Pedestal desk
A pedestal desk or a tanker desk is a large, free-standing desk made of a simple rectangular working surface resting on two pedestals or small cabinets of stacked drawers of one or two sizes, with plinths around the bases. There is a central large drawer above the legs and knees of the user. Sometimes in the 19th century and modern examples, a "modesty panel" is placed in front, between the pedestals, to hide the legs and knees of the user from anyone else sitting or standing in front; this variation is sometimes called a "panel desk". The smaller and older pedestal desks with such a panel are sometimes called kneehole desks, were placed against a wall. From the mid-18th century onwards, the pedestal desk has had a top, inlaid with a large panel of leather or baize for a writing surface, within a cross-banded border. If the desk has a wooden top surface, it may have a pull-out lined writing drawer, or the pull-out may be fitted with a folding horse to serve as a bookrest. Few non-specialists call this form a pedestal desk.
Most people refer to it as an executive desk, in contrast with the cubicle desk, assigned to those who work under the executive. However, the term executive desk has been applied to so many desk forms as to be misleading, so the less-used but more precise "pedestal desk" has been retained here; the pedestal desk appeared in England, in the 18th century but became popular in the 19th and the 20th, overtaking the variants of the secretary desk and the writing table in sheer numbers. The French stayed faithful to the writing table or bureau plat, which might have a matching paper-case that stood upon it. There were at least two precursors to the pedestal desk: The French bureau Mazarin of the late 17th century and the Chinese jumu desk or scholar's desk, which Europeans knew entirely at second-hand from illustrations on porcelain. However, unlike the pedestal desk, these precursors had an incomplete stack of drawers and compartments holding up the two ends; the cases of drawers were raised about 15–30 cm from the floor on legs.
When a pedestal desk is doubled in size to form a nearly square working surface, drawers are put on both sides to accommodate two users at the same time, it becomes a partners desk. Thomas Chippendale gives designs for such tables, which were used in libraries, as writing tables in The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker's Director. Pedestal desks made of steel sheet metal were introduced in 1946 and were popular in America until the 1970s. Called tanker desks, they were used in institutions such as schools and business and government offices; when the pedestal desk form is cut to about two thirds of its normal width, one of the pedestals is replaced by legs, this is called a right pedestal desk or a left pedestal desk, depending on the position of the pedestal. This kind of form is common for a student desk; the pedestal desk is one of the two principal forms of the big campaign desk, used by the military in the past. It can be considered a portable desk in a limited way since the writing surface could be separated from the pedestals, to facilitate transport.
The three separate elements were fitted with large handles on the sides. Computer desk List of desk forms and types Aronson, Joseph; the Encyclopedia of Furniture. 3rd ed. New York: Crown Publishers, 1966. Charron, Andy. Desks: Outstanding Projects from America's Best Craftsmen. Taunton Press, 2000. Pp. 124–144. Gloag, John. A Complete Dictionary of Furniture. Woodstock, N. Y.: Overlook Press, 1991. Moser, Thomas. Measured Shop Drawings for American Furniture. New York: Sterling Publishing Inc. 1985. Media related to Pedestal desks at Wikimedia Commons
Standing desk
A standing desk or stand-up desk is a desk conceived for writing or reading while standing up or while sitting on a high stool. Several writers and statesmen wrote standing up: Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens, Winston Churchill, Ernest Hemingway, Vladimir Nabokov; some of them had specially made lecterns. Standing desks have been made in many variations. Standing desks may be specialized to suit particular tasks, such as certain variations of the telephone desk and desks for architectural drafting; some standing desks may only be used while standing while others allow users to sit or stand by adjusting the desk height with an electric motor, hand crank, or counterbalance system. Some desks are constructed like teacher's lecterns, allowing them to be set on top of an existing desk for standing, or removed for sitting. While height of most seated desks is standardized, standing desks are made in many different heights ranging from 70 to 128 centimetres. Ideally the height of a standing desk fits the height of its individual user.
With seated desks, adjusting the height relative to the user can be accomplished by adjusting the height of the user's chair. However, because users of a standing desk move around more than when seated, using a pedestal to adjust the user's height is not practical. To solve this issue, a standing desk may either be custom-made, to suit the height of the user, or made with adjustable parts. For writing or drafting, the angle or slant of the surface may be adjustable, with a typical drawing table or table à la tronchin. If the desk is made for computer use, the legs may be adjustable. Another option is a platform made to sit on top of a regular seated desk that raises the desk's surface to a useful height for standing; such platforms may be fixed adjustable. A height-adjustable desk or sit-stand desk can be adjusted to both standing positions. Sit-stand desks may be effective at reducing sitting time during the work day between 30 minutes and two hours per working day but the evidence is low quality.
