Douglas R. Seidler

Earlier this week Adobe announced Creative Suite 4. From what I can tell, Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign received minor updates… probably not worth the upgrade. Dreamweaver - Adobe’s web editing software - received the most attention this time around and is now available for trial as beta software. If you do not currently own CS3 or CS2, I recommend purchasing the Design Standard Edition which costs about $400 (for students).

There is a good article at Slate.com by Brendan I Koerner exploring the true “Greenness” of Bamboo flooring. The scale of production, methods or harvest, assembly and transportation all impact what is considered by most to be the “green” alternative to traditional hardwood floors.

Bamboo does have loads of green potential. But as is usually the case when it comes to crops, much depends on how the bamboo is managed, harvested, and ultimately made into flooring. Many producers assume that consumers won’t pay attention to such behind-the-scenes details and will be dazzled by smooth-talking salesman who toss around words like “sustainability” and “sequestration.”

…bamboo’s environmental edge can evaporate if the stuff is heedlessly grown. Given the recent vogue for bamboo among Western consumers, producers in Asia (specifically China’s Hunan Province) have been aggressive with their planting, often at the expense of old woodlands and their attendant ecosystems. To goose their yields, these plantations employ plenty of fertilizers and pesticides, thereby negating one of bamboo’s primary advantages.

read the full article here

I only began to understand how complex construction drawings are when I started teaching 4 years ago. Prior to teaching, my experience communicating with consultants, contractors, architects, and interior designers through the conventional 2D drawings is almost always straight forward (I do admit these drawing produced their fair share of errors in the field).

The build blog has an interesting post that shows use of 3D analysis / cut away drawings in other fields to allow everyone immediately understand of these complex relationships.

I wonder if BIM will help us produce more legible construction docs or only provide more of the same (slightly more coordinated) construction docs.

Douglas Seidler represented his paper:

Who’s Teaching Technology?

Methods and strategies to develop effective digital design curricula

at the Boston Architectural College’s Foundation Faculty Workshop March, 19, 2008. This paper was previously presented and published with the Interior Design Educators Council 2008 Annual Conference in Montreal, Canada on March 2008. Seidler’s paper continues his research on constructivist education theory and its application in design education.

You can read more about this paper at: dougseidler.com

AutoCAD 2009 is now available for trial download. To receive your free 30-day trial complete and submit the form at autodesk.com.

New features in 2009 include:

• Ribbon - With the ribbon interface, overall drafting productivity is increased as the number of steps to reach a command is decreased. The ribbon interface presents command options in a concise visual format. allowing you to quickly select commands based on the work you’re doing . Moving between applications is now quick and intuitive. The ribbon is both customizable and expandable so that it can be optimized for each user and meet each company’s standards.
• Menu Browser - Reviewing and working with several files is no longer a tedious and time-consuming process. The new menu browser interface allows you to browse files and examine thumbnail images and provides detailed information about file size and file creator. Plus, you can organize recently used files by name, date, or title.
• Action Recorder - The new action recorder saves time and increases productivity by automating repetitive tasks without requiring the skill or assistance of a professional CAD manager. Users can quickly record a task, add text messages and requests for input, then quickly select and play back recorded files.
• Layer Dialog - The new layer dialog makes creating and editing layer properties faster and less prone to error. Changes are instantly reflected in the drawing as they are made in the dialog. The manipulation of the dialog box has been simplified, and columns in the dialog can be individually resized so the contents of that column or its title are not truncated. Individual columns can be fixed in place so that the rest of the columns can be scrolled through and referenced to a fixed column such as the layer name.
• Quick Properties - The easily customizable quick properties menu increases productivity by reducing the steps to access properties information, ensuring that information presented is optimized for that particular user and project.
• Quick View - The quick view feature uses thumbnails instead of file names, making opening the correct drawing file and layout faster and decreasing the time spent opening incorrect drawing files.

The Material Project is a material & building reference that anyone can edit. This type of community edited knowledge base provides an opportunity for design professionals and graduate students to share their material research and building research with each other as an accurate and evolving investigation on material in design.

The Material Project was started in the Fall 2005 semester as a printed research collaborative of graduate students studying Advanced Materials and Methods at NESAD in Boston, MA. The collaborative, lead by Professor Douglas R Seidler, continued into the Spring 2007 semester. The written collaborative and resulting knowledge base was migrated to the MaterialWiki project in the Spring 2008 semester.

see more: materialproject.org

The prime objective of Digital Drawing for Designers: A Visual Guide to AutoCAD is to provide designers a visual, clear, and concise guide to better understand the world of Digital Drawing as it relates to AutoCAD. While there are many AutoCAD books on the market, most are thick with technical language and excessive technical discussions about the software. In my experience, many discussions in these books use inconsistent language or complicated instruction to teach relatively simple tasks. These books also require the learner to choose which information is essential to understand AutoCAD, something that poses a great challenge to many students. After teaching digital drawing at Suffolk University for several years, I recognized that Architects and Interior Designers need better AutoCAD instruction.

Recent educational research suggests that students gain a stronger understanding through instruction with specific and transparent learning objectives. In addition, the research suggests that understanding is easier to attain when learning connects to a body of knowledge that the student already understands. For AutoCAD, the existing body of knowledge seemed obvious: manual drafting.

The combination of my in-class teaching experience and this educational research inspired me to develop and write supplemental course material that better communicates the relationship between AutoCAD and manual drafting. You can click here to see an example of how I introduce drawing horizontal and vertical lines (the Ortho parameter). Through this new approach to teaching AutoCAD, I found that my student’s enthusiasm and general understanding of AutoCAD increased exponentially. This supplemental course material became the foundation for this book. I wrote Digital Drawing for Designers to share this new teaching approach with Architects and Interior Designers in colleges and universities across the country.

more: books.dougseidler.com

Seidler’s first textbook:

Digital Drawing for Designers: A Visual Guide to AutoCAD

explores the relationship between hand drawing and digital drawing.This new new pedagogical approach to teaching AutoCAD — a differentiator between this book and other textbooks — creates lasting connections between drawing in AutoCAD and a student’s existing knowledge of manual drafting.buy now: amazon.comread more: books.dougseidler.com

AutoCAD® 2008 software adds features to help make everyday tasks easier. Annotation scaling and control of layers by viewport minimize workarounds, while text enhancements, multiple leaders, and improved tables help deliver an unmatched level of aesthetic precision and professionalism.
Read More

Comparison Matrix available at autodesk.com.

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Douglas R Seidler is the author of Digital Drawing for Designers: A Visual Guide to AutoCAD.

Douglas Seidler will present his paper:

Using Free Web Technologies

to Increase Understanding and Visual Learning

at the 2007 International Conference on the Beginning Design Student in Savannah, GA on Friday March 3, 2007.

more: abstract & paper presentation