Jeff Feeman

Industrial design is the concept of thinking of ideas and taking those ideas from a drawing on a piece of paper all the way through to production. You might think of industrial design as the making of products. In my major we have gone through a lot of different kinds of drawings ranging anywhere from common everyday products that you would use, all the way to drawing human bodies and making sure that we know the basics of drawing. Some products that I have worked on have been a new type of weed whacker, recreational water devices, solar products, common knives, etc. I love to work with my hands so during the design process I will go back and forth from drawing things on paper/computer to building with my hands and seeing if the concepts actually work. We start out by thinking of a problem that the world has for example maybe your dust buster doesn't work the way you think it should so we take a look at what is out there and form ideas in our heads to improve that. We see what people don't like and what could be better about it and then we draw our ideas down on paper and come up with a lot of variations. We then weed through the bad ones and come up with a solution we think will work. After this is done we get into the more "artistic" side and we start looking at things like ergonomics (how the user interacts with the products and what feels right) and give it an aesthetic look so that it looks appealing. During this whole process we think about what materials we should be using and what will last the longest over time. I have taken classes in materials and stresses of what is out there. I started off at Penn State with Architecture and drawing on CAD (computer aided drafting) and switched to Engineering and I can read blueprints and I have taken classes in computer applications. We have worked with designing both on paper and on the computer. I love taking an idea from my head about something that can be improved upon and taking through the whole process to see it made in the end. In my major we are either improving an old product or making a completely new one, there is a lot of variation. I also studied abroad in Germany for a semester and love seeing different cultures and that also helps me improve my products globally so that I am not just selling to one specific group. During my studies I have also picked up 2 minors, one is in International Business and the other in Business Administration. So I have multiple sides to what I can do. I have a little bit of Architecture, Engineering, CAD, Industrial Design, New Energy and the Business side of things.