Industrial-Retro-Indie-Hipster-Techno Research-Based Woodworking

All of the words used in the title of this entry have been used at one point or another to describe whether in complete or partial truth the design statement my current work is making. There are projects that actually pay the bills, and then because the economy has slowed down that activity, there are projects that are producing a body of knowledge or at least are adding to it.

There are aspects to a project I have coming up that I need to understand more completely before actually committing resources toward building it, so I decided to create a series of simple objects to prototype those aspects and their associated construction methods. The original purpose of this prototype set involved the design use of tungsten filament light bulbs, but as the project evolved so too did the objects used to hold the bulbs.

Those objects are the end result of an evolutionary process as there were several iterations of each that came before I arrived at the final set you see here. Each design iteration had fewer parts as time went on, but those parts became increasingly complex to build as I described in an earlier entry. The most significant development I think that came from this project was in the direct use of design model geometry to graphically generate computer numerically controlled tool paths. An artisan studio or workshop is a high-mix, low-volume build environment, and being able to adapt methods quickly to different design requirements to achieve acceptable build time becomes more important if a business case is involved.

A good reference source for some of the underlying principles that I currently attempt to address through prototyping design work can be found at the website for the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Quick Response Manufacturing.