As a designer, your job is to match someone’s needs/problems with a solution. The tricky part is, this someone is not necessarily the client you are talking with and who pays you, it could be a third party that you only know of through your paying client.
As an engineer, the particular kind of design you do aims toward technical solutions, so you might produce plans, blueprints, calculations and prototypes to carry on with that goal. Lire la suite →
A few weeks ago, I discovered the tiny world of tiny houses and camping-vans and found that quite amazing. However, the current commercial camping vans look pretty sub-optimal to me, because they are equipped with kitchen-style furniture, meaning heavy, stand-alone stuff made of chipwood/OSB panels 1.5 cm thick. See for yourself :
I spent 3 years working at Polytechnique Montreal on a 280 kg solar car made of carbon fiber, fiberglass and epoxy, and embedding 6 m² of solar panels on the top shell, so, seeing such a daddy’s design add around 750 kg of equipement on top of a 6 m² cargo van blew my mind in a bad way. Lire la suite →
