Coffee Cloud Table of Doodles
Materials - Bass Wood, Milk Paint, Polyurethane
L23 inches X W25 inches X H28 inches
November 2016 - December 2016
The Coffee Cloud Table was an experiment on form and shape that originated from a doodle in my sketchbook. I focused on what made the doodle, a doodle and translated it from the 2D to 3D. I aimed for a singularity of form, yet unique in every part. The table challenged my nature of design by asking itself constantly of the border between creativity and reality.
Reflections:
This was a particularly a hard challenge. The biggest point of my struggle was not understanding what it meant to create a furniture. This struggle was another rock to an ongoing slew of other obstacles that really troubled me when working with wood.
As an example to this case one of my objectives was to take a ~1/2 block of wood and hand plane it to be flat. The wood was in decent shape and just needed a few planes to flatten it out. However that did not happen for me as I went from the ~1/2" board to ~1/8" board twice within the week. The reason, well I did not know what I had to look for when planing the board. I saw and copied what to do, but not understanding the actions behind the method. Worst of it all realizing that this task is incredibly simple, but being unable to execute it. There were other problems such as not realizing my tools were slightly faulty or that they were misaligned. Either way, I had a difficult time learning the basics of woodworking. So when asked to create my own furniture for the class I did not know what to do.
I did not really had a solid concept of what it meant to make a table. Most of my life up to that point was from Ikea and I was fine with it. Things that did not work with Ikea I made my own. To be honest I never really looked at designs before as I tended to overlook them and never consider it as anything. Hence the difficulty in this field as someone who really had not much going in.
So when I first turned in proposals for the table it really was half-ass or rather not incredibly thought out. Despite a week full of agony of trying to figure out what to do with it. Two of my proposals were ideas that I was interested in such as puzzles, and some form of leafy table that really was just 3 circle with a bunch of sticks that connected the 3 of them in a weird way. The last one is what you see here a doodle that I just threw in mainly because I could not think of one and flipped through the sketchbook and found this thing. Fortunately and Unfortunately my peers did not like the other 2 ideas and so this sketch became my design. This meant that I had to make a doodle a reality but exactly how?
For the next month, I spent the entire time drawing on tracing paper of ideas of how this table could come out to be. I struggled with finding a form that matched the drawing as well as making sense of it in the real world. I often asked around to get a better understanding of my own work as I had little opinion of it and often was indecisive. But that indecisive came from my own lack of understanding of what could be done than what should be done. This drove me a bit nuts to where I had about a good 1/8" thick of tracing paper stacked together of different iterations of how the table could be brought together. In the end, time chose the design as I had less than 3.5 weeks left to work on it. I ended up picking a design that I liked better than the other iterations. It wasn't that they were bad just not to my liking.
The rest was kinda history I threw myself into the work and made my piece.
