I was a TA for 2.009 in the Fall of 2016. 2.009 is the senior capstone product design course at MIT, mainly for mechanical engineering students. TAing this class is like working for a small production team creating, managing, documenting, and overseeing weekly events for ~180 people. We mentor students on their projects, create graphics for lectures and the class website, serve as photographers for the class, and create documentary content in the form of videos and illustrations.


We wanted to encourage students to think about solving problems that arise in the harshest conditions or most off-putting jobs. Throughout the semester, we chose to theme our website and graphics with illustrated beavers.



When teams are assigned "sub-themes" to focus on, the staff has very little time to post these along with fun, descriptive graphics. This video is a sped up screen recording of myself creating 8 beaver illustrations (one for each team's subtheme):



For the final presentations (audience of ~5000), I created this animation to introduce the class:


(using AfterEffects and Illustrator)

As you might have seen in the above animation, our graphics for final presentations were very much "pipe" centered, to reflect the rough tough and messy theme, as well as easily represent 8 different teams. I also designed posters to announce the event that we put up around campus:




Also for this class:
That one time I made a Slimer costume for Halloween at work!

And then we made a video about it:

(this video edited by Rachel Reed)

I illustrated a Seuss themed graphic and applied it to a large prop for a class activity (pictured is one of our loverly Instructors - Shreya!):


The legs were printed and then individually hand cut (by me) with a knife, I thought it would be fun to document, so now you get to watch me work:



I also designed on-theme labels for the sugar-glass bottles that were later used in a skit on good and bad critique:


Video I edited showing the skit and those bottles:

The Class Theme:

Every year, the capstone product design class at MIT presents a new theme, meant to inspire students as they brainstorm ideas for new products. In 2017, the theme was:

SUPER!

I created graphics along this theme, to be used throughout the class. An important factor in this project is that the class is always divided into 8 teams, each represented by a unique color:

Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple, Pink, and Silver.

My first step was to do some research on superheroes and superpowers. I put together this association chart to help the staff and students define "super" and to encourage diversity in their brainstorming:

Visual Theme & “Product Man”:

I decided to embody the "super" theme for teams by assigning each team a shape, which could later be represented as shields with emblems:


The mosaic containing these shields was also used as a cape for our new super-hero character "Product Man" (aka, Professor David Wallace). Here is James modeling the cape when it was first sewn (by talented co-TA Georgia Van De Zande):

Sub-Theme Emblems:

Several weeks into the semester, teams are assigned a subtheme based on the team's most promising proposed product ideas. In order to give teams as much time as possible to work with their sub-themes, the staff only have a few hours to decide on subthemes and create graphics for them.

I had started brainstorming potential subthemes and icons ahead of time and had some doodles ready in my notebook:


Later, I recorded my screen during this design session, so you can see how I went about making 7* new emblems in ~2.5 hours at ~50x speed:
*the 8th team emblem (for pink team) was designed by another talented artist, Chuck Xia.

The finished emblem designs and their associated superpowers:




The emblems would later be used on real shields by teams during the famed "build challenge," an obstacle-course like competition event that provides team-building and stress relief from recent design critiques: