Lessons in Good Design

This past week I had the privilege of being invited back to my high school shop class to share and demonstrate some of the vast knowledge I acquired while in college (ha!).  I sat and pondered what would be the best use of my short time.  I talked to my dad about what I was up to and he recommended I recall the things that I struggled with the most while in high school shop and try to help in those areas.

The dominate area of struggle for any aspiring high school woodworker has to be design.  On a basic component level nearly everything made in the school shop was a rectangle of some nature.  Nothing wrong with a well proportioned rectangular box, in fact the best piece in the shop was a lovely rectangular buffet that looked very elegant not only because it had great simple detail but it also had balance in it's size (really wished I had took a picture to show you.)  There are things wrong with a rectangle if it is a rectangle simply because that's the shape plywood comes in and the shape that table saws cut.

 So for all you struggling with design out there here is a brief lesson from a project I'm currently working on.

Original side view sketch

While designing I usually work through several sketches and then move to a scale model.  While working on a dining set for a client I made a terrific discovery when I moved from sketching to modeling the chairs.  Whenever one builds a chair, or any piece of furniture for that matter, visual balance is vital in order to subconsciously convince the potential sitter to sit.  Moreover, actual physical balance is far more important, or else that potential sitter will also be a potential ER patient.  So, when I made the scale model chair, on a whim I set the chair up without it's front legs attached, and it balanced on it's back legs!  It's amazing to witness accidents like this, I had visual balance on the drawing and now the chair was balancing physically on it's back legs.  Now no one would sit in the chair as is. It obviously would fall forward.  However it does direct me in regards to the nature of the front legs.  They should be visually light tapering in some way down to the floor, implying that they just barely touch the floor while at the same time feeling sturdy once the sitter has sat.

I never would have made this discovery had I moved from drawing to full scale prototype.  Modeling in three dimensions will reveal mysteries and give you invaluable information as you move forward in designing any 3D object.