Snakefeet

What is marine design?

• Conceptual design
• Detail design
• Production support

What is marine design not?

• Naval architecture
• Engineering
• Styling / decoration

Tools

• 2D CAD
• 3D modeling
• Spreadsheets

Roles in Ship Building Projects

• Assisting NavArchs with arrangement drawings
• Assisting engineers with system schematics & functional drawings
• Preliminary / conceptual drawings & models
• Assisting in weight & CG studies
• Visualization
• Space planning
• Build strategy planning
• Material estimates
• Part fabrication design
• Part assembly design
• Module erection design

Works

• Arrangement drawings
• Docking plans
• Ships characteristic drawings

(In a canoe, dinghy, or kayak on Little Creek)

Are you looking for a way out of the 9 to 5 grind? A way out of the rat race and a way to work on your own terms, to travel, and to live the life you choose?

Cool, so am I. Let me know if you figure it out. In the meantime, an important part of having a side hustle or starting any business is seed money. For an individual that's usually gotten through a job.

I'm here in Little Creek, Virginia, the headwaters of the Atlantic Ocean, to talk to you about jobs in the maritime industry, particularly in marine design: design work supporting the manufacturing of ships and boats.

Within that category are a number of roles and kinds of work, so there are positions that suit all sorts of people. Let me tell you what I know about them and maybe one will appeal to you.

Marine designers give shape to dreams and form to fantasies. Engineers work in highly abstracted, mathematical descriptions of characteristics of a ship and are removed from the physical reality of it. The shipwrights deal directly with the physical components that are assembled to become a ship and give no time or patience for abstraction, ambiguity, or sophistry.

Designers take all the memos, spreadsheets, screenshots, rambling email threads, daydreams, and castles in the clouds that engineers create and turn them into full-scale geometric simulations of the built ship, with every piece of structure and piping modeled and accounted for; every junction box, light fixture, and electrical switchboard in its place; the propulsion machinery, the galley appliances, auxiliary equipment, habitability furnishings, every single piece of metal welded into place and every object from a 20' bronze propeller at the end of the drive shaft to a four inch fart fan outside the captain's head, precisely modeled to make sure it will all fit in place, be able to be assembled, and be accessible for service through the life of the ship.

Then we take that model and peel it apart into derivative works: assembly drawings and fabrication drawings of different kinds; tables and reference works like watertight closure tables