Howdy, Today was an early start, being in at 9am to start producing chocolates wasn’t really helped by my current medication for kidney stones and the fact that I had accidentally skipped breakfast this morning. We met the chocolate expert from the health sciences department – Ray Newbury outside the food labs, where we were invited in to undertake a little bit of health and safety training. This simply included the general rules as well as clothing we had to wear to ensure the utmost of hygiene whilst handling the chocolates. Ray started by showing us the heating bowls, which allowed us to melt the chocolate in the correct industry standard way. This included heating the chocolates to 40 degrees centigrade, then cooling them to 20 degrees, then reheating them to 37 degrees, a process known as tempering. The chocolate took about 20 to 30 minutes to melt fully, at […]

Howdy, Today Angelo introduced us to the final box design for our Gusto chocolates. Our design now has a definitive colour and it looks far more finished than our original prototypes. The design still required some refinement in the details, however the main style was now done. Angelo, Lorna and I worked together to slightly redesign some of the problems areas and soon we had a design we were happy to produce en masse. Setting up the laser cutter was a challenge due to it’s tendency to stop working for no apparent reason, however we persisted and found which settings worked best on the cutter. We had managed to streamline the production process for the boxes by preloading the files onto the cutter and then manning the cutter only when needed. The cutter made a useful beep to confirm it had finished each process and so we needed only return […]

Howdy, We had two guest lectures today, one that I felt was really interesting and brought a great insight into the world of enterprise, the other was a nice, in depth talk about the makers guild, but the topic of art galleries and presenting my work in a gallery wasn’t really something I was interested in.   Our first talk was from the owner of God Machine – a company which was started by Aziz Ibsule, a man with the hobby of drawing gothic style graphics but who started out with no real knowledge or idea of how to take it any further. Aziz’s story of growing his ideas whilst working his way up the ranks in the alternative shop – Blue Banana, was inspiring and it truly showed that if you get an idea of something you’d like to do, you can just go and do it, it just takes the […]

Howdy, Well today consisted mainly of 3D printing and laser cutting card. Its been a long day, but we have managed to iron out some creases in our designs and make some products we are all very happy with. Angelo, Lorna and I met in the rapid prototyping room in our Howard Gardens Product Design Studio, where we showed each other the designs we had spent the weekend creating and perfecting. Angelo had designed a new box for our chocolates to be sold in, which could be assembled with no other parts, eg. no adhesives.  He had also used some open source designs to make some 3d objects to print. It feels like the whole group is pulling it’s weight. I feel that we all have something to show each other every time we meet, whether it is a tangible model or design, or an intangible idea or plan for […]

Howdy, Today hasn’t exactly been productive. I woke up at 2.30am in pain, which turned out to be a kidney stone (After 13 hours in the hospital).   Other than finishing the design of my final chocolate – the cat face, I have managed to achieve very little today, which isn’t being helped by the pain killers… Overall, not a productive day….

Howdy, Today has been focused purely on some design work and planning. After yesterday’s decisions about our company’s heading, we are all now able to actually produce what we are going to sell and of course that means decided the exact designs. I have designed four different chocolate ideas which I feel the market will respond well to, specifically because they are random (yet popular) shapes which we have found is what our market wants. The random assortment consists of a smiley face, a cat face, a Pacman and a moustache. These designs are aimed to cause nostalgia, amusement or happiness. Being able to work at my own pace with the entire day to make adjustments was useful and I feel it allowed me produce a better outcome overall. I have also been considering some ideas for slogans on greeting cards, though so far I haven’t really made much progress. […]

Howdy, Today has been a feedback kinda day, starting off with a group discussion with Richard Morris. We showed our chocolaty creations to Richard, to show how we had actually managed to make the idea work. Richard reaffirmed his position on the fact that we needed to contact the health sciences tutors to talk about food standards. After an interesting debate about the progression of our chocolate idea, we ensured we had a collective discussion regarding the direction of our enterprise, especially focusing on what products we wanted to offer. We have now narrowed our product selection to Chocolates, Cakes, Cards and perhaps Candles. I feel that this decisive action is a necessity at this point in the business, which is a definite improvement in my personal skills, proving I have started to become more decisive. We are now at a point that we need to focus more heavily on […]

Howdy, Today our collective has been prototyping some moulds for making chocolates using the Makerbot Replicator 3D printer and a vacuum former. Using the shapes Angelo and I have made, we fed the data into the 3D printers and out popped a perfect 3D model for moulding around… Unfortunately things never really work that way, so today has been a lot of trial and error. Our original designs were the wrong scale and so some scaling had to be done is the makerbot software. Mould depth was also an issue and so I addressed this with some liberal use of the extrude tool, making my 3D printed former a good for millimeters thicker. After the second former was finished, it was immediately obvious that there was a problem actually removing our 3D printed models from the printer’s base. As the plastics is printed directly onto the bed, it can stick […]

Howdy, Over the weekend I’ve been compiling some ideas for the project. Through the group facebook page, our collective discussed what we wanted to have done by Monday – mainly something related to how we could manufacture our chocolate ideas. Angelo and I decided to design some random pop culture related 3d object in the solid edge cad package, so that we could hopefully 3D print the shapes using our Makerbots in the product design studio. Using these shapes, we decided we could vacuum form these shapes to make a chocolate mould. As a person who likes some of the current pop culture on the internet, I decided to try and make some internet meme related 3D shapes, which proved quite entertaining. Whether these shapes prove to be popular, I am unsure, which at the moment I feel isn’t particularly important, these shapes are only for prototyping for the moment […]

Today we came back after a night to think over our ideas. As a collective, we were unsure if we were happy with our idea and decided to analyse it, alongside also thinking of other proposals which would prove to be better plans. Other than saying the word “Bacon” a considerable amount of times, I couldn’t really think of any considerable contingencies and my group was equally as stuck. After discussing our ideas with Richard Morris – our tutor for this module, we felt slightly more confident with our direction. Richard’s confidence in our original idea gave me a sense of determination for our project, I felt that there were many more directions than I original feared and so the fact that we weren’t limiting ourselves made me a lot happier… We briefly discussed some of the areas we would like to explore as a creative collective, mainly including Cakes, […]