Some antique standing desks have an open frame with drawers, a foot rail to reduce back pain. A hinged desktop could be lifted in order to access a small cabinet underneath it so that the user could store or retrieve papers and writing implements without needing to bend over or stand back from the desk. There is a higher mortality rate among people who sit for prolonged periods, the risk is not negated by regular exercise, though it is lowered. Low-quality evidence indicates that providing employees with a standing desk option may reduce the length of time some people sit in the first year; this reduction in sitting may decrease with time. It is not clear how standing desks compare to other work-place interventions to reduce the length of time employees are sitting during the work day. There is no international consensus on recommended levels of sitting and standing while at work, suggested workplace practices vary in different countries. There are only minor differences in energy expenditure between standing.
List of desk types Lectern, a type of upright desk Charron, Andy. Desks: Outstanding Projects from America's Best Craftsmen. Taunton Press. Pp. 108–123. ISBN 978-1-56158-348-5. Moser, Thomas. Measured Shop Drawings for American Furniture. New York: Sterling Publlishing Inc. ISBN 978-0-8069-5712-8
Book
As a physical object, a book is a stack of rectangular pages oriented with one edge tied, sewn, or otherwise fixed together and bound to the flexible spine of a protective cover of heavier inflexible material. The technical term for this physical arrangement is codex. In the history of hand-held physical supports for extended written compositions or records, the codex replaces its immediate predecessor, the scroll. A single sheet in a codex is a leaf, each side of a leaf is a page; as an intellectual object, a book is prototypically a composition of such great length that it takes a considerable investment of time to compose and a still considerable, though not so extensive, investment of time to read. This sense of book has an unrestricted sense. In the restricted sense, a book is a self-sufficient section or part of a longer composition, a usage that reflects the fact that, in antiquity, long works had to be written on several scrolls, each scroll had to be identified by the book it contained.
So, for instance, each part of Aristotle's Physics is called a book, as of course the Bible encompasses many different books. In the unrestricted sense, a book is the compositional whole of which such sections, whether called books or chapters or parts, are parts; the intellectual content in a physical book need not be a composition, nor be called a book. Books can consist only of drawings, engravings, or photographs, or such things as crossword puzzles or cut-out dolls. In a physical book the pages can be left blank or can feature an abstract set of lines as support for on-going entries, i.e. an account book, an appointment book, a log book, an autograph book, a notebook, a diary or day book, or a sketch book. Some physical books are made with pages thick and sturdy enough to support other physical objects, like a scrapbook or photograph album. Books may be distributed in electronic form as other formats. Although in ordinary academic parlance a monograph is understood to be a specialist academic work, rather than a reference work on a single scholarly subject, in library and information science monograph denotes more broadly any non-serial publication complete in one volume or a finite number of volumes, in contrast to serial publications like a magazine, journal, or newspaper.
An avid reader or collector of books or a book lover is a bibliophile or colloquially, "bookworm". A shop where books are bought and sold is a bookstore. Books are sold elsewhere. Books can be borrowed from libraries. Google has estimated that as of 2010 130,000,000 distinct titles had been published. In some wealthier nations, the sale of printed books has decreased because of the use of e-books, though sales of e-books declined in the first half of 2015; the word book comes from Old English "bōc", which in turn comes from the Germanic root "*bōk-", cognate to "beech". In Slavic languages "буква" is cognate with "beech". In Russian and in Serbian and Macedonian, the word "букварь" or "буквар" refers to a primary school textbook that helps young children master the techniques of reading and writing, it is thus conjectured. The Latin word codex, meaning a book in the modern sense meant "block of wood"; when writing systems were created in ancient civilizations, a variety of objects, such as stone, tree bark, metal sheets, bones, were used for writing.
A tablet is a physically robust writing medium, suitable for casual transport and writing. Clay tablets were flattened and dry pieces of clay that could be carried, impressed with a stylus, they were used as a writing medium for writing in cuneiform, throughout the Bronze Age and well into the Iron Age. Wax tablets were pieces of wood covered in a thick enough coating of wax to record the impressions of a stylus, they were the normal writing material in schools, in accounting, for taking notes. They had the advantage of being reusable: the wax could be melted, reformed into a blank; the custom of binding several wax tablets together is a possible precursor of modern bound books. The etymology of the word codex suggests that it may have developed from wooden wax tablets. Scrolls can be made from papyrus, a thick paper-like material made by weaving the stems of the papyrus plant pounding the woven sheet with a hammer-like tool until it is flattened. Papyrus was used for writing in Ancient Egypt as early as the First Dynasty, although the first evidence is from the account books of King Nefertiti Kakai of the Fifth Dynasty.
