Hasta La Ideas

The Autodesk Sustainability Workshop is a free and vast online resource that aims to teach sustainability strategies, from micro to macro. The simple, easily-digestible series of strategy videos, tutorials and case studies can help students, educators, designers, engineers and architects not only learn about sustainability, but how to directly apply it.

Core77 asked 5 students to take it for a test spin, investigating the workshop and using Autodesk software to incorporate what they’d learned in a re-design of a commonplace object. We start with California-based Erin Fong (California College of the Arts, BFA in Industrial Design, May 2011) and her update to the DSLR.

Core77: Erin, tell us about yourself.
Erin Fong: I am 24 and I was born in Oakland, but am currently living in Castro Valley. I love to travel, find new experiences, and read—classic literature, historical fiction and even rereading some favorite childhood books. I also like running, that’s when I get a lot of my design thinking done.

What made you decide to study industrial design?
I grew up in a family that encouraged creativity and was exposed to the arts at a very young age. I always loved hands-on projects and received my first glue gun in elementary school. I felt like the glue gun allowed me to create almost anything, and that was my introduction to creating 3D objects. I’ve carried that interest with me and always feel the urge to make products work better to my own lifestyle.

What areas of industrial design are you interested in focusing on?
My natural tendencies have been toward consumer products and electronics, but I am always open to learning and experiencing different things.

Tell us about your project.
My goal is to challenge the form of the SLR camera. From my experience and from watching other people take pictures, there are so many different ways people position themselves in order to get the perfect picture: Lying on the ground, standing on top of chairs, crouching behind a tree, etc. Depending on the environment and situation, the demands on a photographer are different. However, the form of the camera has always remained the same: a static box. As a result, I wanted to try to create a new form that allowed users to gain a better grip on the camera when they’re shooting from any angle. In addition, I wanted to make it friendly for both right and left-handed users because especially when using only one hand to hold the camera, people prefer to use their dominant hand, but when the shutter button is only on one side, some people are forced to use their non-dominant hand, making it more difficult to get the picture they want.

I also wanted to make the flow of taking pictures more seamless. Currently, a lot of the camera buttons are located on the back of the camera, so when making adjustments to the camera settings, sometimes people have to take the camera away from their face and look at the camera. By moving the buttons to the front of the camera handle where it is easily accessible to the fingers, I wanted it to be like a musical instrument—just like how a pianist can create a variety of beautiful music without looking down at the keys, I wanted photographers to have an uninterrupted time focusing on the picture they’re taking without have to take their eyes off of the subject to look at the camera buttons.

From a sustainability viewpoint, DSLR cameras have a pretty good lifetime, but what do you do when it’s obsolete? Another idea I’m going after is how to recycle and reuse a good portion of the camera body immediately after the actual camera stops working or becomes replaced by better models. Therefore, the key change I made to the original design was eliminating one of the camera handles, because simply having one handle maintains my original intent of making the camera friendly for both left and right handed users (as well as the single-handed function). Now the single handle breaks into a tripod. As a result, when the camera fails to take pictures, the camera handle/tripod can be removed from the rest of the camera body and be reused, maintaining its function as a tripod for other cameras without having to be collected and going through the recycling process.

I knew the camera project would be a good challenge for me, and I wanted to prompt an interesting way of thinking about sustainability.

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