(1) Pencil Holder
My very first wood project when I started the training course. It was pretty scary doing design and technology for the first time, fumbling with pencils trying to sketch miserably. And that was not the worse. Working with the tools and learning them all. But in the end, manage to come up with this pencil holder. Design is not an easy process. A lot of things need to be consider and for this project, I actually overlook a very important aspect in design. The top hole for the pencil holder was slanted at an angle that is too high where any pencil slipped through that hole will just slide off the other end. A mock-up model would have help in identifying this potential problem in design. Something worth noting always when designing.
(2) 6-piece Wood Project
An idea that was inspired by my earrings dilemma at home. The design involves the initial in my name "A" and "W" and this is an earring rack. You can hang your earrings along the dowels connecting the "A" and "W".
There are six pieces of wood (ignoring the supporting frame at the bottom). This has to be the hardest wood project I have done mainly due to the size involved and the joints. Broke one of the joint in making and have to redo it again. Everything was done by hand using hand tools and no machinery involved. Hence, it was quite a miserable moment to chisel the joints slowly and delicately.
With 6 pieces of wood, including the supporting frame, there are about 10 wood joints that I need to tackle. When that last one broke, I just sat there really fed up. Thank goodness Johnson helped me during that frustrating moment of despair. The number of dowels can be increased depending on how many earrings you want to hang on the rack. The other challenge is this project is the angle at which the dowel are connected to the "A" and the "W". Due to the positioning and the arrangement of the "A" and "W", the holes must be drilled at the right angles to ensure a tight fit for the dowel to be slotted in.
(3) Night Lamp (Year 2008 - Year of the Rat)
This project makes use of vacuum forming. This idea came to me because of the Chinese year, the Rat and I have included the year 2008 in the body of the rat as a remembrance to the year it was being made. There is a light dependent resistor (LDR) as you can see in the image above (the brown colour component sitting on the "8"). The LDR will detect the amount of light in a room and when it falls to a certain level (when it is dark enough), it will lights up the three (3) super bright light emitting diodes (LED) and this will turn on the night lamp. This night lamp is powered by a simple mercury cell which I placed behind the frame.
(4) The 黃 Display
We were all asked to make a display using acrylic. I came up with this idea because of my surname and through a number of doodling and sketching, I thought of joining the different strokes of the 黃 character using many pieces of thin acrylic. Getting it to stand was a challenge because of the small surface area at the bottom and the amount of weight it has to support at the top. The house symbolises the 黃 family. So this display means a lot to the designer. A lot of people on first glance thought it looks like a pineapple and some even comment that it could be a kind of virus. Well, everyone looks at things differently.
(5) EKEA (The Sustainability Project)
This is also an interesting idea that I liked a lot. We were asked to identify a potential problem we have in life and for me, living in a flat in Singapore poses a very common problem in every household. Where to put all the shoes in such a little flat? And when you have a few ladies living in the same apartment (ladies are shoe lovers and they will buy endless number of shoes and still want to buy more), keeping the shoes neatly hidden away is a problem. So I thought, why not utilise the space right above us. They are the most under-utilised space. And the tree-concept come about because of sustainability and having a like for green-nature. Aesthetically, it would add for a nice decoration to the apartment too.
Because of time constraint and practicability issues in the workshop, manufacturing the Shoe Tree would be a humongous project. The idea was downsized and manipulated into a little Shoe Web instead. Below are extracts of the presentation of the project.
This is the final development of the Shoe Web project.
This is a mock-up of the Shoe Web to illustrate how it works. This design enable the shoe web to be modular. You can increase or decrease the number of shoes it can hold. And you can choose to buy one or two or even more of this shoe web based on your needs. And the elastic band enables you to put any box sizes into the web. So you get to keep all your expensive and branded shoe boxes with your lovely pair of heels inside of course. Overall, its a fun project to do and its interesting how the idea got transformed from a Shoe Tree into a Shoe Web.
