecture on how walls are constructed. We learned about columns, beams, studs, headers you named it we learned it. He helped us design our walls so they would be able to support our building around the windows we designed. As interior designers in school we are just able to stick a window here or add it there but with this project we had to understand the process in how to do so. So no longer will we just stick windows in a design because we now understand how structure works and what a pain it can be to structure a building around window. It is all very technical but it was well worth learning. It makes us design with a purpose not just "stick things in." It is not something you would think an interior designer needs to know (how to construct a wall) but I enjoy the fact that I pretty much understand how to do so. Of course we are not experts by any means, but now we have a foundation of understanding that we can grow off of.

Real life project... Joy.

We just handed in our first project and like clock work another one greets us the next day on our desk. This on however, is different than any project before. This is a real project with a real client. Our first day we met with the client to hear about what his plans were for this building. After seeing the pictures and ideas I have come to the conclusion that it is going to be one heck of a project. The client wants to renovate this old rundown building... and I am talking a complete makeover. We went on our first job site. It was a little intimidating. When they first got the building there was so much rundown stuff in there. They said when we got there it would be about 80% cleaned... if that was 80% then there was a lot, and I mean a lot, of stuff in there. I was assigned to take pictures during the job site so that allowed me to look at the details in the building. It was not entirely bad. For example, this building had some beautiful tin ceiling panels still intact.

We are breaking this project into two parts. There are two different sides of this building. One a fast food restaurant and the other a bistro/bar. One of the hardest things in this project is interpreting what the client actually wants. He threw out a couple of inspirational words but then he would talk about something completely opposite from what he just said. This just leaves you frustrated and clueless. For this first part of the project we are all working as individuals to provide the client with and many ideas as possible. Our presentation will be to the client and from there he will pick a couple of designs that he like and would like to see continued. From there we will break up into teams and design the rest of the building.

Just explaining this makes me realize what a daunting task this truly is. In the end one of our designs or bits and pieces of our designs will actually be used in a real life project.

first project

I have my first project due on Monday. This project has been completely different than anyone we have received prior. First of all, this project is a real client which is a little intimidating and exciting at the same time. One thing that is really cool about this project is that the client only wants "conceptual ideas" so we do not have to get very technical about our design. It is basically only the fun part of designing that we are doing for this project. Seriously, how cool is that? It gets even better because we could win and our design actually could be used. How nice would that be to be able to use in our portfolio. We had the option of working with partners so my friend and I worked together and our design is really something. They came to us wanting a more professional design modeled off of our COLAB space. Our COLAB space is basically a place were we can go and relax but it entices creativity because of the design. There are so many cool things in that space. For example, there is furniture made out of cardboard. There are refurbished old dentist chairs for seating. There are chairs made out of flip-flop shavings. I mean, the stuff in there is endless. So when you go in that space you see how people create things out of materials that you would never imagine possible. I was researching materials the other day and I found this person who made a leather floor out of old belts. Seriously, who thinks of stuff like that?! So we are just putting our finishing touches on our design I am nervous but I am also really proud of what we came up with.

charrette

So we started off the semester again with a charrette. Last year we had a week to come up with an idea for the charrette however, this year we had only 3 days! In addition, this year Ad Design and Fashion Design also joined us (Interior and Industrial Design). The charrette was "a fix for the future" ...how do you fix the future first of all and in just 3 days? So like usual we were assigned groups which at the end only 7 of us remained. We did not have a lot of time to brainstorm ideas because of the limited amount of time so it was extremely hard to formulate an idea that we all strongly agreed upon. My group decided that we wanted to tackle a social issue ... obesity. There are so many things that are contributed to obesity... ignorance, poverty and so on. Then we decided that we wanted to educate and we believed that it should start in the elementary schools. We wanted to educate children about the importance of energy and about being sustainable in addition we also wanted to give them the feeling of empowerment. Our final product that we came up with was a playground. This playground was incorporated with pieoelectric equipment which would allow the children to create their own energy. There would be many visual aids to show the children how much energy was being created to show them that they are making a difference. This energy that they created would be used to "fuel" their school. If we give children the feeling of empowerment and show them that they can make a difference they will take that with them throughout their entire life.

I can not believe it is the last week of school. Wow this year has flow by. Last week of school is usually the toughest. This year our teachers gave us this time to hand in make up work to improve our grade if we want to. But we also have a project due on Monday so it is all about time management. I will be completely done with everything on the last day of school. All my finals will be over with and my projects due. It is nice because I can just relax after Monday but it would be nice to have a little more time to dedicate to some of my projects. I guess this just preps us for reality in the business world.