Core77 Design Awards 2022

I’m very pleased to see Stuart Candy’s project “Imagination is a Commons” is the winner for Core77’s award for Speculative Design, 2022. Back in March of 2021, I received a somewhat unusual paid request — for studio photography services. One year into the COVID-19 pandemic, when vaccines were still out of reach for many, and facilities and institutions remained shuttered, I was suffering from cabin fever isolation and grieving the death of my uncle.

I was finishing up my second Master’s degree, and Pittsburgh had only begun to thaw after a long and difficult winter. Without access to the campus photography studio, Stuart had reached out to his network at Carnegie Mellon, seeking alternatives. As luck would have it, during my undergraduate studies I invested in my own studio photography setup.

My barebones digital photography setup

Scrappy resilience was a constant theme throughout 2020. Students without studio space were constantly finding ways to make do. This was one of those rare moments where few compromises were necessary, and I had everything I needed on hand. Imagine my surprise when I was handed a bag full of artifacts from the future…

T-shirts from a coding festival in the year 2030

Social distancing and staying home (for the better part of a year) had distorted my sense of time. In the first year of the pandemic, there were days and weeks that seemed to vaporize, and weekends that lasted a month. To hold these artifacts, and to focus on them through a viewfinder, I felt as though I had stepped completely outside of time and space. This was a perfect diversion from my mundane existence, and a reminder that this too shall pass.

Thank you, Stuart and Ceda. And congratulations!

Kinetic-friendly spoon project Mega Post

That’s a wrap! It’s certainly been an interesting semester, but now I am ready to put it behind me. Reflecting on the spoon project, I have some final thoughts and observations. First, I want to thank the fine folks at CMU School of Design. From the amazing and hardworking faculty and graduate student cohort, I have had nothing less than inspiration and encouragement throughout this entire process, despite the obvious challenges of working remotely.

Rendering of sixth and final (?) spoon design. I pulled the kitchen design (Pierre Gilles) and bowl (Damogran Labs) from GrabCad.com. The spoon and coffee mug are mine.

This project was divided into two parts: the first part focused on exploring different ways of prototyping and making. This was described to me as an informal way of A/B Testing for methods. The second part involved the deliberate iteration of prototypes through user testing — a challenge in the context of a global pandemic and social distancing. To make the most meaningful design choices possible given limited resources, I decided to leverage the power of physical simulation to supplement the making of physical prototypes.

There are a variety of 3D software tools that offer some degree of physical simulation. For this project, I selected Maxon Cinema 4D R20 (Educational License) and Blender as my two ways of making. I chose these because I already am familiar with Cinema 4D and understand know how to manage a workflow in that context, because Blender is open source and free for anyone to use, and both programs work under MacOS and Windows environments (my rendering workstation is a Hackintosh with multiple operating systems, which grants the flexibility to overcome certain technical limitations). My initial experiments with Cinema 4D were… not great.

My very first (and failed) attempt to simulate fluids in Cinema 4D. Carnegie Mellon University School of Design Prototyping for Interaction Spring 2020

As you can see, there are “physics” happening here, but they are not anything close to the physics of the real world. This is not “real world” physics, this is Asshole Physics:

Zachary "Spokker Jones" Gutierrez and I came up with the term "Asshole Physics" when we were discussing the game and the physics models it employed. Basically there's a lot of crap you can knock over and kick around, including dead bodies, buckets, cans, and little sections of drywall which are standing around in the middle of rooms for no obvious reason. Zachary casually mentioned, "I have made it a point to knock over every fucking thing in that game. I am living out my fantasies of being a giant asshole," and I responded by stealing his "asshole" comment and claiming that I made it up. Thus "Asshole Physics" was born.

Without more sophisticated plugins to simulate fluid, Cinema 4D R20 is only “out of the box” capable of non-newtonian semisolids. I can make stuff bump around and “squish.” I can have a 3D character micturating on the side of a building. I can create the appearance and illusion of something like a fluid, but with such restrictions, I could not realistically evaluate my spoon designs. I explored my options and found that Next Limit’s RealFlow plugin would meet my basic needs. Best of all, they offer a free 30-day trial! My initial excitement quickly waned after the plugin failed to install and activate on my system…

(This email chain is long and covers a week of back and forth with customer service. I am including the entire conversation as a way to recreate my experience. While this may not directly relate to the scope of this project, I still believe that there is value in documenting the unexpected problems that crop up when trying to do something new.)

