Student Work

My main hobby for connecting with my friends is playing tabletop role-playing games. This has been a big part of my life since i was a freshman in high school and has had a huge impact on the person I am today. For my main project I would like to put together a table for…

   My midterm project inspiration was based on an aesthetic, but I ran into so many obstacles that I’m trying a completely different approach.  This time I’m making materials and my final object a priority. I want to make something I’ll be proud of, and will use after the class is over.  Since I moved…

To satisfy the requirements of: Deliverables will be a functional artifact that satisfies an aesthetic of your choice, plus documentation The artifact must be dynamic or complete a task (demonstrating form/function balance)Has to be aesthetic My friend is currently building an electrical guitar but recently graduated and can’t use the facilities’ resources on campus, so…

For my final project I am planning on making a propeller out of wood. I would like to make a propeller for my final project because I love all things aviation. Ever since I was young I have been fastened by flight. Some of my earliest memories are of planes; a majority of my toys…

For my main project, I would really like to cater to one of my very basic needs, an organizer for my headphones and earphones. It is a pain to keep them around in my room as I don’t have a particular space or shelf assigned for that. I draw inspiration from the Steampunk aesthetic as…

In Thermo and Heat Transfer we talked a lot about sterling engines and how they operate. I have to give Professor Knutsen a shout out as he is the one who was fascinated with these little machines and got me hooked on them. I always wanted to make one but never got around to it.…

For my main project, I am still sifting through a plethora of ideas, one of my main ideas is creating a dynamic sculpture of some sort. This inspiration is from sculptures I have seen that use things like wind for movement.  However, if I chose this option I would want to create something that uses…

When I had first started thinking of inspiration for this project, I wanted to work with something I enjoy and am passionate about. I started thinking about all of the opportunity behind clothing, and how you can make a piece of clothing out of really any material if you design and construct it right. So,…

For my main project, I want to create something that I would keep at my desk at work or around my house as decoration. Knowing that one of the requirements for the final project is that it needs to have a dynamic element, I started brainstorming what would be appropriate to keep around in the…

For my main project, I was once again inspired by the laser cutters, although I may end up going with an alternative manufacturing route after hearing a peer’s less-than-optimal experience creating gears with them. As far as I know, my main project idea is an original idea, although I am sure toys of the same…

For my final project idea I decided to focus on the realm of cardboard. There are a plethora of DIY projects where people have taken scrap cardboard and turned them into chairs, couches, art, and even designs with mechanical use. I wanted to create something that I would continue to use outside the class, and…

For my Main Project, I knew that I wanted to work with quality wood to make a timely piece for display. The main question I found asking myself, is what do I want to do with wood and what will be possible and or within my “scope” of being achievable. Another question was for whom…

I want to make something that is both useful and aesthetically appealing. I want to make a folding coffee table. My apartment has been lacking one for over a year now and although I have come across many opportunities to purchase perfectly good coffee tables, none of them meet my three requirements. It must be…

For my main project I want to do something related to Japanese zen gardens and bonsai trees. The process of bonsai is thousands of years old and is the process of keeping a tree small, but allowing it to age to mimic real life on a small scale. I want to do this same thing,…

Acrylic LED lit Sword For my main project inspiration I was leaning towards making a sword out of acrylic using our school’s laser cutter. However the issue was finding a way to make it dynamic. Doing some research I stumble upon https://ripperblades.net/ who make and sell many of these swords with a strong light going…

I recently went to a restaurant in boulder right off of pearl street. I was fascinated upon entering at the industrial machine that they had at the bar. This large system allowed the bar tender to rotate between multiple sets of shelves containing alcohol in a novel way. I think I would like to make…

Aesthetic of Conjunction Benjamin Chang When looking for inspiration regarding aesthetics, I searched for artists I enjoy. Olafur Eliasson is such an artist that I find great inspiration from. Eliasson specializes in creating works of art that engage with the audience via a sense of space and feeling. Eliasson Exhibitions yield marvelous and mysterious works…

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…

I am very tempted to make a sculpture out of mycelium, but after the disaster that was my upcycle project, I think it would be safest to avoid relying on it. This being said I think I want to make some sort of kinetic sculpture. I am familiar with kinetic wind sculptures due to my…

For my Upcycle project, I wanted to create something that utilized materials found from my everything drawer. The everything drawer is a commonplace for items that do not have a  designated place to go.  The items placed in the everything drawer either are placed there and then never touched again, or are placed in the…

For my Main Project in this class, I would like to incorporate water and electronics in some way. I have been thinking about using a pump to continuously and uniformly drip water on some lever or sensor. From the feedback of the sensor, a clock will tick, and an LCD screen can display the time.…

Check out my presentation here: [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPC3JNy6MRA&w=560&h=315] Inspiration: As per the usual, it was a Friday night and I was watching Parks and Rec on Netflix with my fiance. It was the episode where Leslie Knope gets married (a few weeks earlier than originally planned) and Ann Perkins finishes the wedding dress using old newspapers featuring…

February 5, 2020 Slides

Admin Sketching cubes Universal Principles of Design: Contour Bias Admin: Final (Exam) Expo will be Sunday May 3, 7:30-10 pm in the Idea Forge. Snacks, open to the public. Invite your friends and family. Great projects, and informative reports. However NO CREDIT WITHOUT FEATURED IMAGE. Use Worktrade to get help, or see me or Behruz…

In this game we had to merge an object and an aesthetic. Our object was a Tiki-bar and our aesthetic was a book-bag.  Members that contributed to this were Austin Ross, Joe Knapp, Davis Butte and myself Noah Verspohl.

