Feministy Logo

This is a logo I did for Liz Abinante's Feministy, crafter of uniquely simple knitwear designs. When we started discussing a logo design, we reviewed a bunch of other knitting-related logos and found that, in many cases, knitting imagery like yarn, yarn balls, and knitting needles were heavily used. I felt that moving away from that would help differentiate Feministy from other designers out there.

One thing that Liz wanted in her design was her name: some know her as Feministy, others as Liz. A good logo would form a single image of her.

So naturally we turned to her as an starting point for the design. Liz herself is a big part of why her business succeeds - she sells knitwear designs yes, but also easy and clear instructions, and useful and personal feedback - this is a designer you want to know. While we were talking, she came up with the term "knitting mother" and we really clung to that. We coupled the "knitting mother" concept with her fashion, interests, and the word "feministy" itself; she's a fan of vintage fashion - and that '50s-'60s Mad Men thing is certainly en vogue - and domestic arts. But she's no 1950's housewife, she's a modern woman, an entrepreneur who is interested in playing with the idea of '50s woman, celebrating it at the same time that she flips it on its head. She's "Feminist" but cuter and more playful: "Feministy".

This is the idea that emerged as the winner in the initial concept phase. It's hard, when you've got something that seems to click so well, to imagine doing anything else. Though she does knitwear and the patterns of the designs are beautiful and seemingly opportune for a logo, they have less to do with her.

Here is my initial sketch for the logo:

You Only Have One Life

Ever since I designed my poster on the Seasonality of Californian Fruits and Vegetables I have been focused on doing graphic design that means something more than the sum of its visual elements - I want to design things that mean something. And I don't mean simply infographics. This is why I have been drawn to the "The Say Something Poster Project" competition. Here is my entry for their second season, "This Way Forward."

Thought Process

The prompt for "This Way Forward" said to "say something" to the next generation, given the past 2 - 5 years, to help inspire, motivate, and prepare them.

This is my "inspiration statement:"

Despite distracting much of this generation, gaming is about heroism. My poster uses gaming iconography to depict each person as a game hero who must save the prince/princess. But, crucially, we are not our game avatars: we only have one life to live.

My idea is that particularly in the past few years, our generation, today's 16 - 25 year olds, has become increasingly distracted by digital media. This is a problem: how do we remain productive when digital entertainment is so huge and pervasive?

While facebook and twitter and tumblr are more iconic of this trend, video games are a huge part of it - gaming is the grandaddy of all digital distractions! Games turned out to be a fruitful way to explore this problem and eke out some kind of message. You can say a lot of true (and truly boring) things about Facebook and Twitter: they cater to narcissists, they're all about networking, etc.. Sure there is a message in there, but I feel like people talk less about games (though that's changing) so observations about them just seemed more powerful:

• games are about heroes
• game avatars are insanely motivated
• in a game, you are motivated through, and at the risk of, death
• game avatars are in some way ideal selves

That last one, that game avatars are ideal selves - creatures or things or people that are more capable of doing the sorts of things that we normal people want to be able to do - made me think of this final bullet point:

• real people, unlike game avatars, only have one life to lose.

A game wouldn't be fun if you could only die once and never play the game again after that. But, that's what our lives are. But there is something more to draw out of that. Game heroes do great things - that's part of what makes some games interesting. Doing great things is hard, so you naturally get more chances to do it.

And when you're on that last life, man, things get intense. You really want to keep going, you really do not want to fail.

This is true of video games, but isn't it true of real life?

We only have one life, why aren't we trying harder to do what it is that we want to do?

There's probably a complicated answer to that question, but that's not what this is about. That paradox struck me. If we saw life as a video game, if we saw our lives as video game lives, would we try harder? Would that realization that we only have one chance to jump on the bad guys, save the princess, and reach the flagpole, make people more motivated?

I think that if it doesn't in the long term, it is at the very least a reality check, in a quite literal sense.

So, that was the thought process behind my idea, and at that point I honed in on Mario as an icon of video  games that is universally recognized and from there I took on the task of creating a bunch of 8-bit "anybodies" to take the place of Mario in the design.

