Furniture Design

It's been a long time.  So this post is going to bring you up to date with my Furniture Design class (Fall 2011).  It's a small class--only 8 of us.  Even before I applied to GWU, I knew I wanted to take this class.  It hasn't been offered in the past few years, so I did everything I could to be sure that I would get in.  Through some administrative glitches, the class was full and I didn't have a slot.  I was furious and heartbroken. So I registered for LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Leadership).  Well, a few people dropped Furniture Design, and my name was at the top of the waiting list, so I got in!  Yea!

Our professor is the internationally award-winning product designer, Jonah Takagi.

We started by studying a random object and brainstorming words about our object.  Then again with a different object.  This was to loosen up our creativity and get us to generate so many ideas that we'd get stuck and then have to work past that to generate even more ideas. 

Next, we were assigned a current famous designer and give a presentation to the class.
My designer was Inga Sempe.

Then we created an inspiration board.
Mine was very tactile with lots of objects actually incorporated.

We sketched lots of ideas for a table, which will be our final project.

Then we selected our top 5 choices and are refining them to narrow it down to one. Below is one of my top 5. It was origninally an oval with a swooch and circle that I would inlay with mosaics. Professor Takagi suggested that I have a purpose or some connection to the shapes and that they shouldn't be random. This was good advice.  I had been thinking if I do make this table, I'd like it to be in maple.

That made me think about maple and it's leaves, bark, colors, and seeds. The seeds are the ones that fly like helicopters. So I took one seed and worked with it to create a shape for the table top and the mosaic inlay.

That's enough for now.  Check back in a few days or next week for more about my life as a GWU Interior Design grad student.