Bathroom Design

To complement my kitchen design, here is my final bathroom design! I think the poster turned out much better. You can actually read it this time and understand what's going on. Personally, I think that's a huge improvement. This project seemed a lot more difficult than it was while I was working on it because I had so many other things to do last week. I finished this poster up over a period of three days (however the process work before hand took at least a week, if not more.) I'm pretty satisfied with the end result. I consider it a huge personal success. Once again, I have problems with the fact that I would never live in something like this, but hopefully someone else out there would like it! It's still a design for the client, no matter what. I'd love to design my dream home someday soon though. I would work a lot better if I was actually excited over what I'm doing. Other than that though, I don't really have much I'm disappointed by here. The tiles in the Plan Oblique were ridiculously tough to draw, but I still did it. I also accidentally cut off part of the name block, but what's done is done. I know I drew it right regardless! I'm just not the best at putting it all together on a computer. Computers and I have always been enemies which worries me when I finally start learning how to design with programs. Hopefully it'll go better than expected, just like this project!

Study Tour Visits

One of the first stops on our study tour of Seattle was Knoll. Knoll specializes in office design, such as office chairs, desks, filing cabinets, meeting rooms, and so on. I absolutely loved this firm. My mom works in insurance, so my whole life I've been visiting her in different offices around the city and every last one of them sucks. To be honest. My mom has been crammed in the middle of tall cubicles, which no one likes. She has been put in a private cubicle with a nice view, but it was so large and walled off that it felt depressing. Currently, she has a beautiful office, but you can barely fit one person in the hallway leading to her door. So when I visited with my boyfriend, the three of us standing in the doorway did not feel comfortable at all. Why is it that offices are so hard for designers to create?
At Knoll they showed us a thousand and one different ways I could improve all these offices for my mom. I loved the chairs they were designing specifically for how people work, not how diagrams say we sit at desks. They designed all the walls lower so you can see across the room while standing, but also feel like you have private space when sitting and working. They also designed several open desks, for collaborative work, which I find extremely important for my mom since she has an assistant who is currently stuck in a cubicle that is walled off from my mom's office. Knoll really understood how people work and how they want to function, rather than how we're told to. Designing for people is huge to me. If an item is technically correct but doesn't function in a way that people use it for, then it can never be considered a success.

 

Another site we visited was the Home of the Immediate Future, presented by Habitat for Humanity. I already know a LOT about the organization since I've volunteered for them and studied them so many times. So I didn't really learn much here. We also weren't allowed to tour the second floor which was really disappointing to me. I found the building interesting nonetheless and I loved that they considered how to move around functions of the house in case a family has different needs. Many of the rooms of the house could swap with each other. What I disliked the most about this house was the fact that the fridge was under the stairs. It was a clever use of the space but did not work very well for the future function of the home. I also tried opening and closing the fridge to see how it would take up space and I cut my finger open pretty badly. Of course, the home was not finished at the time, so the untreated wood was not the nicest material. But even then, when they finish the walls, people are still at risk of crushing their fingers with this odd set up. May not get a nasty cut, but not fun either way. Habitat for Humanity has done some wonderful things as far as providing affordable, lasting homes, but they still have a way to go with creating a space that understands the function of people.

Urban Sketchers

In Seattle, we spent a good amount of time walking around Olympic Sculpture Park. Everything we sketched took on some unnatural, abstract shape, right in the middle of a natural environment and buildings. It was really difficult for me to sketch something like that!

The above picture was the last one I did. The sculpture is called "The Eagle." I don't really see an eagle, more like a mutated elephant to me. But still. This was extremely difficult to draw because I don't personally understand the material that it's made of. I've never worked with metal and tried to form it, so I have a hard time imagining how it is supposed to be folded. I put so much work into trying to get the sculpture correct that I neglected the foreground and accurately depicting that. I like it a lot more now that I've had time to look away from it. The color I added after I returned to Pullman and I think it really made the sketch better. It isn't much, but the emphasis on the sculpture changes the whole balance. I think next time I will go inspect the sculpture before I attempt to draw it. I had no idea what the details were from my distance and I think that really hindered me.

 

This drawing was my first one actually. (Maybe I should have put these in the right order!) These were really interesting structures. From where I was sitting they look like small individual "wave" forms. But when I finished this sketch and walked by the sculptures to the other side, they reminded me of giant viking ships. I wish I had put a person in the drawing to show the scale. But I felt puny once I walked next to them, which you can't really get a feeling for from this perspective. However, the sketch itself was fun to create. it was interesting to try and create a three dimensional wave. The walls that framed the sculptures, as well as the building and shrubbery really made a great composition. I had fun trying to represent everything proportionally and accurately without making my plant life into solid scribbles. I think overall this sketch was a success!