Design

I have grown a lot in the last few months as an Illustrator user, so I decided to do a quick mock-up of my idea in Illustrator. Normally I begin on paper, but this project didn't have so much in terms of illustrating and drawing to do. All the lines had to be right.

This is the initial mock-up. I hadn't built any of the assets yet so Mario is just repeated in the background. I liked this design broadly speaking, but the contrast between the text and the background is a little jarring.  In the stroked text I was going for something reminiscent of Nintendo's logo.

Though this was a reasonable first move, I feel like this is symptomatic of a design habit I have that I think carries over from typography: I always try to remain true to the theme of a central design element.

I am doing a logo right now, for example, that uses isometric shapes. In that design, I poured over many drafts that tried to make everything else in the design isometric in some way. Even though I was keeping with the theme, it just didn't look good.

Anyway, my next task was to design a bunch of people heads. I ended up making 42 unique heads with the 8-bit mario as my template. It was pretty challenging. I can't even think of 42 people off the top of my head. One thing that helped me get through all the heads was to design heads based on people I know and characters I love.

Some heads. Walter White and Badger are the bottom two.

8-bit David Bowie circa Aladdin Sane.

The final roster.

OK, so I got my heads together. The next issue was the typography. I cut down my message to "You only have one life" but I still had that ugly Nintendo font.

The problem that presented itself here was that there isn't really any good font to use with 8-bit design - unless the font itself is 8-bit. To solve this problem, I turned to the history of posters. I turned to the most famous of all posters, or at least it seems that way nowadays, the Keep Calm and Carry On poster from WWII Britain.

There are plenty of parodies of this poster and it's really quite recognizable, but I felt that the context of my poster is so different that my allusion to it in using Gill Sans and all caps was not all that passé.

So, I used Gill Sans, but of course it still doesn't look perfect within the confines of an 8-bit aesthetic. I redrew the text in an 8-bit style and used that as a drop shadow to create a transition between the text and the background.

That's the final text, but I got stuck on this version below for quite some time:

This image has two "drop shadows" - one in green and one in blue. I thought this would work because I was thinking of television monitors and RGB, but again, I got fixated on sticking to a design theme so much so that I didn't realize that it looked a little too messy. I still kind of like it, but oh well!

The final touch was to string some text around the border. I was worried that "You only have one life" was just a statement of fact that didn't help motivate or push people in the right direction. So I went back to my original text, "jump on bad guys" and extended that with some other text around the frame:

Visually I'm not 100% sold on the text but it's important, I think, to the message. Plus, this gives the poster impact at many different distances. You can read the central text from afar. The characters are visible from a medial distance, and this smaller text appears when you are closer.

I could fidget with this design for another week, but I think that the law of diminishing returns applies here and I'm happy to have it in my portfolio.

Hamlet Book Design: aesthetics and usability combined

I recently designed a día de los muertos-themed piece inspired by Hamlet:

I liked this so much that I wondered what it would look like as a book cover. From there, it didn't take much for me to go ahead and design the entire book. Coming at this project as an artist with an English degree who practices human-centered design, I felt like my book design might be able to do the following things, which I feel are sometimes forgotten or even never considered:

• Create a unified visual aesthetic throughout the entire book.

1. It is often the case that the cover design/art is done by someone other than the book designer. Here I have the chance to build a book in its entirety.
2. As my design began with the cover art, I have a particular chance to make the book layout and design extra striking.

• Design the book layout in a way that is true to the traditions of book design, but which also emphasizes design for usability.

1. As Hamlet is a play from the early 17th century, this book needs to function for actors and directors, users with specific needs which I will go into.

The Cover: selecting typefaces and designing a spine

The cover of the book is the visual beginning of the book design, both in terms of what readers see and in terms of my design process. I took visual cues from my original cover art to think about my aesthetic.

