Foo fighter's cover - Best of You

This was in 2009, in a festival of my University in Japan, me and some classmates made a Foo Fighter's cover band and this music is "Best of you"

The Camera Work Project

This was a very interesting project. It was for a class in Japan about camera techniques.

11/17 - ZIBA Design Workshop

This workshop was a very interesting experience. Before arrive at ZIBA's office we had the taks to pay attention at the path that we were using. The information that we had gather would be used in the workshop later.

When we arrived at the office Mr.Hirata, ziba's office president, received us and gave a presentation about the company. The company has its base in Portland, Oregon and its in the marke for over 20 years. It has a impressive history of success and growth.

After the presentation of the company we've started the workshop. Our task was to to develop a map to show how to arrive at ZIBA's office from the train station. We should consider our client's needs. Our client would be the office's president himself, and an important consideration was the fact that he used glasses, so the elements inside the map would have to be easy to see. The results were very interesting. I was very worried to represent all the important elements, but didn't realize the most basic aspects, how to represent the elements.

In the last part of our visit, Mr. Hirata showed some design processes and gave important adivices regarding the creation process. It was a very rich and interesting experience.

11/11 - Edward Tufte and Micro/Macro workshop

Edward Tufte works with information design, interface design and graphic design. He's well known by writing analytical design books, and he had written 7 books which gave him more than 40 awards for content and design. He is a professor Emeritus at Yale University and he teaches courses in statical evidence, information design and interface design.

In the class we saw his book "Envisioning Information Book" and we concentrate our study into micro/macro readings. In this work Tafte studies the relation between micro and macro readings and how to find a good connection between both of them.

At the end of the class we made a workshop based in Macro/Micro reference. We should create something graphically that could show at the same time the Macro and Micro universe.

11/04 - Masahito Sato and Rule workshop

In this class, we studied about the Japanese designer Masahito Sato. He was one of the creators of the tv program "Pythagora Switch", an interesting and funny educational program made for children. It's basically a puppet show, but with a strong educational purpose, with some advanced subjects for children. One particularity of this designer it's that he was a marketing specialist that studied other designers by himself, and created his own and unique method.

Then at the end of the class, the professor gave us a "rule workshop". First we had to write down 20 things that we liked and them resume this 20 things in 3 key-words. Those key-words represented important aspects of our identity as a designer and could be used to create our visual identity. A very important step to the creation of our unique method and identity!

10/28 - Vision proposal design methodology

I wasn't present in this class due to a flu.

10/14-10/21 - Achille Castiglioni and workshop

I'm summarizing the classes from 14th and 21th october in one post, because in both of them the subject was the industrial designer Achille Castiglioni.

In the beginning of the first class, each of the students made a short presentation about their works and then the professor talked about Castiglioni and some of his works. Achille Castiglioni was a very famous Italian Industrial designer. A lot of his inspirations came from everyday things and he often made use of ordinary materials. For him it was very important to use the minimum amount of materials to obtain forms with maximum effect. Castiglioni had a very playful person, always loved to "play" with the objects and this could be seen in his works, his projects should have a friendly relationship with the user. In the class we saw pictures of his works and some products like the "sleek spoon", a very interesting spoon that was conceived to Kraft mayonnaise jars. This spoon has a very interesting design and the purpose was to facilitate and improve the removal of the mayonnaise from the jar, since the curvatures of the spoon matched the curvatures of the jar.

                                                              Castiglioni's sleek spoon

Other very interesting project and perhaps the most iconic project of Castiglioni was the "Sella stool", that is basically a phone stool. Its a bike's saddle adapted into a spherical iron base, that gives a dynamic balance while seated.  This object was made in order to sit while in one's feet, because in the fifties the houses used to have wall phones, so the person was forced to stand while using the phone. And then the professor talked about the design aproaches of Castigliani:

- Redesign: it's the reformulation of an existing design, in order to improve it.

- Ready made design: It's the creation of a new product with parts from other products.

- Metaphor: it's when the design has the reference of another product, it's a way to play with the form.

At the end of this class, professor Yamazaki started a workshop session with "ready made design" and the results were very interesting!