Deck and patio designed and built for my parent’s house
Quiptionary
Transcribed Scenes from an Italian Restaurant for full band and performed at talent show
Fixed my first car including engine and body work
I don’t know if it counts as a creative project, but it was certainly a big learning experience. The main thing that I learned was that I don’t really like tinkering with cars. For me, cars are tools and I just want them to work.
College
Raft design (Island, total structural failure)
In Fort Wayne where I grew up, they have an annual Three Rivers Festival, part of which was a raft race where people would build rafts and float them down one of the rivers.
In this case, I wanted to build a floating island and worked with all my friends to build it. Unfortunately, I didn’t engineer it well. It consisted of several platforms that weren’t tied together well enough. As soon as it got in the water, it started to rock and it broke into pieces before it even got to the starting line.
Memory poster for Brent
My freshman year in college, I decided to draw a poster for my best friend, Brent. We’d had a lot of ups and downs in our relationship, so I chose the theme of a roller coaster, and filled the poster with brief phrases and words related to our time together. It was fun, but took much more time and work than I thought it would.
Loft bed for friend in dorm
Attic Storage Space Bedroom
Halloween concept for Boulder Art Center
One of my design school projects was in association with the Boulder Art Center. They held a trick or treat street at the gallery where volunteers painted panels and they set up booths to hand out candy. They were concerned that many of the volunteers didn’t feel artistic and it was difficult and stressful for them to come up with designs. Their thought was to have a design contest among the students so the design would be provided and the volunteers would just have to paint what was already designed.
My idea was not to design the whole thing but to supply a bunch of elements—moons, witches, scary fences, castles on a hill, etc— that they could assemble into compositions. My assumption was that the volunteers simply didn’t have the visual vocabulary at hand that they needed to succeed.
I planned to provide paper images (for use in an opaque projector), transparencies (for use in an overhead projector), and slides (for use in a slide projector).
Unfortunately, I discovered the day of the presentation that we would not be able to explain anything to the judges, that our designs would have to speak for themselves. It wasn’t at all clear from my model what I was proposing, so it was quickly dismissed.
I felt strongly that the volunteers shouldn’t have to defer their design to someone else. It was early expression of my assertion that design is a universal human activity and not something that should be limited to a professional class of people.
Software design: system for using issues and answers in architectural design CAD
One of my professors had a theory of design that was based on the idea that design was a matter of addressing various issues or questions that came up and providing answers. And that those answers, to some degree, could be captured and reused later in future designs when similar issues arose.
He anticipated that this kind of issue/answer database could be integrated with a CAD program to create a new kind of design tool.
Personal computers were fairly new, and the Macintosh OS and Windows were in their early days of use, so he was looking for ideas about what a system using these kinds of user interface tools might look like.
I studied the idea as an independent study class and wrote a lengthy report that he later used to develop some prototypes.
I got an A in the class, and he suggested that my mind might be wasted if I didn’t continue on to graduate school. I did not go to graduate school, but I’m still trying to use my mind.
Lunar base design, independent study
Low redwood chair (not very comfortable)
Various computer programs using Turbo Pascal
20s
Mondayless Week wheel
Crystal Word Chain game
Songwriting: My Hands
Songwriting: Tommy Taltuna
Songwriting: Susan’s Song
Songwriting: Joan’s wedding song
Christmas Caroling Books (hand bound)
Halloween party featuring The Ghoul Guy
Furniture: small wardrobe (for my sister, Joan)
Furniture: sweater chest (for my sister, Karen) made from discarded cedar siding
Stop-motion armature (TV with arms and hands on a pillar) used in TV commercial
Styrofoam sarcophagus used in TV commercial
Timeline event anchor book (historical timeline where you can anchor events you know about in their time period)
Greeting cards: Dinosaur series
Greeting cards: Seasoned Green Things
“Escape of a Lifetime” murder mystery game (incomplete)
Tool for making vertices out of medical rubber hose (for geodesic models)
“Portfolio” game (incomplete)
Angel Light (incomplete)
Bear Island website - educational site about Buckminster Fuller (incomplete)
OT3 website - Open Tools, Technologies and Techniques (precursor to Open Artifacts)