Reflection on the Stamo

Jessica Tong

Some things that were unresolved were the U clamp on the vertical pole. Not enough research was done with this, and I assumed it would work, without even thinking of trying it. Probably because there was too much stuff to think about at the same time, that I missed one very important aspect of my design.

I did not think enough about the height of the room, so the issue with how long the poles were, may have been a problem. If I were to concentrate less on the afterlife of the product, I would have replaced the centre poles with ropes, just to reduce the amount of material/product needed, and figured out how to keep them from toppling. Although, then I would still need an extension of some sort to allow them to be used as vertical IV stands in hospitals after the Tsunami response.

I am happy with my posters and my model however, because I usually am unable to finish everything on time. So in that respect, I had better time management for this assignment. I learnt that we should confirm our concept earlier on in the process, and just stick with it, because if we were to constantly criticize, we would be here all day. If we stick with it, and carry it through, we are more likely to find small problems that can be dealt with later on. For example, I am usually in the ‘concept’ stage until the last week of when assignments are due, because there are so many alternatives to resolve a problem. For this, I tried to finalise my concept as early as possible. The quality of my posters, I am happy with, although maybe more detail and information about the positioning of the patients would be useful, as my ‘in context’ renderings are too vague. The balancing of the actual product has been proven and I am sure that it would not topple if produced, which is important.

I have learnt from this project that existing products that are already on the market can be utilized in my design in order to save money and materials, which I didn’t take into consideration in previous designs. In terms of model making, I am unsure why I always end up choosing the difficult way out. I should have used foam core slices stacked together, or wooden planks cut to size, sanded on the sander in the workshop and stacked together. Then primed and spray-painted from there. This would be more practical than using blue foam cutting, sanding, pollyfilla-ing, more sanding, z-poxying, more sanding, more polly-filla-ing, more sanding, more z-poxying and more sanding, then priming a few times and spraying paint. That was really painful, unnecessary, EXTREMELY costly, and just made me sick with all that blue foam in the air. But at least it turned out alright. Every assignment, I tell myself to design something compact, and simple and small to make, something easy to taken on the bus and train, but it turned out to be quite the opposite.