Job Shadow

I had a great time at my job shadow! I spent Friday, September 28th with Alyse Zimmer from Build Urban in the Fremont area. She gave Grace and I a tour of the firm (which had a spectacular view of the water for the record), and then gave us a quick look at their most recent project plans. It was so nice to see how an interior design degree can be used in the real world! And everything they were working on I understood for the most part!
Later on they took us to pick out materials for their next project (after stopping by one of the sites they already built). We went to a place called Great Floors in Seattle and spent the rest of the day there. It was amazing to see the design process in work. Not only worrying about the color schemes, but also the price and green quality of the items. We haven't had to work with a budget yet so it was interesting to see the designers discussing everything. It was actually a very energizing atmosphere seeing people zip out of the room and back again with a million more samples to try out. I couldn't even express how much fun I had!
The most interesting part to me was to find out that Alyse was working more as an architect than a designer. I'm more interested in the architecture part personally, so it was cool to see that that option is still available to me if I graduate with an interior design degree. Her firm was so small that there was one owner, two accountants, an architect, and Alyse, the "designer." I think I'd like to work in a company like that. It was the best job shadow I could've asked for!

Finding Home

In a project to design an apartment complex for a client, Seth Anawalt, I started with the kitchen design. My kitchen is inpsired by the magnifying glass concept posted about previously. I chose the warm feelings that represent all the good feelings you have at home. The rest of the design was a little more difficult to figure out. I tried to focus on a circular traffic pattern to reflect the round magnifying glass. The counter heights varied to show how the magnifying glass changes the size of objects. Also, all my materials are glass, wood, and metal; the same materials you'd think of when you picture a classic magnifying glass.

Unfortunately, I don't think I did the best of reflecting a magnifying glass in this project. It was originally supposed to incorporate more circles and lines (as shown in the light fixture and bar stools), but I ended up getting rid of most of those features as I worked. Some things just didn't work out the way I wanted or I thought they looked better without those features.

Overall, I think I made a beautiful kithen for our client. It is not my personal style, but meant to work for our clients wishes and the future users needs. I think if I had done something with my own style it would have turned out a lot better because I would have put more energy into it. Another big problem with this project is that I had so little time to get things done! I have work and so many other classes that even with good time management it was just impossible to do without staying up all night at least once.

In the future I think I'll try to put a little more of my own style into my designs. It is always best to please the client, but if I don't put my own personality into a project what's going to make me stand out?



 

Roll With It

To experience what it would be like in our world from a different perspective, I borrowed a wheelchair for an hour. Big surprise! Almost nothing designed in our world today was easy to use from a wheelchair! I thought getting around town was difficult enough without the hindrance of being on wheels. A quick tour of the main buildings I'm used to walking around and I knew something had to be changed.

So here I am, starting my tour in the bathroom of all places. I may look silly, but getting that wheelchair in the stall was quite an achievement for me! It took more than a few forward and backward pushes to get there. Plus trying to even get on the toilet? Not going to happen. So I just left.

After washing my hands (for no purpose other than to see if I even could) I tried to dry off. The sink was a little difficult to reach the knobs, but the paper towels were impossible. Being short already, plus being in a low wheelchair, I simply couldn't do it. How many people have to actually deal with these problems in our world? Maybe that's why we never really see a lot of the handicapped out and about; we just make everything difficult for them. I'd rather stay in a home built for me than have these issues on a daily basis!

Once again, at the local coffee stand. What if I spilt a drink on myself? Too bad, it'll stain my clothes. Napkins were beyond my reach as well, when normally I could have as many as I wanted in seconds. Reaching and stretching for minutes couldn't get me a napkin.

Doesn't look like much does it? Believe it or not, there is a slight decline in elevation leaving the building. And it leads to a much steeper hill onto the main road. I was not expecting this when I finally made it down the ramp (which was difficult enough), so I started to just roll away! Definitely helped with the arm muscles though. Had to put on the breaks and barely caught myself.

When I made it into the kitchen next door, well. It wasn't very helpful. All the drawers were at eye level! I couldn't see a thing inside of them (unless I craned my neck over it). The overhead cabinets and the counter itself were not even considered. Nothing in there could have been used except for the lowest drawers. Not even the freezer over the fridge was accessible.

Lastly, getting through doors was a tricky problem. I didn't expect this at first, but I found myself flinching as I rolled through every doorway, scared I was going to get my fingers crushed. Wide doorways look silly to me usually, but now I get why they're so important! Everyone would have to wait for someone trying to maneuver through a door like the one below. I would be so embarrassed if I held up a bunch of people for something as simple as that.

Accessibility is a much bigger problem than I thought it would be. I believe in all public places, we should work on making things more accessible for people with all disabilities, not just for those in wheelchairs. However, my only hold back is that I don't believe homes should be required to meet the same needs. Homes should always stay private and be designed for the user themselves, not for who may or may not visit once in a lifetime. But again, in public, commercial spaces, everything needs to be designed for everyone as best as possible. There are people out there who are embarrassed, frustrated, and even incapable of making a contribution to our society because of these issues with design. We lose valuables workers and creative minds because someone may be stuck at home.

A sketch of the fridge from eye level. Clearly I cannot reach the freezer up above and could not even get the wheelchair close enough to reach the back of the shelves without kicking everything in the door.