It took a week to finally get everything sorted with the demo. During that time, I began to explore option B: Blender.

Blender is a free, powerful, open source 3D creation tool. Best of all, it includes the mantaflow fluid simulation engine (since version 2.8). I have worked with Cinema 4D on other projects, and have become fairly comfortable with the interface. Given my experience with Fusion 360, Inventor, and C4D, I knew that I would need to overcome a learning curve before I could use this software to meet my needs for this project. Fortunately, I was able to find a spectacular tutorial series for beginners.

If you want to read more about my experience with the tutorial, click here.

This tutorial was ideal because it involved exercises that helped me learn how to use the interface, and covered several different workflows. I was really impressed with Blender’s node-based material system and procedural textures. You can work strictly with parametric modeling, or you can discretely modify mesh geometry to create highly organic and imperfect forms. I’m excited to work with Blender on future projects. It’s a very exciting time to be working in 3D.

While working through these tutorials, I began sketching and working in Fusion 360 to craft my first spoon designs for part 2 of this project. You can read more about this experience here.

Takeaways from Part 1

I really appreciated the responsiveness from the team at Next Limit. Clearly there are problems with the software’s implementation of their product’s copy protection. This is an all-too-common problem in the world of software. Programmers gotta eat just like everybody else, and we certainly should make sure that the talented and hardworking folks behind the code are able to put food on their table at the end of the day. Piracy can deprive a small business of the necessary revenue to keep the lights on, so I am absolutely sympathetic to this reality and what risks are involved when you release your software for demo purposes. Getting people to pay for something that they can easily get for free is a challenging proposition. At the same time, you cannot realistically expect to get customers to pay for software if they cannot try it first. Ultimately, this one week of back and forth with customer support was a critical loss. I never completed a side-by-side comparison of fluid simulations. While I did eventually succeed at installing and using RealFlow to do fluid simulations, (and was honestly impressed with how easy it was) I did not, however, have enough time to setup a comparable simulation to evaluate spoon designs. My trial expired about a week ago, and I see this aspect of the project as a lost opportunity. If Next Limit applied similar licensing practices as Maxon (verify it through .edu email address), they could offer an educational package of their RealFlow plugin.

Blender really came through for me. The learning curve was aggressive, but not impossible. While I found mantaflow to be a respectable and entirely capable fluid simulator, it was not without its own share of issues. I spent a lot of time making granular tweaks to improve the fidelity of my simulations, while also using the observations from my simulations to inform design decisions for my spoons in part 2 of this project.

Part 2: Design Iterations Based on User Testing

While this project required user testing and design iterations based on feedback, I decided to limit the user evaluations to address handle shape and the spoon’s overall dimensions. This was not an arbitrary decision or an excuse to focus on physical simulation of fluid dynamics (with user testing as an aside). No, this decision was based on the nature of the course from which it was assigned: Prototyping for Interaction Design. This semester I have have been focusing on designing for interaction (arguably, all designers do, at some point in their process, focus on this aspect). When thinking about the tools we use (to eat food) as a system, it is important to consider the touchpoints involved. The handle of a spoon is a non-trivial component. It can take on many forms, and naturally includes affordances. How someone holds a spoon, and how easy it is for them to use it are central to the evaluation of the design.

The iterations of design were highly generative in nature, inspired by both user evaluations and physical simulations, I maintained a homeomorphic continuity: treating the initial shape as an elastic form to be molded and reshaped to maximize performance. Knowing how a concave shape might be optimized to perform under rapid movement — I wanted to create something that would be useful, and the physical simulation of fluids facilitated a means of evaluation — is only one aspect of a more complicated interaction, and this test alone could not fully address human needs. When physical form is designed and directed to improve user interaction (and physical properties are given equal consideration), it is possible to create a truly useful tool. I realize that this is a very technical description, but it is easier to understand when properly visualized. I have rendered a compilation sequence to show how this spoon shape evolved to its final(?) form (I am still considering a physical prototyping stage for this project over the summer).

A sequence of fluid dynamics tests designed to evaluate fluid retention of concave forms. Carnegie Mellon University, School of Design, Prototyping for Interaction, Spring 2020.

