It certainly was an eventful semester. I learned a ton about how aesthetics influences our everyday lives. Additionally, this course showed me the societal divide between the arts and engineering, and I made my best effort over the semester to bridge the gap and incorporate both artistry and engineering within my projects. In future personal…

Why and What Next My laser cut enclosure panels finally arrived, so I was able to construct my desk lamp! Functional Motivation My main functional goal for this project was to alleviate the poor lighting in my room in graduate housing. I only have a single overhead light, that is far from centrally positioned. Accordingly,…

Ordered Component Progress The major progress so far has been the arrival of the light socket and plug that I ordered [1]. In order to expedite the placement of my decorative panel laser cutting order from Ponoko, a side view of the light base was used with a pixel analyzer. Figure 1. Brighttia website [1]…

Main Project Aesthetic Inspiration Prior to the pandemic, I had just finished re-watching the first season of Westworld with some future housemates in preparation for the season 3 premiere. In the teaser trailers leading up to the newest season, we were able see some of the first glimpses of the world outside of the wild…

Timeline My project has been complicated by the closing of the ITLL due to the COVID-19 pandemic. My only option for fabricating my laser cut desk lamp on campus is now the Rapid Prototyping Lab’s laser cutter within the Idea Forge. The Idea Forge now has reduced hours (open 9 AM – 5 PM) for…

After deliberating a bit, I have chosen to follow Option 3: Futuristic Laser Cut Sections of my last “Main Project Aesthetics” post when creating my desk lamp. I hope to create something similar to the featured image design [1] by laser cutting wood into a sleek, decorative arrangement of geometric shapes. Again, I hope to…

Option 1: Medieval Fantasy Hightower Spire Following my inspiration post, the first option of aesthetic to apply to my desk lamp would be to create a replica of the Song of Ice and Fire universe’s Hightower in Oldtown. If I choose this option, I will make my desk lamp sufficiently tall (~1m height) and add…

Introduction For this course’s Main Project, I would like to create something with regular functional use. My current room in graduate housing only has one oddly-positioned overhead light, so even with an additional off-the-shelf lamp, in the evenings I’ve been finding that it’s functionally impossible to get any non-computer work (paperwork, reading. etc.) done within…

Shortly after making my inspiration post, I found an extremely similar process conducted by a craft-cycle.com user “McKenzie” posted to the site – https://www.craft-cycle.com/upcycled-receipt-notebook-2/ – on August 3rd of last year, with pretty promising results regarding notebook/sketchpad functionality. Reading through this post addressed a lot of my own concerns regarding how I would proceed with…

Group members: Justin Engbrecht (myself), Patrick Bodine-Ellison, and Benjamin Robles For the Aesthetics Game this semester conducted by guest lecturer Dr. Greg Whiting, our table received the object “Coat hanger” and the aesthetic “Novelty Architecture / Roadside Vernacular Architecture”. We initially had no idea what this aesthetic was, and had to google it to find…

While we were discussing the importance of doodling within lecture the past week, I realized that while I have a full-size notebook in my backpack dedicated to this course, I may want another smaller sketchpad that I can carry in my pocket for whenever inspiration strikes me. In the context of upcycling, creating pages for…

For my first aesthetic exploration, I have chosen to explore the Retrofuturism aesthetic. Building upon the concept of futurism, retrofuturism has the distinction of showing retro styling and perspective at odds with a futuristic depiction, especially regarding technology and machinery. Visually, retrofuturism eschews the blocky form in favor of curves and contours, often featuring vibrant…