Sindrian Arts

Apologies for not having posted in a while; unsurprisingly, school kept me busy.  However, not a whole lot of consequence happened, so here’s the cliff notes for the interesting bits:

Classes I took:

Design communication:
Same as every quarter; sketch a lot, do some renders.  One highlight is that I was introduced to Prezi, a wonderful little presentation web app that allows anyone to make a visually interesting presentation fairly easily.
JCPenny bag studio:
This was my design studio for the quarter.  Our task was to re-design JCPenny’s (or maybe it should be jcp’s) approach to reusable bags to help them transition away from plastic bags.  Unfortunately it was a group project, and the groups kept changing.  However, the execs from jcp LOVED the final presentation, so it all worked out in the end.
Design Seminar:
The purpose of this class was to prepare a proposal for our capstone project, start on research for it, and get it approved by the faculty.  Given that I already had a pretty well fleshed-out vision of my capstone (the CNC-based business I just spent a quarter working on), this was pretty easy.
Career Development:
AKA, how to get a job after you graduate.  Since I plan on being self-employed, I had to work with the professor to adapt the assignments to suit my needs, but it worked out all right.  For the most part, I simply adapted work from my final class:
Entrepreneurship:
This was my big class of the quarter.  Ironically, it was also my only elective, and the only class I took outside of the design college.  I cannot rant and rave enough about this class; it was hands down the best thing I took at UC to date.  If you go to UC and are at all interested in entrepreneurship, I HIGHLY recommend you take this class (or any class, really) taught by Tom Dalziel.  If you’re not in the college of business you’ll have to get special permission, but Tom will be very happy to have you.
This was the first class I’ve ever taken with NO BUSY WORK.  Every single assignment was part of the larger process of developing a business plan to be presented at the end of the quarter.
I had originally planned to write the Sindrian Arts business plan for this class, but as did more research, I realized that a: the business I wanted to start would not be attractive to outside investors interested primarily in making money, and b: my business actually had two distinct phases, each requiring their own plan, and thus too much work for the class.  What I ended up doing was writing a business plan for a version of Sindrian Arts.
In this business, called Green Furniture Works, the focus would be on making sustainable designer furniture.  While not quite what I want to do, it was close enough that I could still lean a lot from it, while being much more applicable to the class.  My next post will be about how this all has informed where I’m going from here.

>What a crazy life. First I stay up all night busting my ass to finish my chair before the crit at 7 am on Friday, and now I find myself sitting in the Salt Lake City airport waiting to be picked up by a bunch of crazy burners to take me to Burning Man. Rediculous. I’ll be incommunicado for the next ten days or so, but I promise a full debreifing when I get back.

>My CNC is finally finished! I’ll post some pics of it to the flickr album later. Of course, that means that I can now devote all my time to finishing my chair. Oh, and packing for Burning Man of course.

>I’m getting my CNC machine running tomorrow. The cable I thought would arrive Wednesday still isn’t here, but according to the friendly mail guy said that a package from Peoria would take two to three days, so it should arrive tomorrow. In case it doesn’t, my partner-in-crime Nate thinks we could rig something to take it’s place pretty easily.

>OK, so over the weekend Nate and I finished getting (almost) everything we need and wiring up all the electronics for the CNC so we could start testing it. Sunday evening we plugged it all in, launched Mach3, and entered our first bit of G-code.