Toward the latter half of this sequence, you will notice a change in colors (for both the liquids and spoons). I decided to differentiate the final rendering sequences as these were based on user evaluations. The colors chose for these final sequences are based on the color tags used for the user test:

These printouts are derived from DXF vector images exported from Fusion 360. The designs shown are oldest (top) to newest (bottom). The fifth design (blue) is rendered with a blue body and green liquid.

I printed and mailed the paper prototype to a potential user suffering from ongoing hand tremors (my partner’s mother). I sent this without written instructions. Instead, I only provided different color tags to facilitate feedback. My user let me know that the red spoon handle was in the “Goldilocks” zone in terms of size and shape: not too big, not too small, not too curvy, not too straight. Using this feedback I constructed the sixth and final (?) form — see the first image of this post.

The user test included a direct side-by-side comparison with existing dinnerware.

Before developing these simplified paper prototypes, I also experimented with ways of making more three-dimensional forms that could be sent in the mail. While this novel approach showed some potential, I was concerned with how user error might complicate or (even worse) bias feedback. Still, these paper prototypes helped me to better understand and interpret the scale of my 3D models.

Final Thoughts

This project still feels somewhat incomplete. Perhaps this is because the generative design process itself can always demand further iteration, or maybe it is because I have not yet created a physical prototype that can actually be tested as an eating instrument. Maybe it is only because there were still a few “rogue droplets” (grrrrrr) that I simply could not keep contained with the completion of my sixth iteration. Whatever the net effect might be from these various shortcomings, I am pleased with the learning opportunities that were presented throughout this exploration of design.

Were I to continue with this process, the next steps would be to 3D print the latest shape using a food-safe material (there are a few third-party vendors that offer this service). I would then ship that latest design for further user evaluation. I believe that there are still many additional iterations necessary before I could defend having created something that satisfies the criteria I set out with this project (i.e., a spoon that overcomes the challenges of involuntary muscle movements and essential tremors).

If I were to collaborate with others, I would also want to evaluate the ecological and economic impact of such a device. How might we go about manufacturing to appropriate scale? How might additional user tests with a wider audience influence the existing form? There remains many unanswered questions and a newfound respect for the power of generative design.

Bugs in the Blender

I have continued to have luck exploring the Fluid simulations in Blender, but this process has not been without its quirks. I recently encountered a strange issue related to Particle Radius settings

Particle Radius

The radius of one liquid particle in grid cells units. This value describes how much area is covered by a particle and thus determines how much area around it can be considered as liquid. A greater radius will let particles cover more area. This will result in more grids cell being tagged as liquid instead of just being empty.

Whenever the simulation appears to leak or gain volume in an undesired, non physically accurate way it is a good idea to adjust this value. That is, when liquid seems to disappear this value needs to be increased. The inverse applies when too much liquid is being produced.

What does this look like in practice? My most recent simulation actually seems to produce fluid as the scene progresses.

Nevertheless, I was able to gain critical insights into this form and will continue to iterate new designs. This is being done in conjunction with paper prototyping. These forms are less sophisticated, but still provide valuable information about how users will experience and interact with this flatware.

Spoonfuls of updates

This week was packed full of progress on multiple projects. I received feedback for my group’s birth control information app “MyGallery.” Our work was even featured on CMU’s Design page.

Crafting an iconographic representation for the withdrawal method was my proudest moment.

I’ve continued to explore fluid simulations with Blender. I’ve ran into some technical hurdles: Blender 2.82 uses a variety of protocols to leverage GPUs for rendering and computation. It offers an AI-driven denoiser (Optix), CUDA path tracing, and OpenCL. My MacBook Pro has an AMD Radeon Pro 5500M GPU as well as the option to plug in a Radeon Frontier Edition (first generation Vega) eGPU on Thunderbolt 3. Plenty of GPU compute power in either configuration, but there is a snag: MacOS 10.15 (Catalina) has deprecated OpenCL in favor of Metal 2+. CUDA and Optix are proprietary to nVidia GPUs. Apple hasn’t shipped a Mac with nVidia GPUs since Kepler launched (GeForce 700 series). Blender supports AMD ProRender, but I found it was terribly unstable.

I could easily slip into a tangent about how unfortunate the breakup between Apple and nVidia truly is, but I will spare you.