As I wrote in my post about the art itself, the skull is a día de los muertos-style representation of Yorick’s skull. I felt that Yorick’s skull, as the skull of a jester Hamlet loved as a child, embodied several key themes of the book: insanity and madness, severed relationships, and death. I draw out madness through the día de los muertos sugar skull and its exaggerated carnival designs. My sugar skull is of course a variation on traditional día de los muertos designs in that the character of the lines is derived from 16th century blackletter lettering and gothicism. The violence of Hamlet comes out in the color choice of the art: red and white (blood and bone).

Note the historical, and now obsolete, center justification of the back cover text.

Choosing typefaces

Though my art is a postmodern pastiche of these two styles, I wanted to ground the rest of the book design in that 16th century historical moment. This meant choosing typefaces true to this Shakespearian time. There are several digital versions of classic 16th century and incunabula  typefaces, and I ended up selecting Adobe Jenson Pro, cut by Robert Slimbach. One of the main reasons I chose it is that the periods are diamond shaped, much like the diamonds that decorate Yorick’s sugar skull.

Adobe Jenson Pro

The diamond ellipses

Adobe Jenson is based on a Venetian typeface by Nicolas Jenson, which initially turned me off. I had been looking for a good typeface by a Danish or at least Northern European designer - as if the book were from the historical moment of Hamlet itself. Hamlet, however, is based on 12th century legend and at that point a carolingian typeface would have been more appropriate, but ultimately unreadable at length. So, I decided to go with something Shakespeare would have recognized, and I’m happy with the choice. Adobe Jenson is beautiful and idiosyncratic.

This being decided, I felt like using a blackletter in combination with Adobe Jenson would further the sense of the historical moment of Hamlet and set the design apart, since no one really uses blackletter anymore. I landed on a free font designed by Dieter Steffmann called Moderne Fraktur. It’s a highly readable blackletter and despite its high x-height it goes well with Adobe Jenson. The cross bars on the "e" characters are both diagonal and they share a kind of roundness in their letterforms.

Moderne Fraktur and several faces of Adobe Jenson working together.

A striking spine

Before I continue to the text itself, I want to bring up the spine design. It is customary for book spines to have the author, the publisher, and the book title. Because Hamlet is such a well-known title, I didn’t feel that the author was necessary at all. Visually, it detracted from the spine design’s stark contrast between red and white, blood and bone. The result is a simple and severe book spine which stands out on a bookshelf.

The simplicity afforded by skipping the author's name lets this book stand out in the crowd.

My book among some successful book spines.

Inside the Book: aesthetics and design for usability

Traditional typography with some important changes. Read about them below.

Aesthetically, the book largely honors traditional renaissance book design, with a few crucial differences.

To begin with, the page size is a golden section proportion. The golden section is the self-repeating 1 : 1.62 ratio which defines the scales of the human body among many other aspects of nature. This pleasant ratio has been used for 1,000s of years in every type of human design, and was common during the renaissance.

Margin design as described by Jan Tschichold

Proportions of the margins

The margins are a modified golden-section relationship, as defined by Jan Tschichold in The Form of the Book, where the bottom margin is twice the inner margin, not thrice. In this configuration, the margins lock the text block into place. This is particularly important considering that this is a play, and the right margin is very loose and ragged.

In terms of typography, the body text is simple but readable. Character names appear in small caps and lines of dialogue are indented 1 em to make it clear when the speaker changes, something which would otherwise be confusing at times.

Extra care was taken with the bracket characters around stage action. Though stage action is italicized, the brackets remain roman. I do not feel that italicized brackets are appropriate or historically true, so I didn’t use them. Besides, the extra thin spaces and roman brackets give an extra sense of care and refinement to the typography.

Note the roman brackets and the use of Moderne Fraktur inside the book as an aesthetic echo of the cover.

You will notice that the line numbers are away from the spine rather than both on a particular side of the text. I did this for a few reasons. The first is that aesthetically, I need to acknowledge the page spread as a unit. The page itself is important but we also see experience pages together in spreads. Secondly, line numbers are reference information, and reference information such as page numbers, the act and scene number, etc. need to be toward the outer margin or they aren’t useful as you flip through a book. This serves the additional end of typographic unity: all reference material is located together, in the outside margin.

designing for usability

The elephant in the room at this point is the fact that I imagine this book design as printing in two colors: black and red. While this is ultimately a more expensive option, it is visually striking and incredibly useful in ways that set the book apart, both from other books, and from e-ink devices.

