Snakefeet

Copied over from another site of mine since they're still under development

I've always been into objects and devices: taking them apart to see how they work, or trying to repair, restore, or improve them.

I've been on a gradual progression through different kinds of design.

• Architectural Design
• Industrial Design
• Marine Design
• Design for Production (Detail Design)
• Trailing Edge Design
• Slow Design
• Solo Design

Architectural Design: I nominally studied Architecture for three years. In retrospect, Architectural Design would have been a better fit but I didn't know the distinction. I didn't even know to look for it.

Industrial Design: I graduated in Industrial Design just in time to realize I didn't like it. Fortunately a school project had provided me an entrance into Marine Design.

Marine Design: I thought working for yacht construction and maintenance yards would lead me to becoming a yacht designer. It may have if I'd actively pursued it. However, the crashes of 2000 and 2008 soured me on the mega-yacht life and led me to make professionally defensive moves into the military-industrial side of ship building, where I focused more and more on Detail Design.

Detail Design: or, Design for Production, among all the design verticals, may be the farthest one can get from the architect's heady heights of envisioning a whole building or city block on a sheet of trace with a few strokes of fine tip felt pen.

It is the process of determining the shape, to fractions of a millimeter in accuracy, of every piece of a ship. This process takes vague forms that naval architects imagine, turn them into precisely defined geometry, and generate data used by fabricators to cut each and every piece of metal that goes together to forming a ship.

The types of design so far have been ones I learned from the outside. Now I'm sketching out other fields of design to fill in gaps that I perceive.

Trailing Edge Design: Cutting Edge Design is cool and exciting. Products based on new technology have been a mainstay of the United States for a century or more. Freed from the limits of physical products, the “move fast and break things” mentality spurred neophilia to new heights.

A cutting edge pushing a fluid aside to pass through it forcibly, like a propeller blade, rudder, or impeller vane, moves faster and more efficiently if followed by a trailing edge that brings the parted fluid back together smoothly. A blunt trailing edge causes a low pressure area behind the propeller blade, etc. At best this causes drag and inefficiency. At worst it can cause cavitation, leading to noise, even physical damage to the object passing through the fluid.

Analogously speaking, I propose that moving fast and breaking things in industry, politics, &/or society could industrial, political, and societal cavitation: swirling & chaos, and vacuum bubbles that collapse in on themselves, causing damage to the structure that caused them.

Something has to restore order and peace after the enthusiasm or shock of rapid changes. Trailing Edge Design is a side of the coin that hasn't been thoroughly explored yet but that bears investigation.

Slow Design: came from a reactionary mindset similar to Trailing Edge Design. Rapid visualization, rapid prototyping, fast -tracked construction, “time is money”, and so on have been the general assumptions for decades. But faster isn't always better. Slow Design is a middle path between high speed, high volume, low quantity mass production of commodities and low speed, one-off production of artists and artisans.

Solo Design: the term here is provisional because I haven't found one I like yet. I see this as deliberate self-actualization. Planning out what one wants to become and the process it will take to get there. This is not new. In fact it is essentially the core goal of the original liberal arts: and enlightened mind and virtuous life. Those terms have fallen out of favor and life is more complicated now. But the goals of self-possession and of understanding the world around us in terms of first principles are still desirable ones

Scratch paper

Trailing Edge Design: Cutting Edge Design is cool and exciting. Products based on new technology have been a mainstay of the United States for a century or more. Freed from the limits of physical products, the “move fast and break things” mentality spurred neophilia to new heights.

New concepts plowing through the status quo bring to mind fluid dynamics. A propeller blade or rudder or pump impeller vane is most efficient when the cutting edge and trailing edge work together to part, and then put back together, the streams of fluid they pass through.

A possible result is cultural cavitation

Something has to restore order and tranquility after the enthusiasm of shock of rapid changes. The smooth aft edge of a wing or rudder is just as important to fluid flow and efficiency as the equally smooth, if blunter leading edge.