No seriously, they aint renders
And yes, it does work. Amazing what a little color correction and masking will do for gadget porn.
Mmm, first finished pictures
Gotta get a better camera, and still missing a laser cut back logo, but she’s lookin pretty good:
The Final Countdown
After hours of staring at renders and wireframes and dimensions, and standoffs and calipers and measurements and measurements, seeing this for the first time was a pretty damn good feeling:
Mmm, final pre-machining renders
The design went off to the CNC machine shop this weekend, formalized in line drawing diagram-ey goodness.
With some nice tasty final renders to give an idea of the finished object:
Small Touches
Detail of back panel Lenovo logo with cutout “O” to allow ventilation:
Fine, so everybody hates red. Reworked front panel with accent line/touch sensor and product logo:
Vote For Me Dagnabbit
http://www.whatsyourideaoffun.com/us/content/y560-slice
Because voting keeps our democracy strong, and dagnabbit is an underused word. And if I get the most votes (and my design dosen’t suck), I get a free trip to Vegas.
Progress
Hopefully this is starting to look a little more recognizably like a computer. Sure, the geometry looks pretty simple, but each hole for a screw or USB port represents waaay to much time measuring/printing a paper template/placing/getting it wrong/repeat. Logo placement is provisional, looks kinda stupid as is. Right now I’m playing with a red/charcoal powdercoat or automotive matte paint job, but the question is how much red is too much red. I feel the thing also looks a bit too unadorned – I’m considering doing a large amount of laser engraving on many of the flat grey surfaces. What to do with all that empty space on the face?
New Directions
So the original plan was to create something, thin, tiny and without a monitor – a slice like the blog title suggests:
However the reality is that the XXL size of my components would render such a design comically large and kind of impractical. I’m also loath to waste a perfectly nice 15.5″ LCD screen. And I like the idea of a portrait-format screen – perfect for reading those long PDFs or efficient viewing of Gmail and Outlook inboxes. We’re gonna need a montaaaaage….
A start, but boooooring. To iMacish
Mmmmmmmmm<half hour>mugghhhhhh.
What really takes the most time - little details like the angle of LCD orientation to achieve the best view
Aaaaaaand several hours later. Click for large version.
I’m kind of liking this. The stand is based on the shadow cast by the main body and offsets the substantial physical weight of the machined aluminum vertical case. The angles of the stand will serve to conceal the cable spaghetti that otherwise ruins most nice looking computers. The compound angles of the base also create interesting perspective tricks when viewed from different points. Not happy with the main body that houses the screen, motherboard – it’s, well, a box. Too iMac G5/every all-in-one PC ever. The challenge is that ports have to go on the bottom, blu ray slot on the top.
Inspiration I – beautiful form
As I flail around measuring circuit boards, assessing clearances and reading component spec sheets the fact that I have 30 DAYS to produce something halfway finished and attractive keeps resurfacing. For a while now I’ve been collecting examples of forms that are beautiful in their own right yet could conceivably house a functional device. ..
Gorgeous.
A piece by Kishi Eiko, a Japanese ceramic artist
The back side of an HTC Evo smartphone. Sometimes the beauty of a functional object can be found in the places that are normally out of sight – thousands of patents and man hours and dozens of companies and countless different materials, all working seamlessly and hidden from view.
Details, Bloody Details
Before I can even get to the fun design-ey part, everything has to be measured and characterized. Where will dozens of tiny screws have to be mounted? How are they placed in relation to each other and other important components? Where are the USB ports and the Blu Ray drive, and how will the necessity of making them easily accessible affect the form of the casing? Where do vents need to be placed so that the whole contraption doesn’t just melt or catch fire? The number of interconnected variables and the accuracy with which they need to be measured is intimidating.
Essential items for any construction project: cheap calipers, cheap cerveza, 2500 page industrial supply catalogs.
Building with complex components AND detailed schematics is difficult. Building with nothing to go on whatsoever is a real bitch
Things You Should Never Do With Your Laptop #447
The hardware: courtesy of Lenovo
The Lenovo Ideapad y560, a very nice piece of hardware. Good screen, half a terabyte hdd, 4 gigs of RAM, *amazing* speakers. For the spec inclined click here.