Red and black inks separate reference material from the text proper.

Visually, the red ink binds the text to its cover design, but how is the red ink useful? I realized when designing this book that in reading a play there are two basic ways of looking at a book. The first is obvious: reading. This book is traditional in terms of its design towards readability. The second is also important: searching. Plays are texts through which performers and directors are bound to leap. Actors may read several hundred lines and go back to practice at a specific moment, or they may begin midway through the book and then go back to practice earlier parts. Actors may only want to read through scenes they are a part of. Searching for the right line is a unique part of reading a play and it must be made easy to do. It is also separate from reading, and thus is must be separated typographically.

Thus, red ink denotes and separates reference material. Differentiating the colors makes it easier to focus on either the text itself or the reference numbers and materials. I should also note that modern synonyms to the occasionally antiquated words of Hamlet also appear in red. So, as an actor, this two-toned system will help you find the right material, and then focus on it when you do.

I call this book concept “the globe theatre performer’s edition” because I focused my design on the needs of actors reading texts. The scale and binding of the book have been selected with these needs in mind. Blocking and physically acting is an important part of reading a play even before actors go off-book. For this reason, this edition has to facilitate one-handed reading.

The book is 4.75” wide for this reason. According to the human-factors book The Measure of Man and Woman, most men and women can accommodate a 4.75” object between their thumb and the final joints of their fingers, so the book is very holdable.

Every aspect of the design must be considered: holding the book with one hand makes performing with it comfortable.

A book designed to be held.

The book is also loosely bound, so that the pages will lay flat even if you’ve just purchased it.

The book opens flat because it is not bound very tightly.

Behold the reason that margins exist: a place for the thumbs.

Conclusion

Maybe the best part of this project was constructing the prototype book. As a matter of full disclosure, I only printed out the first act. The rest of the paper in my bound copy is scrap paper. It would have been pointless pain in the ass to stitch all those signatures together. There’s nothing quite like seeing your work in front of you, physically realized.

Having the physical prototype in my hand was also incredibly useful. Holding the book gave me more insight than I could have ever had staring at an InDesign file. The book feels great in the hand. If I could change anything, I would probably make the book’s width even thinner and use some quality paper.

Working with book design has been interesting because there are so many rules to follow, so many conventions. At times it doesn’t really seem like you can call your work your own, since you’re working from so many elements that other people made, masterfully I might add. But this is also a rewarding context. The elements of typography are hundreds of years old and these people whose work you are using are, again, masters. So even if I made only a few innovations in designing this book, those are innovations set against the backdrop of masters of this craft. I feel honored and humbled to have done so.

A book can spring to life when it is printed.

gorgeous letters are the key to successful typography

Hamlet Print

My last piece was "Day of the Dead" themed, and it turned out really wonderfully. It combined intricate patterning for which Illustrator is ideally suited, and faux-graffiti airbrush effect, two Mexican aesthetics, which came together quite powerfully.

I was so happy with the result that I wanted to do more. The piece I am writing about here, below, is in the same vein, but with a few important differences. Inspired by Mondo Tees, a company that remakes old movie posters, I came to the idea of doing a print based on literature. I think that prominence of skulls in day of the dead art led me to do a piece inspired by Hamlet, that and my level of familiarity with Shakespeare. The connection of course being the famous visual of Hamlet in which the title character comes across the skull of the old court jester Yorick in a graveyard as he returns to Denmark to kill the usurper king. So I've done a sort of visual representing Hamlet, and specifically his monologue on Yorick in Act V.i.

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy; he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? (Hamlet, V.i)

The result is a piece that blends the Day of the Dead style and aesthetic with the aesthetics of early modern blackletter type. It's surprisingly how well the two work together, at least initially. While day of the dead art is an art of the people, made by everyone and anyone, this gothic typographic look is highly controlled and rigid. And yet, each style is highly ornate, and interested in basic line art, patterning, and symmetry.

