Daycare Design and Material Selection

This is a design of a daycare based on materials and knowing the appropriate material for each type of encounters. I feel that this project shows my graphic design abilities and my knowledge of material. As a group project, it was a group collaboration to design the room and choose material, however Gabi had the assignment of rendering this particular drawing and choosing the color of the materials and I had the task of putting together the poster design and graphical elements as seen in the picture below.

Graphic Design - REDESIGN Project

The project was to find a poster which is ill designed and to redesign it for two different audiences. With this initial design, I took one direction towards children and the theme park side of the park and then took a second stance with the vacation and scenery side of the initial poster. The first poster is the initial design found online at http://sdvisit.com/tools/adcritique/index.asp#Say good-bye to clip art and the second and third are my redesigns of that original based on audience and clarity using Photoshop and InDesign.

Graphical Designs of Mine by hand

Final Train Depot Design - Commercial and Residential

This project was a project based on Historic Restoration of a Train Depot located in Pullman, Washington, which is to be transformed into a residential space for an artist along with his/her spouse, while incorporating an art gallery and art studio for which the artist can work. Along with the designs, I was supposed to stick to the criteria of ADA and universal design as the commercial portions must be ADA accessible and the residence will be for one legally blind occupant, the husband/wife. The project was meant to be a part of an adaptive reuse design with using the historic train depot's original exterior walls with little to no alterations to windows and doors and using some features within the depot for the new design. The train depot design process was a long and extensive project which taught me a lot about commercial and residential design that I had not learned before while applying the concept of historic restoration and adaptive reuse. My initial project was inspired by a nail in the wall of the exterior of the depot, which in end inspired the concept of Organic Vs. Synthetic Design.

The initial tour of the depot was in itself inspiring, however, I felt that every object I looked to for inspiration was either the same as someone else's (taking away from the originality) or not intriguing enough for me to build off of in a non literal way. This is why I decided to go back to the depot on my own on the following day. When visiting on my own, I walked the entire depot with no distractions and found this old rusty nail in the side of the building. The nail began to make me think and wonder about the depot in ways I had not before, focusing on the history and the meaning rather than the design and materiality. This told me that the nail was my inspiration object. Taking multiple photographs of the nail, I ended up choosing the photo above as my inspiration due to the emphasis of the photo on the nail pulling in a viewer. Through building my concept, I ran into a lot of complications with my thought process and not being too literal. With that, I began to think outside of the literal design of the nail and brick and the texture of the materials and into the actual concept of the nail itself as I had in the beginning. Thinking more about what the nail means and why it is there, is how I came up with my design concept. Looking into the history, meaning, wonder, and stories of the nail and who was there, what hung upon it, why it was there, etc was what drove me into the concept of history and wonder but also the idea that it had been there so long that the organic matter around it has literally wrapped itself around the nail, which is the synthetic. This essential brought about my title of the Synthetic vs. Organic Design. This initially led to the design of my parti, textile, and concpept model. (all on previous blog, and above)

In order to preserve the historical aspect of the original train depot, I was to include and remain all exterior walls that were previously there and all windows and doors could only be interchanged as one or the other and not taken away. With this, I kept most windows the same and only changed one to a door and then one double door to a single and a window. Also, for the exterior of the gallery, I changed the doors to double out swinging doors to meet code for commercial egress. Along with my designing of the exterior with walls and door changes, I basically took on the challenge of a landscape architect and designed the exterior foliage of the depot as well. Adding in plants, trees, walkways, and more which follow my concept as well as egress for the commercial and residential design. The Site Plan pictured shows the walkways in which the gallery egress allows emergency access to the parking lots as well as the residential entry pathways. The back of the residential design allows for a private access back yard that even with the path from the gallery interrupting, is blocked with fencing to allow privacy. It was a challenge for me to channel a landscape design from my interior safeplace, but it was actually very fun and interesting to add to the exterior with this design and not remain only designing the interior. My overall exterior design followed codes and inspiration with its overall organization, using the synthetic vs organic in the grass vs brick and concrete swirling pathways.

