Lucas Barnes

Sustainable Product Designer

ME

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PROJECTS

'UniPrep' Portable Meal SystemHand-Carved Beechwood SpatulaCactus-Skin WalletsClimate Action Museum InternshipManufacturable Outdoor DeskRavinia Festival Poster Competition"Treevas" Sustainable ClothingAwRoa Logo DesignBlacksmith Bonsai

TOOLKIT

Design SketchingRapid PrototypingWoodworkingAdobe Creative SuiteWebflowSolidWorksKeyShotPhotographyVideographyIllustration

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Hand-Carved Beechwood Spatula

H

aving recently been trained and certified on most of our large-scale power tools and standalone woodworking machines under the instruction of Josiah, the shop manager of CMU's School of Design Porter Hall Fabrication Shop, this project was intended to drill our hand-working muscles to create a spatula-like "scooping" hand-held form that fell into the category of "flow form."

Contribution: All Original Work
Timeline: 3 Weeks
Material: Beechwood
Date Completed: Mid February - Mid March 2024
Association: Carnegie Mellon University School of Design

Final spatula form, hand-formed from a brick of beechwood.

Hours and Hours and Hours of Sanding

As my design professors have been hammering home for the past two years, getting your hands dirty and physically touching, looking, smelling, tapping, rubbing, etc. the materials you are working with will greatly improve your understanding of said material's properties and behavior; This knowledge can not only be applied to your current project, but future ones as well. I embraced this lesson to the fullest with

this project, meticulously cutting, trimming, carving, and sanding my spatula from a solid brick of beechwood into this complex, curvy flow form that is both beautiful and functional. It was especially enjoyable to witness the grain pattern slowly emerge amongst the rough edges and faces I began with. My lab professor, Josiah, doubted the beechwood's ability to hold the underside turn-over feature well, but it prevailed!

Design Process

Step 1 — Started with some expressive curvy lines (seen in top right), highlighting the curves that stood out to me for whatever reason in the moment. I used a page full of to-scale boxes (according to the dimensions of the beechwood bricks we were being provided) to preview the "messages" that came through various combinations of curvy silhouette outlines. After identifying my "favorite few," I created a variety of 2D and 3D sketches to explore the considered forms in greater detail, annotating focus areas with sticky notes.

Step 2 — First two tooling board prototypes, directly translated from my first sketches.

Step 3 — Our full class meets to inspect the differences between all of our prototypes.

Step 4 — I was attracted to the way my first prototype (seen above in the photo of two pink foam prototypes, the top model) forced your hand to sway side to side, although the tight curves at either end felt limiting.

My second prototype (the lower of the two pink foam prototypes seen above) felt very comfortable in the palm and allowed forward motion, but wasn't intuitive in its intended use. Test users reported that they felt they should "chop" rather than "scoop."

My third prototype seen here was of higher fidelity, being made of tooling board. It was more intuitive, but still indicated "chop" and when using it your index finger would drag across the table/surface.

Step 5 — As test users reported, the handle felt comfortable finally but forced the hand too close to the table surface. So, I crafted a few handle-only prototypes to find the form that filled the palm of the user just right to not only be comfortable and keep the user's hand away from the surface, but to help force the user's intuition of a "scooping" motion.

Step 6 — A representative image from a previous prototype to showcase how I made my initial cut.

Step 7 — Using our pressurized Dremel and sanding table, I carefully carved away.

Step 8 — To smooth the rough surface and more gently bring out the curves, I used our power rotary sander.

Step 9 — To create the perfect fragile curvature, I had to hand-sand the form to completion.

Step 10 — Happy with my final form, I began mocking up a final presentation board as required from our assignment to showcase my process in a straightforward way. I used notated sticky notes to organize the layout of my board's process section, highlighting what was still missing.

Final presentation board, guiding viewers straightforward through my process.

Project Takeaways

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rom this project, I take away much experience and knowledge about the behaviors, properties, and limitations of wood, especially beechwood. It was very valuable to spend so much time amongst my peers in the machine shop, forming not only connections but having people to bounce ideas and advice off of. I appreciated having complete creative control over this project, and I think my attention

to detail and experience working with wood shines through this project. Going forward, if I were to do this project again, I would broaden my use of sketching along the way. Often times I get caught up in the details of a particular form and become a perfectionist, but to embrace slight imperfection in favor of zooming out to analyze the whole will likely prove to be a beneficial practice for me.