The Day of the Dead seemed suiting to Hamlet (specifically this scene) for more reasons: both are about the dead and about remembering the dead. Each uses colorful figures to depict death as well, although in Hamlet Yorick's "infinite jest" adds to the melancholy of remembrance rather than negating it.

The almost paradoxical nature of the jester and the skull - the funny and the melancholy - seems suited to Hamlet, whose mistaken killing of Polonius drives him merrily into a thirsty bloodlust that ultimately produces his own doom. Because of this, I wanted Yorick's skull to be hypnotic, and likewise self-contradictory.

This led me to my color choices. I went with circusy primary and secondary colors and paper white. Not only are these reminiscent of the Day of the Dead, but they evoke the jester, celebration, and good times. And these bright colors perform this function against my base colors: red and white, for blood and bone. These are colors that catch your eye in their simplicity, but keep your attention as you realize their tensions. My design of the skull eyes further draws you in, as the insanity of death drew in Hamlet.

If you notice the structure of the colors in the artwork again, the main colors might be said to be red, purple, and gold, as well as the paper white. The red I chose again for blood, while with the purple and gold I try to evoke royalty.

In terms of what I learned working on this, I think I've found a great balance between working on paper and working on the computer. The computer is great for finished artwork and hand drawing is the only way to really design effectively. But there's more to it: the computer is great for establishing margins, guides, and proportions to aid the design. This design is based on the golden ratio, a recent favorite of mine, but only because I was able to work from guides I plotted on the computer. This really focused my artwork, and I think that for the foreseeable future I will lay down proportions shortly after my first sketches are complete.

I didn't really learn anything new on Illustrator this time around, which was kind of a let down, though I did get to do some problem solving working with pathfinder and gradients.

Finally, I got the idea as I was drawing this to try my hand at setting a book with this play, the illustration as the cover. We'll see if that happens but let's hope so.

Day of the Dead

 This one I'm pretty proud of. Once again on assignment for Little Red Bicycle, I had to create a stamp for yarn packaging. My guidelines were to use certain colors and do something day of the dead themed. This is the art I created:

I owe some credit to Didi for the baller colors. And thank you Alycia for letting me use your face.

For a while now I've been taking training courses in Illustrator and naturally I want to try and use the stuff I learn. What I was really able to take advantage of this time were gradient meshes. Gradient meshes allow you to simulate a kind of airbrush effect when done correctly. These are the gradient meshes in my piece:

I wanted to use these with this project because when I think of Mexico and Mexican art one place I turn is towards street art and murals, which are done with spray paint.

I'm trying to master pattern making as well, and what better subject than Day of the Dead to try some patterning out? I think my candy skulls work well. I didn't want to make them insanely detailed because they are background elements, and I think I needed to keep some balance between the business of the face and background areas.

One thing I tried that didn't work was simulating a bad press job, where I would apply grains to each of the separate colors in the piece, as if I had printed all the purple on one block, the pink on another, etc. The piece is so busy in the first place that it ended up being distracting and ugly. Though, if you notice the text, I did mimic poorly aligned printing/stencil art in the process of making the print more legible.

Overall I'm really happy with this and I want to do more work like it in the future.

Soma Sofa

Last year I took a graduate course in Architecture called "Body-Conscious Design" which transformed my view of furniture design. Taught by Galen Cranz, the course explored the relationship between the body, design, and architecture and, while dismantling attitudes towards furniture design old and new, promoted the tenets of a design and lifestyle movement called "somatics." "Somatics," like the ergonomics that it seeks to refine and broaden, is of greek origin. Where "ergonomics" is the study of work, and thus our Aeron chairs and OXO brand items are confined to work-related activities, "somatics," meaning "of the body," offers the opportunity to take the kind of body-conscious thought of ergonomic design and extend it into the rest of our lives.
     So, somatics can involve work-related activities--it can discuss the proper table heights for different kinds of work--or it can be used to help with body movement and pain--the Alexander technique, for example, teaches people how to use their bodies, spines, and necks properly to prevent the pain that plagues most of western society. More to the point, somatics advocates can talk about how to sit, as my teacher Galen Cranz did in her book The Chair and continues to do so in her teaching. My newest design, the Soma Sofa, seeks to embody the somatic principles of The Chair and the course "Body-Conscious Design." It is my response to somatics, ergonomics, the failure of traditional furniture to provide comfort, and the failure of body-conscious furniture to penetrate the average consumer's living room.