My initial idea was to do something along the lines of up-cycled fashion however I did not know exactly what I wanted to do whether it be a hat, a purse, a dress or pants, etc. I decided to go out to a thrift store to get some ideas. Thrifting is a favorite hobby of…

Inspiration I wanted to get real use out of the artifact I made for this class, so I deliberated for a while on what I could make that I would use daily. Unfortunately, my apartment came with no overhead lighting fixtures, so the only light in my room comes from a lamp in the corner…

Inspiration https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AzUjx1s8rn91hskv_eb0iJPFuWh4qG0L/view?usp=sharing For my upcycle project I have created a two-way wallet out of a recycled leather purse. The inspiration for this project originally came from duct tape wallets that I used to make and sell in middle school. The type of wallets I made were able to open in 2 directions, where the geometry…

Vison The vision for my project came to me as I was about to fall asleep one night. Originally I thought that I was going to craft a bowl or cup out of a log, but it didn’t feel quite right. I was thinking of other things but couldn’t nail anything down until an idea…

Inspiration My inspiration for my upcycle project is two-fold; I first got inspired over Christmas break of 2019-2020. I was reading The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien and I loved his description of all of his characters and the setting of middle earth. I could almost believe that I was actually there. The second came from…

  My final result project is a northern lights inspired candle holder/cover.  The change from a sun-catcher to a candle cover stemmed from two events; a classmates blog post suggestion and candles I’ve been gifted.  Someone suggested I add water to my project, to help capture as well as disperse sunlight. I loved this suggestion,…

INSPIRATION: The inspiration for my upcycle project is my mom. Being that she loves trendy art that is suitable for display in our house, I figured I would create her a wall piece to hang in our house. My mom is originally from New Zealand (hence the reason the featured image is the New Zealand…

For my upcycle project I initially had a very hard time thinking about what material I wanted to use and what aesthetic I wanted to incorporate. To me choosing the material would some what point me in the right direction for what I wanted to make, and what aesthetics to use. I knew that I…

Inspiration: My inspiration stems from some of the videos I watched when I was younger. Numberphile gave me a lot of math, science, and engineering inspiration. Stable rollers was one of the very first videos I watched and it amazed me how beautiful, fun, and creative engineering can be. While MarbleLympics is less about the…

Inspiration In the early stages of this project I had trouble finding inspiration for what I wanted to work on. I began to go through my old photos to maybe find that spark. It hit me when I found the photos when I witness the Washington Capitals win the Stanley cup in D.C. in 2018.…

Upcycle 2020. Balance Benjamin Chang Introduction When starting this upcycling project I knew from the beginning I didn’t want to purchase any material of any sort. However, it wasn’t out of the question of gathering through asking around looking for resources to supply a project. When looking for inspiration I came across an installation artist…

Abstract The purpose of this project is to look at upcycling. Upcycling is the process of making something useful out of discarded materials. Examples of upcycling can be seen all around us if we just stop and look. These can be things such as art instillation made of old tires, tables at breweries made of…

Vision This project began with the idea of making a side table which fit a modern/industrial aesthetic. To do this, I originally planned to create a unique weldment using recycled steel tubing for the table’s structure and then build a tabletop out of wood cutoffs. Since the materials I planned to use were dimensional building…

Introduction / Vision I started this project with an initial idea of using old paper wrappers and folding them into origami cranes and making a project out of that. This idea worked well with my desired aesthetic of “Chinese”. Thankfully however, after doing more research and idea searching, I came across an idea to make…

Vision Magic the Gathering has been a hobby of mine that I’ve rediscovered in the past year. However, a side effect of printing cards that are “rare” is that there is an order of magnitude more cards that are worth almost nothing and are never used. However these cards still have breathtaking art commissioned from…

Dear reader, I would like to summarize how this project went with an original haiku: A bonsai and me, Was not meant to be, a tree; Saguaro cactus. So dearest reader, if you cannot tell by my poem we had quite a metamorphosis since my last post and my bonsai has transformed into a saguaro…

This project of the upcycle has been a very fun and interesting challenge! I started out by throwing around ideas about many different types of materials and designs before I started thinking about who I am and what materials I already owned. This was a big idea as I wanted the item I chose to…

Kensue Kiatoukaysy Aesthetics of Design 2/11/2020 Upcycle Project: Captain America Cardboard Shield “Sanderson, Peter, et al. “Captain America.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 11 Nov. 2019, www.britannica.com/topic/Captain-America.” Aesthetic Choice: Aesthetics of Popular Culture Abstract The goal of this project is exactly as it sounds; the purpose is to create some sort of structure, artwork, aesthetic…