My current workflow involves queuing some tasks to my desktop, running Windows 10. The GPUs are dual Radeon VIIs. Unfortunately, I found that rendering on Blender is unstable when both GPUs render in parallel. No problem, since I can free up the other GPU for Folding@Home (a hobby of mine that has exploded in response to COVID-19). Who would have guessed that a global pandemic would boost a distributed computing project to exascale?

Despite these obstacles of platform compatibility, I have made significant progress on my simulation-based research. It is difficult to understate how exciting this project has been for me. For some context: the ASCI Red supercomputer (at the Sandia National Laboratories) was built in 1996, and was the fastest supercomputer in the world until 2000. It was the first computer to achieve true terascale computing (one trillion floating point operations per second). I built my first terascale computer in 2013. This was shortly after leaving my job at Intel. There was something very gratifying about building a computer with a CPU I helped manufacture. GLaDOS G4 (you can see the project here, scroll down to “Everything Else”) was built with a GeForce GTX 780 GPU and Intel Core i7 4770k overclocked to 4.5 GHz. It ran nearly silent and fit inside an up cycled Apple Power Mac G4 (microATX equivalent) case.

The ASCI Red supercomputer was designed to simulate nuclear weapons tests. Today, I am using a system roughly ten times more powerful to simulate soup spilling out of a spoon. I was inspired to approach this problem by two projects. The first was a 2013 project from Portland State University (my alma mater) to make a coffee cup for zero-gravity environments. they used drop cages and 3D printing to iterate several designs until they had a shape that held liquid. “It wasn’t needed, but it was requested.”

The other project hit me right in the heart.

The S’up Spoon is the embodiment of good design. The design was inspired by deep empathy for a user’s problem, and the solution involves as little design as possible. There are few technologies in this world that we trust enough to put in our mouths. If you can make it in this space, you can make it (almost) anywhere. During the fall semester, Moira and I visited the Carnegie Museum of Art. They had an exhibition on accessibility design, and I was brought to tears by stories of innovation and vibrant improvements to quality of life for people with disabilities. Technology, at its very best empowers people to realize their fullest potential. We can easily get lost in the exhilaration of the complex, but this impulse must not dampen our ability to appreciate the elegance of simplicity. Some problems are best solved by form. I saw many incredible solutions in that exhibition, but this spoon has really stuck with me.

My goal is not to make something better, but perhaps a little bit different. The shape of the S’up spoon is intuitive, and if we had never seen a spoon before, we might conclude that it is the better design over more traditional forms. It is however, under our current cultural context, a strange thing to behold. It looks more like a wizard’s pipe or a warrior’s horn. It is beautiful and ergonomic. I do not intend to elevate those specifications. Instead, my goal is to make a spoon that is inconspicuous while still achieving similar results for users who suffer from motor movement difficulties.

How has my first design faired under simulation?

While I can certainly see the appeal of a long hollow channel, I’ve become increasingly concerned with how this shape my be difficult to keep clean. I can imagine objects getting wedged toward the back depending on what is being consumed. I have began to work on a second iteration with a more shallow channel. Still, this first iteration does fairly well. It is managing to retain most of the 15ml (i.e., 1 tablespoon) of fluid under rapid movement.

I enjoyed this simulation so much that decided to make a rendering:

I have not yet gotten back into Cinema 4D to evaluate RealFlow. Despite the challenges regarding compatibility, I am truly impressed with how powerful this open source software has become with this latest release.

Now that I have established this workflow, I can easily switch out revised designs to test under identical conditions. I’m still not sold on the current handle shape, and I think I can improve liquid retention by tweaking the angle of the lips. The flat bottom (Chinese style spoon) does fairly well, with it’s obtuse angle walls. Next, I will try a concave structure with a wider base for the handle and a more aggressive descending angle.

Prototyping – Part 2

Working with Blender has continued to go well.

I have also been looking at some of the existing solutions in this space:

KFS Easy Eat

http://www.eating-help.com

Liftware, by verily

https://www.liftware.com

EliSpoon

https://elispoon.com

Ornamin - Supportive Cutlery (Parkinson’s)

https://www.ornamin.co.uk/shop/cutlery-set?number=SW24

S’up Spoon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8nNlWw6KbA

Apex Medicine Spoon

https://www.riteaid.com/shop/apex-medicine-spoon-0233706

I have been sketching and studying these forms in consideration for my own designs.