Design
As I planned this project, I began seeing this particular loveseat in my parents' house as my benchmark. The loveseat is a terrible thing. It forces you to either sit upright at 90 degrees, or squish into an awkward laying position. Because there is zero head or neck support, the simple act of looking straight ahead, to a television perhaps, becomes strenuous. Your back curls into a C shape which, over decades, leads to humps and slipped discs and, in the short term, produces lower back pain. If you spend any time in the seat at all, blood will pool in your legs, increasing your risk of deadly clots. Sitting kills. 
     The Soma Sofa responds to the evils (yes, evils) of the loveseat in creating a lounging space for two individuals that performs nearly every function of the sofa while being more comfortable and less deadly. And though the Soma Sofa appears large, it is actually slightly smaller than a conventional loveseat.
     I want to start by talking about the mechanics of the Soma Sofa, or more precisely, the human body on the Soma Sofa.

The angle between the back and seat cushioning is 135 degrees, midway between sitting and standing. In the diagram from The Chair below, note how the lower back muscles perform nearly all of the work supporting the spine in the traditional 90 degree seat. Standing, muscle work is distributed between the lower back, the butt, and the legs, and at 135 degrees, perching, we get much the same distribution as standing. This perching position is an ideal rest position. Try this if you're interested: lay on your back on the ground and feel your lower body muscles. Laying completely flat, you should still feel strain in your lower back. Easing this into the perching position relaxes those muscles.

From Galen Cranz' book, The Chair

     What's more, laying as you do in the Soma Sofa evenly distributes the force of gravity on the body. This means a few things: you won't fatigue your body and you won't fatigue the Soma Sofa. Traditional couches tend to collapse overtime as the force of most of your weight in one spot (coming from your butt), compresses the foam or stuffing. Distributed evenly over a larger area, your body is more like a snow shoe, and has less impact on the furniture, making it possible to create lighter, longer lasting pieces.

     
You'll notice too one of the stranger features of the cushion in the back pad: butt space. This is a key aspect of the Soma Sofa. As I noted before, laying flat tends to cause stress in the lower back muscles. Part of the reason is because your butt sticks out and forces your lower back in. Any body-conscious seat design must account for our asses.
     Usually, however, you only find butt space in ergonomic design. Ergonomic design, as I've said, is usually the domain of office and workspace designers. I see my potential contribution to body-conscious design as an interest in bringing the observations, science, and philosophy of ergonomics and somatics to home furniture like the sofa and the dining table chair. If ergonomic and somatic principles really will help us live more body-conscious lives, they have to be incorporated into every aspect of our lives. 
     I acknowledge that the ergonomic and somatic aspects of the Soma Sofa are not original. I am deeply indebted to my teachers and the designs of the past - such as Le Corbusier's chaise, an icon of modernism that shares the Soma's 135 degree back-seat angle. This is even where I drew the idea of requiring a separate pillow for neck support. An early choice for a name in fact was the Corbusideux, punning on the fact that my chaise is very similar to Corbusier's save that it seats two.

Aesthetics
Corbusier's chaise has some aesthetic baggage that I didn't want to bring into my own design. Could you see the Corbusier in your home? It's so cold and uninviting (yet incredibly comfortable) that it seems at worst seating in a chic dentist's offices and at best the unused show furniture in the office of a wasteful executive. Modernism's heyday is over, and we need furniture not just for the super rich, but for everyone.
     That's what I thought as I worked out the visual elements of the Soma Sofa. Though the design is inherently based on stark, Modernist angles, the "Blue Moon" upholstery counters it, and the big black buttons take the Soma to a kinder, perhaps even feminine, place while breaking up the monotony of the big flat cushion.