Papyrus sheets were glued together to form a scroll. Tree bark such as lime and other materials were used. According to Herodotus, the Phoenicians brought writing and papyrus to Greece around the 10th or 9th century BC; the Greek word for papyrus as writing material and book come from the Phoenician port town Byblos, through which papyrus was exported to Greece. From Greek we derive the word tome, which meant a slice or piece and from there began to denote "a roll of papyrus". Tomus was used by the Latins with the same meaning as volumen. Whether made from papyrus, parchment, or paper, scrolls were the dominant form of book in the Hellenistic, Chinese and Macedonian culture
Computer-aided design
Computer-aided design is the use of computers to aid in the creation, analysis, or optimization of a design. CAD software is used to increase the productivity of the designer, improve the quality of design, improve communications through documentation, to create a database for manufacturing. CAD output is in the form of electronic files for print, machining, or other manufacturing operations; the term CADD is used. Its use in designing electronic systems is known as electronic design automation. In mechanical design it is known as mechanical design automation or computer-aided drafting, which includes the process of creating a technical drawing with the use of computer software. CAD software for mechanical design uses either vector-based graphics to depict the objects of traditional drafting, or may produce raster graphics showing the overall appearance of designed objects. However, it involves more than just shapes; as in the manual drafting of technical and engineering drawings, the output of CAD must convey information, such as materials, processes and tolerances, according to application-specific conventions.
CAD may be used to design figures in two-dimensional space. CAD is an important industrial art extensively used in many applications, including automotive and aerospace industries and architectural design and many more. CAD is widely used to produce computer animation for special effects in movies and technical manuals called DCC digital content creation; the modern ubiquity and power of computers means that perfume bottles and shampoo dispensers are designed using techniques unheard of by engineers of the 1960s. Because of its enormous economic importance, CAD has been a major driving force for research in computational geometry, computer graphics, discrete differential geometry; the design of geometric models for object shapes, in particular, is called computer-aided geometric design. Starting around the mid 1960s, with the IBM Drafting System, computer-aided design systems began to provide more capability than just an ability to reproduce manual drafting with electronic drafting, the cost-benefit for companies to switch to CAD became apparent.
The benefits of CAD systems over manual drafting are the capabilities one takes for granted from computer systems today. CAD provided the designer with the ability to perform engineering calculations. During this transition, calculations were still performed either by hand or by those individuals who could run computer programs. CAD was a revolutionary change in the engineering industry, where draftsmen and engineering roles begin to merge, it did not eliminate departments, as much as it merged departments and empowered draftsman and engineers. CAD is an example of the pervasive effect. Current computer-aided design software packages range from 2D vector-based drafting systems to 3D solid and surface modelers. Modern CAD packages can frequently allow rotations in three dimensions, allowing viewing of a designed object from any desired angle from the inside looking out; some CAD software is capable of dynamic mathematical modeling. CAD technology is used in the design of tools and machinery and in the drafting and design of all types of buildings, from small residential types to the largest commercial and industrial structures.
CAD is used for detailed engineering of 3D models or 2D drawings of physical components, but it is used throughout the engineering process from conceptual design and layout of products, through strength and dynamic analysis of assemblies to definition of manufacturing methods of components. It can be used to design objects such as jewelry, appliances, etc. Furthermore, many CAD applications now offer advanced rendering and animation capabilities so engineers can better visualize their product designs. 4D BIM is a type of virtual construction engineering simulation incorporating time or schedule related information for project management. CAD has become an important technology within the scope of computer-aided technologies, with benefits such as lower product development costs and a shortened design cycle. CAD enables designers to layout and develop work on screen, print it out and save it for future editing, saving time on their drawings. Computer-aided design is one of the many tools used by engineers and designers and is used in many ways depending on the profession of the user and the type of software in question.
CAD is one part of the whole digital product development activity within the product lifecycle management processes, as such is used together with other tools, which are either integrated modules or stand-alone products, such as: Computer-aided engineering and finite element analysis Computer-aided manufacturing including instructions to computer numerical control machines Photorealistic rendering and motion simulation. Document management and revision control using product data management. CAD is used for the accurate creation of photo simulations that are required in the preparation of environmental impact reports, in which computer-aided designs of intended buildings are superimposed into photographs of existing environments to represent what that locale will be like, where the proposed facilities are allowed to be built. Pote
Stencil
Stencilling produces an image or pattern by applying pigment to a surface over an intermediate object with designed gaps in it which create the pattern or image by only allowing the pigment to reach some parts of the surface. The stencil is pattern and the intermediate object. In practice, the stencil is a thin sheet of material, such as paper, wood or metal, with letters or a design cut from it, used to produce the letters or design on an underlying surface by applying pigment through the cut-out holes in the material; the key advantage of a stencil is that it can be reused to and produce the same letters or design. Although aerosol or painting stencils can be made for one-time use they are made with the intention of being reused. To be reusable, they must remain intact after a design is produced and the stencil is removed from the work surface. With some designs, this is done by connecting stencil islands to other parts of the stencil with bridges. Stencil technique in visual art is referred to as pochoir.