Overall, my favorite part of designing the train depot was working on the Art Gallery and the Stir Competition. It was a nice adjustment to venture into commercial design versus the residential design that we have been working on for so long now in the Interior Design courses. using codes and ADA in ways which I have not had to before was a challenge in the beginning, but essentially I figured it out (seen in the photo below). When designing the gallery, it was fun to bring in my concept in mostly the ceiling to allow large concept inspiration but without overpowering the artist's artwork throughout the gallery itself. I was able to bring in organic shape and the piecing of the straight and harsh synthetic into the ceiling with the dropped features and clouds throughout. On top of the design aspects themselves, I am also very proud of the perspectives that I drew for these designs. With the artist that I ended up choosing for inspiration, the art is very vibrant colored and smaller in scale, this is why I chose grey walls to avoid taking from the light absorption that the paintings will need to stand out but also why I lowered the ceilings significantly to not overwhelm the unused wall space in the interior all together. The artist's art is inspired by himself and his own history, I thought this was relevant to my concept initially resulting in the name of the gallery as "His Story Art Gallery" referencing the art as a way to tell his own story but also the history of the nail and depot in all. Overall, my gallery design is my favorite part of the entire Train Depot design as it pulls in the history, emphasis, contrast, and organic vs synthetic inspiration while sticking to the historic restoration guidelines given.

In contrast to my favorite part of the design, the Codes and Egress and the Demolition plan were my least favorite due to how challenging it was overall. I am not saying that I did not like learning it in the end, because in the end it was very significant and influential to my design and also to further designs, it was just a challenging process as I have not done either type of plan before. Learning how to make a codes and egress plan was a lot more work than I intended, requiring hours of research and thinking of how to plan a space accordingly but also remembering those guidelines while planning the space. The overall learning process I feel was a very important aspect to this design project and it will help me in further designs throughout my education as well as my career. Though the process was a challenge, I feel that I adequately met the criteria and learned a lot in the process. It was interesting to think of the design as more than aesthetic and unintentional (in reason to walls etc) and to be able to look as where to tear down and apply new walls with consideration to the entire building, water walls, etc. In order to accommodate sustainability, with this demolition plan, I kept water walls and reused them throughout the design and multiple other walls as well. I also used space efficiently in terms of egress and circulation. I feel that learning codes and demolition and the more on the complicated and intricate design parts instead of on the aesthetic and artistic side of the design process is essential to learning the trade of interior design and this project allowed me to do so.

Presentations were an essential part to the project in the end as it was our way of telling the entire story. I am pretty confident in my graphic design abilities, however, in this project I seemed to run into a wall and I was stuck for awhile on how to compositionally layout the project for showing to professionals, etc. With time, I figured it out through exploration and was very proud of the graphic elements and presentation that I came up with, however, the challenge was a new thing to me. I usually do not come up with a block for graphically representing my work, as I did with this project, I had to overcome it and learn new ways of dealing with the problem which taught me a lot about patience and simplifying. I say simplifying because I realized that I hit the block because I had too much going on in my head for ideas with integrating my concept in the graphic orientation of my final boards. With sitting down and working it out in thumbnails, I was able to come up with a graphically pleasing concept to my boards without overwhelming the project or distracting from the depot design itself. In the end, I felt very proud and confident in my boards when going into presenting because I was able to overcome this obstacle, but also to practice and rehearse my presentation in order to adequately sell my design to the viewers. Receiving reviews from the professionals is one of my favorite parts as it gives me things to grow from, learn from, and work on for next time but also reassures my designs and again helps to solidify that I am proud of what I have been working on for several months.

In the end, the Train Depot Historic Restoration and Adaptive Reuse project was very beneficial to learning new design techniques and growing as an interior designer overall. I feel that I learned a lot about myself, concept, and codes from this project which I can take with me in the future for other designs. This project was fun yet exhausting at the same time, but I wouldn't change anything about that as it was a great learning experience. In end, I feel that I was able to clearly represent my inspiration throughout my project and reflect on the codes and universal design requirements with the final project completed.