     Don't get me wrong, Modernism's industrial look has given us great designs, new and old. Apple's designs are Modernism incarnate, and truly beautiful. So in rounding the edges of the poplar frame, I mimicked the radius of the iPhone 4 curves.

Wooden dowels hide the construction.

Usability


Tests on my friends and family have all gone very well: the Soma is comfortable beyond a doubt. It successfully captures the somatic principles I began with. But the bigger question that more tests may begin to answer is how usable is it in a living room environment. Can you do the things that you normally do on a sofa on the Soma Sofa?

Listening to Music and Thinking

If this lounge has ideal usage, it is as a thinking and listening device. Without the body strain of a loveseat or sofa, you can listen to music or walk through things in your head until your heart's content.

Watching Television

Television too, is better enjoyed on the Soma Sofa. I initially worried that, with your head back 67.5 degrees, you wouldn't be able to see the television. But a neck pillow, which is a necessary part of the Soma Sofa, resolves this and leaves your resting eye position--between 15 and 30 degrees down from horizontal--level with the ground and perfect for a television set at modest height. People often complain of eye and neck strain watching movies at the theater or in their homes. The Soma Sofa's reconfigured angles seem to resolve these issues.

Reading

The only big problems are reading and playing handheld games. The reclined posture forces you to hold books up to your eyes without support. Unless you use a music stand or some other supporting piece of equipment, you won't be able to read for very long without getting tired.
     As of writing this, there are few options for reading/music stands that seem ideal. But this is only the beginning of the beginning. If more designers apply somatic principles to home furniture, the body-conscious consumer will have an entire ecosystem of tools for sitting and moving and doing to support them properly. But for that, we'll have to wait.

Wino

My parents are big wine drinkers. I mean, it's usually one bottle a day or a little more. They just enjoy their wine. They also have difficulty throwing things away. My mom will try anything to get a piece of junk overgrown with leaves and vines in our garden. She likes the look.

So at the end of the day, they've collected years' worth of wine corks. My parents say 2-3 years' worth, though I suspect it's more. I'm always looking for an art project, and the wine cork in quantity presents a unique opportunity for "upcycling," sustainable design, aesthetic design, and what the Eames' called "honest use."

This is what came of these wine corks: a table I call the Wino:

The Wino

There are many aspects to the Wino, but the centerpiece is the flat table top made from hundreds of wine corks. I think of the table top as a series of tree-rings, detailing the last two years of my parents' spirit consumption. The occasional tequila and champagne cork tops add some flair.

The table has a wonderful wine aroma. As a note, around 70% of the corks are Charles Shaw.

The Wino is one of my first attempts at presenting recycling, honest use, and sustainable design in an aesthetically pleasing way. The table is made entirely (with the exception of the clear top) of existing materials.

Chair legs with the pegs cut away.

My table legs were actually part of a chair I found at Urban Ore, a salvage yard, in Berkeley. I was drawn to the color of the American Walnut wood, but the chair held more surprises, including the key to making the Wino without nails and using the wine corks themselves to hold everything together.

At UC Berkeley as part of the design group Berkeley Innovation, learning human-centered design in ME110 and with the aid of the Berkeley Institute of Design, I have learned to focus on process. A process which involves user-needs research, analysis, and several iterations to satisfy the needs of users. With this project, I had no users and I needed to focus on materials. While I ultimately should have planned more, the haphazard make-it-up-as-you-go process led to a more clever design in the end because it allowed me to capitalize on chance discoveries.

What I mean is the fact that midway into my build I realized that the beams between the chair legs that I cut away were the exact diameter of the corks I was using. I used this fact to create a surface for my table to rest on without nails:

I owe this elegant solution to chance.