Some shapes are unappealing because of their associations. These still deserve consideration, as they function well in this space.

This week I will begin iterating designs in Fusion 360. Hopefully, I will finally be able to make use of my RealFlow trial license. I’m curious to see how the “out of the box” settings function with these geometries.

Fluid Simulation in Blender

“Throw off your fears let your heart beat freely at the sign that a new time is born.” — Minnie Riperton

I’ve completed my workflow design for fluid dynamics testing in Blender. Here’s a proof of concept:

Now I just need to figure out RealFlow in C4D…

Evaluating Tools for Interaction Design

From paper to digital

UXTools.co has some very useful information about design tools - and they break these down into specific tasks, such as:

Just one of many intuitive rankings for useful design tool categories

Which tool is best for information architecture? I cannot say for sure. There are many, many, many tools for designers to choose from. Knowing which tool is best for a particular task can save time and money. Let’s look at three:

This vector drawing app is part of an entire suite of tools offered by Adobe

Adobe Illustrator 2020

Strengths:

• Compatibility - part of an “ecosystem” it works seamlessly with other Adobe apps

• Established standards - works with a variety of file types, and produces files that can be used with a variety of other apps

• Maturity - with more than three decades of development, it is not likely to go away anytime soon

• Updates - the software is frequently updated (with both new features and bug fixes)

Weaknesses:

• Price - Adobe products have always been expensive, and every version of Illustrator since Adobe CS6 has been priced as a subscription, billed annually or monthly

• Interactivity - does not support interactive features. Elements are static

• Collaboration - does not support simultaneous editing

I do not have personal experience with this app (yet) but here’s what stackshare.io has to say:

Figma

Strengths:

• Collaboration - while both Figma and Illustrator offer vector-based graphic design tools, only Figma is capable of collaboration in real-time. Multiple users can tweak and edit the same file simultaneously.

• Endless design file versioning - file versioning is considered a “best practice” when working on a project. With Illustrator, this is done manually (users must be “good citizens” and use the “save as” option, adding _Vxx to the end of their file names. Figma does this automatically, and embeds the changes into metadata

• Platform agnostic - Figma runs in browser. You can switch between machines to continue working on a variety of platforms. Illustrator works with a variety of platforms (Windows, MacOS, and iOS), but each system requires a separate installation

• Responsive UI - simple changes to graphics elements update in real-time

Why I choose @figmadesign over Sketch. pic.twitter.com/sZRO97tlNO

— H (@HousseynouFall) December 19, 2017

• Prototyping - Illustrator can produce graphics, but it cannot produce interactive prototypes.

• Handoff - prototypes can easily be handed off to web developers to be converted into fully-functional assets.

• Price - it is free for students

Weakness:

• Standardization - Illustrator is generally regarded as an industry standard, and it supports “legacy” project files. Figma is much more modern, but not as backward compatible.

• No access to API - Illustrator users can program functions directly. This is especially useful when a project requires several repetitive tasks

• Popularity - “According to the StackShare community, Adobe Illustrator has a broader approval, being mentioned in 80 company stacks & 57developers stacks; compared to Figma, which is listed in 60 company stacks and 54 developer stacks.” - stackshare.io

Adobe’s offering for designers who need to prototype for interaction

Adobe Xd 2020

Strengths:

• Compatibility - part of an “ecosystem” it works seamlessly with other Adobe apps.

• Prototyping - intuitive interface allows designers to rapidly “wire” their screens through a variety of triggers.

• Large library - offers a wide variety of animations, transitions, and triggers.

• Platform specific templates - includes built-in templates for quickly establishing a project format. Users can work from a variety of pre-baked device settings (iPhones, Android, Web, Desktop).

• Updates - the software is frequently updated (with both new features and bug fixes).

• Web-based sharing - prototypes can be shared and launched in browser. Works with Adobe Cloud

Weaknesses:

• Price - Adobe products have always been expensive, priced as a subscription, billed annually or monthly

• Limited multimedia abilities - while the graphics components are fairly robust, the sound features are extremely limited

• Collaboration - does not support simultaneous editing

Which tool is right for evaluating information architecture?

I do not know. I have decided that I will work with Figma, because I believe that their list of features are compelling and complete enough for my first IxD prototype project this semester. Additionally, Figma has gained significant industry presence. Knowing how to use this software could be beneficial to a variety of future careers.