It’s all very… normal and laptop-ey though. Time to tear it apart.
Yup, that’s what’s in your laptop. One green board and a few silver boxes to hold all of our assignments and love letters and pirated television shows. Childhood photos, epic music collections, porn. It’s funny that we develop relationships with our laptops – we name them and talk to them and get angry at them when they fail – but inside, it’s all ugly little plastic bits and QC PASSED stickers.
So now the industrial design/breaking things/sleepless nights fun begins, how does this floppy, fragile board transform into this as-yet-imaginary-object?….
The Concept part 1 – A rant slash mission statement about squat ugly boxes
So Lenovo gave me the hardware, and 60 days to craft, well… something cool. So here’s what I’m thinking:
Modern computer design seems to tend to extremes. On one hand you have everything-plus-two-kitchen-sinks desktops that are bigger than the fridge you had in college, use more power than your air conditioner and sound like your girlfriend drying her hair. On the other hand (ignoring the sleek, attractive smartphone elephant in the room), you have laptops. Among my IT day job clients and twentysomething peers, this dichotomy seems to result in three situations:
More blackerer, more glossy, still fugly. I mean really, which was worse, stickers with incomprehensible jargon or gloss that looks good for precisely 30 seconds?
1. Dusty, huge Optiplex/Pavilion boxes shoved as far out of sight as possible. You know, the one with the peeling stickers on the front that you just can’t part with cause it cost $2500 back in 05’. All fundamentally based on a design that hasn’t changed in decades.
2. Thinkpads and Latitudes plugged into some sort of godawful dock arrangement. If you did manage to survive the dust fallout and lift the thing out of the dock for the 1st time in 3 years, you’d immediately be treated to “unhappy squealing battery dead shutdown noise”.
3. A gorgeously constructed Macbook Pro, iMac or Mac Pro, placed in prominent view and gleaming arrogantly, as if to say “Damn it feels good to be this overpriced”.
With few exceptions consumers only have one option in a PC that stylish and well designed with adequate performance: get a Mac. And there would seem to be a large market for this, considering that Apple is now the now the 3rd largest manufacturer in the US market. But for us PC users, it’s mostly been a race to the bottom. Massive demand coupled with ever-increasing volumes means that your squat, glossy box in 2010 has exponentially greater power and costs ¼ as much as your squat, beige box from the 90s, but is just as cheap and nasty. But it’s a real shame that the majority of computers – these devices that we spend so much of our lives interacting with – are so aesthetically barren and poorly made.
Even though the desktop computer as we know it us slowly dying, I believe there is still space to design something that you’d never want to hide under a desk. That wouldn’t look out of place next to a Mac Pro or Bang & Olfuson or Mark Levinson or shit, the $99 smartphone your little sister just bought. Something that is a sculptural object in its own right as well as a functional tool for creating and communicating. And with free hardware and a budget from Lenovo, that’s exactly what I plan to build. It probably won’t be mass producible at any sane price. Or even entirely practical. But it damn sure won’t be beige, or glossy. Or a Mac.
The Workshop a.k.a Underemployment and a Lot of Craigslist
Some of the corners of my subterranean work space – a never ending project cobbled together from basement scraps, yard sale pickings and trash day drives through the neighborhood.
Spray paint : 99 cents. Wobbly stool: $2. Scrap wood bench and ancient computer monitor: Free. Constant coathangering by pipes and eventual carbon monoxide poisoning: Priceless.
In case of head crabs.
The best thing about Sambuccalamp is drinking the sambucca. The second best thing is always wondering whether the whole thing is going to catch fire.
The Challenge
“Submit your idea for a cool mod and tell us how you will build it. We´ll choose the best and give those modders the hardware and a $2000 budget to bring it to life! They will be featured in our website, and the modder that gets the most fan votes will be invited to join Lenovo at CES 2011”
A few bowls of ramen, a sick day, and a lot of time in Rhino with V-Ray; and I done got me a renderin:
And so now I have a reasonable budget, some pretty sweet gear courtesy of Lenovo and very little time to design and build a functionally complete and working prototype of an entire computer. The fun beings….
Slice - a design project for Lenovo 
