Archive for the ‘Resources’ Category

Asknature.org – Allowing nature to influence your next design

Saturday, August 8th, 2009

nature inspiring design

Imagine 3.8 billion years of design brilliance available for free, at the moment of creation, to any sustainability innovator in the world.

Imagine nature’s most elegant ideas organized by design and engineering function, so you can enter “filter salt from water” and see how mangroves, penguins, and shorebirds desalinate without fossil fuels.

Now imagine you can meet the people who have studied these organisms, and together you can create the next great bio-inspired solution.

That’s the idea behind AskNature, the online inspiration source for the biomimicry community. Think of it as your home habitat—whether you’re a biologist who wants to share what you know about an amazing organism, or a designer, architect, engineer, or chemist looking for planet-friendly solutions. AskNature is where biology and design cross-pollinate, so bio-inspired breakthroughs can be born.

Picture 2

Biomimicry (from bios, meaning life, and mimesis, meaning to imitate) is a design discipline that seeks sustainable solutions by emulating nature’s time-tested patterns and strategies, e.g., a solar cell inspired by a leaf. The core idea is that Nature, imaginative by necessity, has already solved many of the problems we are grappling with: energy, food production, climate control, non-toxic chemistry, transportation, packaging, and a whole lot more.

Continue reading…

VIA: asknature.org

2 Point Perspective Tutorial | How-To Perspective Grid Demonstration

Sunday, June 28th, 2009

When I am drawing concepts for a new product I often start with a side, top and front elevation. It can often be frustrating trying to transform those elevation drawings into an accurate 3D representation.

In this drawing tutorial Kevin Hulsey illustrates, step-by-step, how to use information from top and side elevation drawings and transform them into an accurate 3D representation.

Continue reading…

VIA: khulsey.com

The Designer’s Field Guide to Sustainability

Thursday, October 16th, 2008

The LUNAR Elements team has recently published “The Designer’s Field Guide to Sustainability”, a tool designed to help all designers and engineers, no matter what their level of experience, design more sustainable products.

A quick note about the guide: None of these tips is a turn-key solution. They are very complex issues that often warrant added thought and discussion. Together, they provide a good start, and can help form a checklist of considerations to take along the design path to ensure that no sustainable opportunity has fallen through the cracks. Reviewed often, they can help us to make sustainability a fundamental part of our design and engineering processes.

Feel free to post thoughts, examples, criticisms or advice. All input will be collected and considered when LUNAR publishes version 2.0.

Enjoy.

Download the PDF

VIA: Lunar design

idsketching.com – NEW free sketching & rendering resource

Wednesday, August 13th, 2008


A great new sketching and rendering resource is now on the web. idsketching.com has a great list of sketching essentials, videos, a blog, and more. The site at the moment is in its beta stage and will be growing over the next couple of weeks. There is some great stuff up on there, it’s worth a look. Oh and it’s all totally free.
(more…)

Sketching and Rendering resource

Tuesday, July 8th, 2008

This great resource was posted on the forums a while back. There are a ton of files and videos to browse ranging from ’symbol design’ all the way up to ‘Photoshop rendering’. Link.

Thanks: Hayden