Stir Competition Submission

Every year Sherwin-Williams holds a paint swatch Interior Design competition. I submitted a poster this year with my Art Gallert design from a recent project that I am in the midst of completing. This design is an art gallery which represents my concept of organic around the synthetic. This design is part of a historical restoration project of turning an old railroad depot into an art gallery, while keeping the original ticket window represented in these renderings as the large brick wall with a complementary second brick ticket window inspired wall to unify the original one. My inspiration for this particular design came from an object at the train depot site. I chose an old and rusty nail covered in moss and organic matter essentially leading to a design conveying the history and wonder with a synthetic man made material piercing into the wall of the complementary organic material and how long or why it was ever there. Conveying emphasis, asymmetry, contrast, strength and unity, the inspiration of the nail pulls a viewer in to wonder of the history and story of what’s behind that nail, all while the two contrasting elements of organic matter and metal represent unity and beauty. There is a sense of cohesion with the organic rock and moss coinciding with the nail and brick while still seeing complements of the contrasting synthetic vs. organic material. In this Train Depot design, contrast is seen throughout the design within the ceiling, curved walls, and materials. The ceiling embraces the complementary colors of Sherwin-Williams paint and represents the organic through flow, color, and texture. The ceiling also has multiple clouds which directly represent the idea of piercing into the organic, while looking like a large replica of the nail itself piercing into the ceiling. The ceiling plan directly pulls from the concept from the contrasting curves of organic against the rigid synthetic design of the wooden beams stained with Sherwin-Williams Stain. The colors chosen for this design directly embody the concept of this design in representation of organic and synthetic colors, a complementary color scheme, and the unity seen within the overall color palette in the end. Through this project I learned a lot about color palettes and design with color in mind. I feel that this skill will be essential for future project in my career.

Blind Audition

Today I had the opportunity to see life through the eyes of a person who is legally blind. Putting on sunglasses with the lenses covered in Vaseline, my sight became 80-90% lessened of what it is on a usual day. I wear glasses and contacts on a daily basis so I already had an idea of what it feels like to not be able to see everything as clearly, however in this experimental research I was able to remove my glasses (considerably reducing my visibility as is) and then adding the sunglasses which resulted in an eyesight much like that of a person who is legally blind, according to the experiment. With the sunglasses, everything was dark and blurry causing most views to be blobs of color and/or light. Maneuvering on campus within the student union building, I was challenged when trying to walk up and down stairs, use elevators, use the ATM kiosk, and even just attempting to shop for the clothing. Much of the stairs had great contrast and dark textured no-slip grips on them which helped in aiding to see the height changes, however a few different stair cases did not and those were much harder to see and I had to use my foot to feel for the elevation change. There were two different elevators in the building, one within the clothing shop and another in the building's main entrance area, the one within the store was much harder to manuever as it had no brail, speakers, or helpful colors to guide someone that is visually impaired while the other elevator spoke the floor that it was one and when the door was open. The ATM's were assistant with headphone spaces for audio guidance which is highly helpful, however the key pad with the numbers had no cues to help with which number was at the top and/at the bottom (since some number keypads start with 1 at the top left and others with 1 at the bottom left.) I attempted to shop for clothing with the thought process of wondering what its like to choose clothing without even knowing what the clothing actually looks like, but based off the supposed color, design, and fabric. It was much harder than I had expected and I would look at some clothing thinking they were very cute and when removing the sunglasses they would be a style that I didn't actually like, It was really interesting to experience. While processing this whole experience, I realized that I could really only see the contrasting of light within corridors and walkways and the "light at the end of the tunnel" as I kept calling it with hallways and windows at the end which would reflect down the floor's surface. To a point, the shiny floors reflected a lot of light which could be confusing, but when walking down the main aisle of the building the windows and their reflections lit up the path in a way. All of the people in the building looked like dark shadows and I would jump when people got too close as the depth perception I had was a lot worse than normal, even without my glasses. A few issues I ran into were doors that were closed would look open to me, I almost ran into the glass doors as I could not tell they were there at all aside from having my hands in front of me, I knocked over a small shelf of Nook covers in the book store, some of the stairs would look like a black blob in front of me and if there wasn't a person on the stairs I couldn't tell the distance or angle at all. I noticed that a lot of walls and doors would have high contrast allowing me to see where the entrances were however, others would not and I would have to interpret the entryway and hope that I was heading in the right direction. Overall I feel that this experience was a great one for me for my future project involving a couple with a visually impaired wife and for overall understanding of diversity within sight all together. I feel that being able to understand how my client (and even others in the world) views life on a daily basis can and will help me to better understand where they are coming from, thus bettering my design when keeping those that are visually impaired in mind. 

