deck

It's been a sleepless night. I'm wide awake at 5 a.m and configuring my flickr account to synchronize with this blog. Anyway, that's the picture of my deck that I've been intending to sell.

About 2 years ago, I was hired by some local secondary school as a relief teacher. I wasn't given a decent office and I had to run off to the bus stop outside just to get some shut-eye.During my short stint there, I hung out at the skate shop that is situated just right outside the school. It's the probably the oldest running skate shop in Singapore.

For those in the know, this shop needs no introduction.In the end, I got tired of waiting at the bus stop and decide to skate in between lessons after buying my deck from the shop. It actually feels like as if the gahmen is actually paying me to skate.

p.s
I failed to synchronize the settings with flickr

Virtual Dead Hen

I think I've just reached a virtual dead end. I should have seen it coming but I was too wrapped up in the process. And to add to that, I don't think I was even asking my self the critical questions. And it didn't help either when you have your tutors and mentor agreeing to it in the first place. As much as I loved the idea of the portable skate ramps, we all know that it's not going to work out. It's not feasible.

Hypothetically, even if it did get produced, it's going to require high end composite materials for its structure and lightweight-ness. At the end of it, this thing is going to cost a bomb and I know for sure skaters won't even buy it. It's not even a logical design since the skaters at the very core of it, are extremely DIY. They don't need what I'm going to design. I think whatever they need, it's got to be something simpler.

I have only 4 days left before the submission of my design concept proposal. In the bag though, I still have the skateable street furniture for me to fall back on. But to be honest, I'm not feeling it. What I'm actually looking out for is something that is derived from this context that I'm observing.

But it's not the end yet. It's only virtual.

Thesis Design Directions

I'm pretty glad that the presentation went well yesterday with all 4 professors being able to see the design directions I had proposed. It is also partly because of smart decision making of me choosing this area. Since none of them are experts in it and that leaves me enough room to explore without them constantly giving me suggestions which I don't like.

I had proposed 3 possible directions for this thesis to continue:
1. Plaza| park
+ This proposal focuses on the redesign of the urban site. It would probably be a plaza. Given that a skate plaza tries to emulate the streets, this design however tries to emulate a skatepark without alienating the rest of the non-skating public.

2. Sit-able skate objects
+ Much smaller in scale compared to the plaza park. As the topic suggest, this design direction will concentrate on making skate structures having secondary functions like being seats or tables. It is not about designing a furniture that you can skate on it. Its about designing a skate obstacle that you can dine on.

3. Portable Fittings
+ This is probably the direction that I like most. This direction focuses on the idea of being able to have the required structures anywhere you want.

To illustrate my point, here are my full presentation panels that I showed yesterday:

Skate and the city

A visual documentation of the various facets in the local skate culture
module code : ID3121 Design Case Study

- skate and the city -

end