Abstract The upcycle project is intended to get our feet wet in creative thinking. Its purpose is to create something artistic or functional or both out of unwanted materials. This means creating the project out of as many reused materials as possible, and trying to eliminate the need for purchasing parts or supplies. I started…

  The goal for this upcycle project is to create an artifact that follows an aesthetic, and construct it mostly out of recycled material. For my project, I decided to create a mosaic art piece out of broken glass, grout, and an old, 2′ x 2′ board. The piece follows an abstract vision of a…

Abstract The up-cycling project in this class, Aesthetics of Design is all about how you select leftover or unused materials and come up with a creative idea of building something using all of that, combined with an aesthetic of your choice. This in turn recycles the materials and creates an unmatched, blooming idea that was…

The upcycling project I decided to do is a coat hanger with shotgun shells. Initially at the beginning of the semester, I struggled a lot to come up with an idea that I like. When Prof. Hertzberg introduced the upcycling project, I quickly thought about shotgun shells and how to use them. When I did…

It’s just hard to upload pictures onto this site, so you can check them out at :https://drive.google.com/open?id=1nfvkl7p3Ltj-a_64PLm_OcqbC4G3kT0u Original Sketch&thought: I started out with quite a lot of ideas for this upcycling project. But after I talked with one of my teacher from another class, I decided to focus on using plastic bottle caps for this…

Inspiration My inspiration for this project came from a bit of digging, a bit of Pinterest browsing, and an ever-growing pile of recycling in my apartment that was begging to be repurposed. I’m a lover of art; I try my best to practice when I have the time in various forms. Something that I’ve always…

I have a considerable amount of electronics waste in my house. From motherboards to hard drives to printers, a combination of my work in IT and my roommate’s propensity for gathering E-waste has lead to a house filled with useless gadgets. My goal with this project was to turn the E-waste that I am so…

For my Upcycle project, I had initially wanted to work with fast food wrappers in some manner from the get go – taking inspiration from art and sculptures from other artists who have worked with a similar medium; that is, with objects or materials that might typically be considered garbage. A sculpture using fast food…

Introduction/Vision When I started this project, I didn’t have a clear idea of what exactly I wanted to accomplish. I knew that I would be using bottle caps, but that didn’t give me any discernable direction or guidelines for moving forward. It took quite a bit of searching, and discussing, to finally come up with…

For the Aesthetics Game, my team pulled the item “backpack” and the aesthetic “Japanese motorcycles”. While these two things aren’t normally thought of as complementary, or in any way similar, we now had to find a way to combine them. The first step that I took was to start brainstorming. What did the “Japanese motorcycle”…

In the beginning, there was darkness… then God said “let there be light.” We were given this “UpCycle” assignment at the beginning of the class. To make something out of cheap or even better, recycled materials. In the description of the assignment, there was a line that read, “it is okay to do art for…

Inspiration When I first started this project, I wished to make a plush, and my original inspiration began with Hello Kitty [1] and recycling the old fabric that I kept from my youth and from what my sister did not need anymore, mostly because I did not keep much to upcycle other than old clothes…

For this project my vision was to create a very simplistic resemblance of the Canon Eos R series camera. The function is not really an aspect as much as the form. For the form I wanted a general shape and configuration to resemble the camera. I was trying for a desktop styled symbol. I want…

For my upcycle project I started with looking at making some sort of clothing out of other clothing that I no longer wear. This idea led me to the internet where I started looking at other upcycle projects. This is where I stumbled upon people making planter boxes out of old household items, so I…

Vision My initial vision involved creating a minimalist planter out of mycelium, which is basically the roots of mushrooms. Mycelium is a really fascinating material because it can be grown in any shape, is low cost (easily upcycled), is completely biodegradable, and when it is baked, it becomes very durable. I was familiar with mycelium…

I. INTRODUCTION: INSPIRATION This report will look at the design process of an upcycled product, made up of re-purposed materials. My Upcycled vinly billboard wallet project first began when I looked through one of Peter McKinnon’s videos, “The Best Minimalistic EDC Wallet” [¹], after discovering it from a recent aesthetic exploration blog post that Christopher…

Inspiration The original inspiration for my Upcycle project came from a Netflix show called The Repair Shop. The Repair Shop highlights the repair and improvement of vintage antiques and cherished family items. The Repair Shop: www.netflix.com.   In one of the first episodes, a vintage music player/cigar holder was brought in for refurbishment. While the…

Ideation With carved egg shells and clay sculptures covered in egg shells as my initial inspirations, I set out to create a sculpture out of egg shells. Frankly, it was a masochistic challenge to my patience, but in the end, I feel proud and glad to have made something that is not necessarily useful but…

Introduction In the Aesthetics of Design class here at CU Boulder, our first project is to design something with a specific aesthetic using only upcycled materials such as cardboard, scrap wood, scrap plastic, etc. When I first started this project, I wanted to make something small (something I could carry) and also something I would use…

My inspiration for this project was found by simply walking through Goodwill. My grandmother passed in November and she has been on my mind a lot lately. When I went into Goodwill, a lot of the things in there reminded me of her. She was an adorable British grandmother who always made sure that her…