Don’t work. Enjoy a perfect Canadian winter day out on the ice with a pair of skates.
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I really can’t resist doing a nice a surgical or anatomical sequence. It’s my favorite thing to illustrate for so many reasons. So I had a lot of fun doing this challenging sequence of images describing a method for creating “neobladders” out of small intestine, post cystectomy. Honestly, in years of working and teaching in Human Anatomy, I never once gave a thought to what happens after cystectomy. Neobladders, who knew?
Read MoreAt the time of writing this in May 2020, we’ve been collectively weighed down with COVID-19 now for about three months and I could write about innumerable subjects surrounding it: those 3D renderings (good and bad) of viruses, changes and things I’ve been impressed and delighted by, things I’ve been disappointed by. Like many places in the world, COVID-19 has been incredibly hard on Canada’s long term care facilities (LTCF’s), getting into them, sickening their workers and absolutely annihilating their vulnerable residents. So I really feel I should write about one thing that I think can’t be examined enough right now, nor in the future: the places where we die.
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Before you decide whether design matters, maybe you should decide what design actually is. I found this great little article in an old Canadian Business Magazine and thought I should share with what started out as just a few of my thoughts on the subject, and well…I could have kept going. I don’t once use the word “innovation”, though, in case you’re tired of it.
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Building a trade show model on a short deadline, shoe-string budget, in the middle of a torrential downpour, while flying by the seat of my pants. Or: “Mis-adventures in clear-coating and varnishing on a the eve of a deadline”. Adventure, surely.
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Say for a moment that you have an old sail boat. There’s some heavy weather coming and your boat needs some major structural repairs. So you take it to the boat yard, haul it out and they fix it. But here’s the catch: they do the major structural repairs with what amounts to binder twine and say good luck, and, by the way, you can’t actually sail it for about six months until we know the binder twine worked. “What the heck?!” you naturally say. They just shrug and respond “We’ve always done it this way”. This is a lot like sternotomies.
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The incredible realization that a trip to the pub with some friends one winter night 14 years ago resulted in a special trip to Lebanon, Ohio last week. Life is weird.
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In short, this is a great little read if you work in design - whether that's interface, experience, industrial design or what have you. It's a great read if you're in human resources. It's also a really great little summer read if you're a teacher or educator working with little and not-so-little minds, unique and not-so-average as they always are. But this is an even greater read if you, like me, never quite feel like you fit in anywhere.
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I spent a good portion of the last two weeks combing the through Global, European and American IP registries looking through some 400 patents for signs of innovation that didn’t quite materialize. A little tired of looking at the screen, I decided to make something ugly and useful by hand with newly acquired skills. And that’s a nice pic of one of the snapping turtles laying eggs in our garden allotment. Relevant.
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Changing mediums slightly from doing things in 2D to doing, well, things. Stick Design Group is my new design consultancy focusing on healthcare and medical device design. Oh, don’t yee worry. I’m still drawing pictures.
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Shared workspace works. This is a nice story of how two engineers working on wind turbines found a designer and illustrator who normally works in health care, and together they made a really handsome static discharge tail for wind turbines. Made in Hamilton.
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Sketches, sketches, sketches. I learned a long time ago that freelance illustration is like a game of squash with your friend. You both like a good rally, and that's what you'll remember about the match, but secretly you really just try to keep wacking the ball into your friends side of the court to keep them running while you work on other stuff. In this episode I send off my first sketches, discuss how I know they're 'right' or right enough, and basically try to keep moving.
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