Honest Use

This chance discovery solved the irritating compromise I was planning to make in using screws to secure everything together rather than finding a solution in the existing materials themselves. It is also an example of what the Eames' called "honest use." This phrase "honest use" comes from Charles Eames' work with Eero Saarinen in the late 1930s on what would be the first of the famous Eames plywood chairs. At that time plywood was a very new creation, and its flexibility and strength awakened the creative spirit of many designers. Eames and Saarinen began a series of experiments with the material that sought to use it "honestly;" i.e. to create artwork and designs that relied upon its flexibility and strength. For Charles and Ray Eames the result was the Eames Lounge Chair Wood, a (once) inexpensive and lightweight chair that used plywood's natural flexibility and strength to express a Modernist simplicity of bare curves as well as proper seating.

Honest use of plywood in the Lounge Chair Wood

This has always inspired me and I think that with the Wino I've successfully captured some sense of honest use of the cork. Most corks are of uniform height and are thus capable of creating surfaces with pressed together, this is the table surface. Cork is also naturally flexible. Its ability to expand and contract creates pressure. Pressure is the key to this design. It is what keeps the cork-pegs in the legs, and it is actually what holds the legs vertical in the first place.

Embedded alongside the corks are the table legs.

Placed alongside the corks are the ends of the four table legs. The cork-pegs support the top of the table, and the top of table actually supports the legs. The pressure of the corks pressed together is enough to hold the table legs vertical in the top of the table. The result is considerable stability without any nails. The design relies mainly on the compressed corks for stability. It works too!

Sustainable Design through Upscaling

The other design ideal that I've aimed for is sustainable design through upcycling. Upcycling is the process of taking used materials and, through creative reuse, making them more valuable than they were before. This is one particularly bright future of recycling. As I said, aside from the clear acrylic table top (Clear Acrylic AR 1 if you're interested in making one), every part of the design is reused. Each wine cork, which are for the most part sustainably harvested in Portugal, is from a finished bottle of wine. Continuing with the wine theme, the iron ring which contains the wine corks is from an old wine barrel.

My mom had a bunch of wine barrel rings in her garden. Thanks mom!

The base of the table, too, is made from old wooden wine crates.

Each slat of wood is from an old wine barrel. The result is so pleasing to me that I want to make a table with this as the top.

In terms of a piece for potential production, material cost is a non-issue but material availability is. Now that I've learned how to make this table, I wouldn't say that the assembly is difficult. In terms of materials cost, the corks were free to me as were the iron ring and wine crates.  The chair cost me $35 to disassemble, and the acrylic top was $80 to have cut at TAP Plastics. I think that the materials would cost between $150 and $200 for each table. Finding those materials might be the hardest part about production. As I learned in the hunt for wine crates with beautiful typography burned into their surfaces, these old wooden crates are quickly becoming a thing of the past, now replaced by lighter, cheaper cardboard boxes. Only the most expensive wines are sold in wooden crates anymore. So, as an idea for furniture in production, this design would ultimately be faced with an absence of recyclable wooden wine crates. Nonetheless, the success I feel with the Wino signals to me the possibilities of upcycling as a force of sustainable design that goes beyond novelty appeal. I feel proud about the end product not just as an example of sustainable design, construction, and honest use, but as an aesthetic piece in itself.

Lessons Learned

I've learned a couple of things in the process of making this table. My biggest takeaway had to be that the design probably shouldn't always be planned out in advance of toying with the materials. Discovering that the peg holes in the chair legs were the same size as the wine corks was nothing short of an epiphany and really solved a lot of problems in the design, simplifying it, making the final product less susceptible to inaccuracies in drilling, and really getting me out of a slump. I wouldn't have realized this if I had thought out my design entirely before interacting with the materials. I think that I will steer my future designs towards a hands-on approach that allows these types of discoveries.

That said I do wish that I had created a plan for construction before I actually started building. I spent a lot of time just trying to figure out assembly.

Adding the final corks while trying not to disturb the alignment of the table legs or the circularity of the iron ring.

I think that this leads me back to the iterative process of design. The Wino, in terms of my assembly methods, should be seen as a work in process. If I was interested in pursuing this design further I would basically start over with the problems of assembly that I had and try to analyze and synthesize better solutions.