The Compact Electric Pencil Sharpener

THE COMPACT ELECTRIC PENCIL SHARPENER

As absurd as these five imagined inventions are, I am quite amazed they turned out as well as they did. Something about being in the art school that I didn’t expect was learning so much about process. This assignment is no different. If I was only asked to design five inventive tools, I don’t know if I would be able do it. Making this mind map helped me to be able to focus on quantity and relieved me of the pressure of coming up with something genius. This process led me to experimental play.

I decided to focus on invention #4. The compact electric pencil sharpener. This idea was the combination of an electric lighter I own, along with a pencil sharpener. This would be a product that students and artists would want to buy for a quick easy sharpener that could fit into their pencil case and yet not take a lot of time or make a lot of mess. It would have a cylindrical shape with the pencil being able to insert into an end. This would be something that the user would be able to figure out easily from seeing the mapping of a simple pencil size hole. There would be another oblong hole on the side, the exact shape for a USB-C charging plug to fit. The opposite half of the cylinder would be where the pencil shavings would collect. It would be made of clear plastic so that the user could see when it needed to be emptied. When the charge was low there would be a small red light as a signifier to notify the user.

I realize a design flaw: if this was truly made, then the pencil shavings would not obediently fall to the other half of the cylinder, but would come out the side therefore getting stuck between the sharpening device inside and the inside wall of the cylinder. But over all, this was the most practical design I came up with.

REFLECTION

Two things I just keep thinking about after all of the reading in this module 1. First: learned helplessness. So many times I’ve blamed myself for bad design. Especially software design. I’ve then told myself that I am not great with technology, or I am too old to learn new software, etc. I’m not saying it’s never been my fault, and it isn’t even always bad design. Sometimes it’s because of over design. Software programs that I’ve worked with such as Dragonframe, Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop have thousands of functions and for good reason. They know there are going to be many different users trying to achieve and create many different things so a plethora of functions is a necessity. This really made me think about this and acknowledge that these designs are difficult and of course I struggled learning them. Everyone does and that is the process. I will stop telling myself that maybe other people were born with more of a gift for learning technology.

The second thought I keep having after learning from the module 1 workload is the way that each person interacts with the world differently. How we push or pull or turn or twist to the left or double click all because of our experiences in life. My husband thinks the spigot for our filtered water should twist the opposite way that it does but I don’t have a problem with it. Why? It must be impossible to design anything that would work for everyone.