alchen131

[alchen131]

Smoothie Experts

What does it mean to be an expert in the field?  What does it mean to the everyday person when they come across such an extraordinary person?  How does someone comprehend the knowledge presented to them?

In this video, I show a conflicted world in which evidence, data, analysis, and speculation come into play discussing on how beneficial smoothies really are.

#smoothie #experts #speculative design #speculative #video

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Extreme Height Chair

What is a cantilever chair. It really is not a definition of a chair. As it has a single leg that connects it to the ground. The most important aspect of it is that it allows the user to “float” in the air. This concept of“floating” is interesting as it begs to wonder if it can be taken even further. The structure created from this idea is not meant to look like but can support the weight. To make this object I would basically be doing a lot of material exploration to showcase what worked and what didn’t work. This is by means of height, the depth of the tubular steel and even length of the steel tubing. Depending on results from testing, I would either reduce, add, or replace the material in the attempt to make it extreme.

#chair #tall #metal #black #leather #cantilever #cantilever chair #unnerving

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Old and New Stacking Bench Stool

The piece I created was a stacking bench stool that could be modified to add decorations and uniqueness to each piece while being able to connect to each other.  This is significant as it is physically linking each stool to another connecting one person to another and is a physical showing of people sharing ideas and thoughts.  Each stool is its own person and it has its own mouth that connects to one stool to another that shares these ideas.

This piece was intentionally blank as I wanted to let Mabeo Furniture to take their own unique take on these pieces giving up much of my control to allow others to do as they see fit.  This piece could easily be a table or other objects as long as the core idea remains the idea that each piece can talk to each other and fit in.  

#bench #stoo #wood #metal #rendering #stacking #furniture

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Fortune Chair - (發達 Chair)

A Chair that takes risk.  A Chair that proclaims that no fortune shall come if they are too afraid to even take a seat.  A Chair for the bold.  A Chair that gives authority and control to the situation as it speaks volumes to the one who sits in it.  This is the fortune chair a loud piece that is unapologetic by nature.

#chair #metal #gold #fortune #prosperity #chinese #chiese-american #culture

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An exploration of a technique through usage of a chair

In this project I wanted to take what learned and put it to a more practical use.  So to that end I chose the chair as the form as it had a lot of ground rules that I had to play along.This chair is not really meant for certain people.  I find this chair to be quite uncomfortable.  Yet several of my peers found this chair to be comfortable.  It has to do with something with how the convex meets the leg but for me it hits on a weird muscle in my leg that makes it not seat able.

The original concept of this chair was to be like an ugly duckling and the ugly was suppose to be the wrinkles on the surface of the chair, but I wasn't able to do that due to the limited time as well as problems working with the Vacuum bag. So it ended up being a chair with a modern look.  It that can be described as uncomfortable but also comfortable if you are under a certain height (I guess not sure but those that did like it were smaller than me and I am not that particularly tall either).  It has this certain elegance to it that makes it feel right at home until you sit on it where it decides for you whether it is the right fit or not.  Maybe this should be called the sorting chair or something similar to the sorting hat in Harry Potter (a curious thought).   It was a really fun process for me to really take what I learn and put it into something more definable and there are loads of things that I did not think about that was discovered through the critique such as an adjustable seat height using this technique. On a side note this chair had spring back and so much of the uncomfortable was lost thanks to the fact that this chair had only half of it being glued together for some reason that is lost to me completely.

For a more indepth look please check out

https://risd.ccnsite.com/gallery/66272673/The-Modern-Sorting-Hat-(cough)-Chair

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A Suspension of Disbelief A desire to see the unexpected.  The willingness to believe in the impossible.  Many of us entertain ourselves with such thoughts of what ifs and how and what it could feel like.  It is why we love things like levitation, flying, floating, or walking on water.  Yet so is the opposite such as falling.In this series I explored the creation of a suspension of disbelief by catching a moment before.  This resulted in some fun moments within each image telling a story of its own.