(Below is a photograph of the stairs with the contrast and texture change as well as a very quick sketch that I did of how the lighting was seen through the glasses with the lighted pathway of reflection and the dark shadows all around)

Concept Development - Train Depot Adaptive Reuse

INSPIRATION OBJECT:

FINAL PARTI

TEXTILE DESIGN

FINAL MODEL OF INSPIRATION

The process of concept design for this design project started with the top photograph and through abstraction and design turned into the bottom photograph of my concept model. Inspired by the first photograph I focused on the elements and principles relating to Organic shape, geometric shape, emphasis, contrast, repetition, strength, permanence, and movement. I also focused primarily around the void knowing about the history of the nail; the why, when, what aspects of the purpose and reason for the nail being there, and the overall idea of the organic embracing the synthetic of the natural vs the man made object. I was drawn to this nail because of the unusual and emphasis of the nail alone in this wall of the train depot. I was attracted to the elements of the textures and colors of the train depot wall itself consisting of the rock and brick along with the moss and natural features, as well as the nail itself as it began to cause me to think of the "why" of the nail and how long it may have been there. I was drawn to the wonder of the nail more than anything and bringing in that idea of how the organic has essentially grown around the man made nail. Pulling these aesthetics in I was able to transform the idea of this nail into the parti shown above and then pulled that into the textile design which I had printed onto a fabric for this design. Moving from the textile and parti, I pulled in the same aesthetics and principles and warping it into a 3D object, I was able to make the model shown above. This model completely pulls in the idea of the organic around the synthetic and this is the essential idea of my entire concept. The process of this concept model making took time to adjust to but with time I feel that I was able to successfully portray the idea of the nail in the train depot wall successfully in an abstract manner for use as inspiration for later in this design project.

Eames House

Autocad Drafting and InDesign Poster on Eames House

Case Study - Architect of 1890-1930

Kirtland Cutter

For this Case Study, I chose to research Kirtland K. Cutter of the Spokane area. I was very fascinated by the architectural designs that he had done and decided that he was the most interesting architect of the time period that I found. Each case study was given to multiple people to then research and combine graphic design ideas in the poster layouts to allow for the posters to aesthetically match each other. I feel that the partners that I worked with were very good at working with others so organizing and agreeing on a layout design was very easily done and agreed upon. Learning about Kirtland Cutter was interesting and I felt that I learned a lot about the time period which the project I am working on now is based out of as well as Cutter's style of design. Being from the East side of Washington, learning about the architecture and reasons to the design of Spokane was also interesting.

Habitat For Humanity Design Project

In a group of three , we worked to design a home for the Palouse Habitat for Humanity. With an approximate square footage of 1,100, we worked to design a two story, 3 - 4 bedroom home with two bath and the possibility for aging in place. This made for a pretty difficult task as we also had the maximum of a 640 sq. ft. foot print of living space (garage not included) to work with. My partners and I worked on multiple different preliminary layout designs and as a group chose what we thought was the best usage of space and met with a Habitat for Humanity Architect who then told us the positives of our design and the ways we could improve it and we went from there. In the end I felt that we came up with a very efficient design for Habitat for Humanity in a realistic manner in that it could be built for a fairly low cost while meeting requirements for Habitat for Humanity’s financial needs. Sticking to the foot print and roughly to the square footage, sacrificing the cost of a complicated roofing system for a larger square footage, we were able to add in the family room as it saves money in the roofing materials and complicated building systems. For this design, we were able to add in multiple 5 ft. turning radius within the 1st floor plan in order to accompany the possibility of a family member needing to use a wheelchair in the long run. Moving the laundry into the garage and pushing the garage out a few extra feet spared living space within the 640 sq. ft. footprint and allowed for the laundry and bathroom to share water walls. This also led to a shared water wall with the upstairs bathroom saving Habitat for Humanity money in building. To keep with the idea that Habitat for Humanity had to encourage family time and interaction, our group decided to add in the family room and the shared study nook on the 2nd floor. This will encourage the children of the family who lives in this home to study and work together and to have possible game and TV nights together. Our overall design came from the word "roots" as we felt that this home would become the foundation to the new life to come much like the roots of a tree stabilize its growth in time. To come up with our word of roots, we looked at many Habitat for Humanity photographs and made a large list of words that came to mind, varying from love, hope, thankful, life, family, opportunity, all the way to elements like contrast and repetition, we settles on the word roots as we felt is was the strongest word we could work from and said much more about the home itself as well as the family inhabiting it. These are the two final posters which we presented our design with and a photograph of our final model of the home design. Overall, I feel that our group did an excellent job meeting the requirements and keeping the Habitat for Humanity workers and cost in mind as well as the possible home owners. I felt that it was a difficult task handed to us in the beginning, but with reworking the layout and thinking with the client in mind we were able to meet the needs for Habitat for Humanity. I feel that our rendering and hand drafting abilities in this project show our strengths as with the design idea that we came up with in the end.