Week 3

28 Feb, 2021

I spent most of my spare time this week working on this site - and publishing it! Also wrote more project pages, like Sun of Denmark and Wall Art.

I should have received components for Project Caramel, but since that didn’t happen there will not be any progress on that project this week.

Project Cocoa

Instead, I started Project Cocoa. I thought the name would be appropriate since the idea is to design a heater cover for friends of mine that renovated their apartment recently. The intention is to design it in laser cut MDF and paint it afterwards, and a fun way of playing with parametric ideas. I got measurements from them, and started drawing up some pencil sketches, and then moved into Grasshopper to try some out.

First Sketches

Building up a sketching workflow in Grasshopper

With people for scale

Including people for sense of scale

In place

Rough placement in context

Next step is to flesh out more sketches. I’m curious about exploring other, less purely geometric principles like magnet fields or physics.

Frequency and refinement

I think about frequency a lot. In preparation for Project Caramel, I read The Scientist and Engineer’s Guide to DSP. Specifically, about Fast Fourier Transforms and how you can use it to go from looking at a signal in time-space to frequency-space.

In the context of interaction design, I think about the frequency of prototype iterations and product releases. During my first five years at LEGO, I have launched two products. In my experience, 2-3 years for product development isn’t unreasonable when developing something that’s both physical and digital. Say I have 30 years of career left, that’s 10-15 products I have left, a frequency around 9 nHz, or 0.28 cycles per year.

One of my hobbies is coffee brewing, and most of the baristas I have met say they serve hundreds of cups of coffee in a single day. As frequency of iterations, that’s 3,170,979 nHz, or 100,000 cycles per year. Not sure what this means or how to think about it, but it’s on my mind.

Site

I have extended the structure so that beyond this blog, but also project pages that I can create for each project. Did lots of styling, built first mobile support, and streamlined the look on the different parts of the site.