Part 2 of 2

#photography #falling #outside #floating

[alchen131]

A Suspension of Disbelief A desire to see the unexpected.  The willingness to believe in the impossible.  Many of us entertain ourselves with such thoughts of what ifs and how and what it could feel like.  It is why we love things like levitation, flying, floating, or walking on water.  Yet so is the opposite such as falling.In this series I explored the creation of a suspension of disbelief by catching a moment before.  This resulted in some fun moments within each image telling a story of its own.

Part 1 of 2

#photography #outside #falling #floating

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14 pictures = 14 words or vaguely describing them

Sensuous

Smart

Spinning

part 2 of 2

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14 pictures = 14 words or vaguely describing them at the very least. Ambivalent

Blue

Familiar

Forgotten

Homogeneous

Oblique

Outside

Reptilian

Scattered

part 1 of 2

#photography #outside #animals

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Night Lights and Snow

Interactions of Camera Lens and light.

#photography #night #snow #light

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In the attempt to learn about plastic vacuum forming I threw for a project with a funny concept.  That concept being, of a what if the Rice Bowl had rice as part of the bowl's design.

Originally the concept of this piece was geared towards the texture of the rice.  However early on, in my attempts this was not possible without making the mold itself into a pin cushion.  Part of the reason was that I wanted the rice grain itself to appear onto the bowl.  In another way of putting this I wanted each individual rice grain to appear without it spacing apart.  What happened instead was that it took the form as a whole than individually.  I tried heating the PETG longer or using a thinner piece, but to no avail.  Thus the only conclusion to solve this was the pin cushion, but it is not possible without destroying the mold itself.  Especially with the tools and limited knowledge that I had on hand.

Going forward from here I began to experiment laminated pieces of plastic together with rice in between.  This formed a texture but also an interesting visual language that read as both rice, but also something else.

These bowls can hold two cups of rice  with ease and as a bowl they stack as well as not being too hot to hold onto despite the rice coming out fresh.

I am happy with what I was able to achieve, but I am sadden that I was not able to achieve what I originally set out for as it became more of an impossible task considering the hours it would have taken to punch out the shape of each rice grain that stacks against each other.  Perhaps a concept to revisit, but as it is right now happy yes, but not satisfied.

#rice #bowl #plastic #food

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As a youngster, Tetris was a game that I played to pass the time.  As I grew older, I began to wonder where did Tetris come from in the first place.  It was such a weird yet intuitive game that really did not fit much of the marketplace today or back then.  However it is a game that everyone in my generation knew regardless of culture especially if they had a computer.   One of the first things I learned about Tetris was that it was inspired by Pentomino.  This game was similar to Tetris, but it had five blocks in each piece.  These five block piece were then use to construct a given area.  Usually this game was made of wood.  What I found most interesting about this aspect that this game has been around for a century since the 1890s and has brought countless investigations in mathematics as well as creativity.  One can argue that it is a great fountain of ideas, but for me it was an idea to create a homage to those times as well as my own history to this game. This piece was going to be much simpler it originally did not have those pockets that you see here.  These pockets came from a series of questioning as well as pondering from suggestions of my peers who asked the what if's? and I began to explore those what if's.  These pondering lead to the design that you see here.  Though there was a slight problem . . . No one really knew if this idea would work.  This piece was incredibly small about 3.5" wide.  There were ideas of how it can work, but no one really knew if the lamination would hold with such a tight radius.  This resulted in experimentation of over 2.5 weeks of tweaking and trying new techniques to make this a possibility. First I tried the vacuum bag, but with only 30 lbs of pressure on such a small area it did not give the pressure I needed to carve out the pockets and those that did broke at the top as the wood was either too thick or too dry.  But even when using the paperback it could not carve out the pockets and so I resolved to use a 2 part mold to craft the shape of this piece.The second I did was to massage the wood or prebending it into the form that was needed so that when pressed it would not crack.  This took a lot of time as I wanted this to be a plywood format.  While the cracks lessen it still had problems.The third I did was extending the length of each by a good 2-3 inches on the sides so that the grains would not be short and later cut them down to length.  However despite my best attempts there were always these weird wrinkles. The fourth thing I did was ironing the paperback and forming the shape onto the two part mold before gluing and with that no wrinkles or deformities. This process allowed me to understand that this can be a manufactured item a toy in the very sense.  It has an intuitive design that allows people to quickly figure out what it is suppose to do and gives people the freedom of creativity.

#plywood #bent lamination #wood

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The Final project was an accumulation of these two projects together and would have loved to make a giant pillar of this as a light having both LEDs on both sides.  However I am limited to the size of the oven as well as the budget and so what I made was a miniature version of this idea but as a pendant lamp.  I wanted to go for a more frozen appearance or a trapped like fortress of this tools as they were falling down.  The edge lighting using LED gave the appearance that I was aiming for and played a lot of its color until I found the frozen  that I was aiming for. I consider this project fun but difficult to manage as many of the times it was just better to allow the plastic follow its desire or guide it via gravity.  There were a lot of special moments within each movement.  The only thing I can really be sad but also proud is that it can only be done in a single take and whatever happens happens and there was little to redo as the project sealed itself up especially when rolled into a cylinder.

#lighting design #plastic #cutlery #6

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This is an exploration of plastic cutlery with light and how it interacts with each other.  I was exploring the possibilities of layering as well as how different sides of the  plastic bends the light around.  Using a variety of equipment such as a heat gun, and an oven to heat and melt the plastic into wild forms.  I was exploring different techniques as well as usage of common items into a more decorative item   The first project I used a heat gun and applied direct heat on to the areas that I desire though because of that there were problems in the heating process such as thinning out the material or cracking.  The light inside this project is an incandescent light bulb.  The quality of light is disperse and is friendly to look at due to the amount of layering.  It was meant to be chaotic but was still able to tell what this project was all about as i moved from a more dense object to something more recognizable.  I imagine this to be on a wall as it's diameter was 11 inches. The second project was extremely experimental and had only one iteration and so there was a lot more planning in what went in before doing it as I had planned to use the oven as my method of production.  My control became more of a guiding control as I could not control the tools that were being misinformed from the oven.  There were many things I did not consider and one of the was that the cutlery would shrink about half the size.  I also realize or figured new ways to play with the plastic.  This lamp used an LED light at the center.  The way I did this was taking a 1/4" acrylic sheet into an oven of 350 degrees Fahrenheit and waited for about 30-40 minutes and placed the plastic cutlery on top of it and judged its melting point every 5 minutes.  When the plastic is close to even to the surface I would then place a 0.003 PETG sheet on top of it which acts as a lamination sealing the plastics together.  However this sheet would act as an adhesive sticking to practically everything and I use that sheet that overflowed to the sides to join the pieces together.

#lighting design #plastic #cutlery

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Tetris Puzzle Chair Model (February 2018) Rhino File, Laser Cut, Plywood, Wooden Doles, Sumi Ink

Inspired by Puzzle games for young kids I wanted to create a chair that allows users to build their own unique chair using a familiar concept (Tetris).  This chair is one of several possibilities that a user can use, but not necessary follow.  This takes advantage of two concepts transporting (it can be broken down to smaller pieces and be delivered in a box with almost no wasted space) and Ikea Effect.

#puzzles #tetris #chair #model

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Twisty Cutlery (November 2017 - December 2017)

Rhino File

I wanted to create a cutlery that was simple, but also could seemingly disappear from the hand.  Thus the twisted handle which forces users to grab the cutlery in a different manner than they are used to.  It is comfortable to the hand and relatively easy to use.

#cutlery

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A Set of Cream and Sugar (September 2017)

Rhino File

Inspired by Asian Design of a Tea Set that had not only the tea pot but also the cups that was combined together.  Here the Cream is at the bottom with the sugar on top.

#cream and sugar