A related technique is aerography, in which spray-painting is done around a three-dimensional object to create a negative of the object instead of a positive of a stencil design. This technique was used in cave paintings dating to 10,000 BC, where human hands were used in painting handprint outlines among paintings of animals and other objects; the artist sprayed pigment around his hand by using a hollow bone, blown by mouth to direct a stream of pigment. Screen printing uses a stencil process, as does mimeography; the masters from which mimeographed pages are printed are called "stencils". Stencils can be made with one or many colour layers using different techniques, with most stencils designed to be applied as solid colours. During screen printing and mimeography, the images for stenciling are broken down into color layers. Multiple layers of stencils are used on the same surface to produce multi-colored images. Hand stencils, made by blowing pigment over a hand held against a wall, are found from over 35,000 years ago in Asia and Europe, prehistoric dates in other continents.
After that stenciling has been used as a historic painting technique on all kinds of materials. Stencils may have been used to color cloth for a long time. In Europe, from about 1450 they were used to color old master prints printed in black and white woodcuts; this was the case with playing-cards, which continued to be colored by stencil long after most other subjects for prints were left in black and white. Stencils were used for mass publications. Stencils were popular as a method of book illustration, for that purpose, the technique was at its height of popularity in France during the 1920s when André Marty, Jean Saudé and many other studios in Paris specialized in the technique. Low wages contributed to the popularity of the labor-intensive process; when stencils are used in this way they are called "pochoir". In the pochoir process, a print with the outlines of the design was produced, a series of stencils were used through which areas of color were applied by hand to the page. To produce detail, a collotype could be produced which the colors were stenciled over.
Pochoir was used to create prints of intense color and is most associated with Art Nouveau and Art Deco design. Aerosol stencils have many practical applications and the stencil concept is used in industrial, artistic and recreational settings, as well as by the military and infrastructure management. A template is used to create an outline of the image. Stencils templates can be made from any material which will hold its form, ranging from plain paper, plastic sheets and wood. Stencils are used by official organizations, including the military, utility companies, governments, to and label objects and locations. Stencils for an official application can be customized, or purchased as individual letters and symbols; this allows the user to arrange words and other labels from one set of templates, unique to the item being labeled. When objects are labeled using a single template alphabet, it makes it easier to identify their affiliation or source. Stencils have become popular for graffiti, since stencil art using spray-paint can be produced and easily.
These qualities are important for graffiti artists where graffiti is illegal or quasi-legal, depending on the city and stenciling surface. The extensive lettering possible with stencils makes it attractive to political artists. For example, the anarcho-punk band Crass used stencils of anti-war, anarchist and anti-consumerist messages in a long-term graffiti campaign around the London Underground system and on advertising billboards. There has been a semi-recent trend in making multi-layered stencils with different shades of grey for each layer creating a more detailed stenciled image. Well known for their use of stencil art is Blek le Rat and Jef aerosol from France, British artist Banksy, New York artist, world traveling artist Tavar Zawacki f.k.a.'ABOVE', Shepard Fairey's OBEY, Pirate & Acid from Hollywood, California. A common tradition for stencils is in home decorating and arts & crafts
Drafting machine
A drafting machine is a tool used in technical drawing, consisting of a pair of scales mounted to form a right angle on an articulated protractor head that allows an angular rotation. The protractor head is able to move across the surface of the drawing board, sliding on two guides directly or indirectly anchored to the drawing board; these guides, which act separately, ensure the movement of the set in the horizontal or vertical direction of the drawing board, can be locked independently of each other. The drafting machine was invented by Charles H. Little in 1901, he founded the Universal Drafting Machine Company in Cleveland, Ohio, to manufacture and sell the instrument. Drafting machines were present in the design offices of European companies since the 1920s, it is curious to see how the Encyclopædia Britannica explicitly specifies 1930 as the year this tool was introduced, but an advertisement of "Memorie di architettura pratica" from 1913 places it twenty years before this date—at least in Italy.
In the older design sets, the movement of the protractor head was assured by a pantograph system that could keep the head in the same angular position throughout its range of motion. The arms were balanced by a system of springs; the machine is mounted on a drawing board with a hard and smooth surface, anchored to a base that allows its tilting and lifting. Thus, the realization of a drawing can be achieved in the most convenient way on a working surface that can be tilted at any angle from horizontal to vertical. There are special versions for A0 double-sized boards, to make large drawings, or copying-boards with background illumination, which have all, necessary to provide specific support. With the drafting machine one can perform a series of drawing operations that otherwise could only be achieved with a much more complex use of the classic ruler square and protractor, as, for example, drawing parallel lines, orthogonal lines, inclined lines according to a preset angle, measurement of angles, etc.
With the development of computer-aided design, the use of drafting machines in the professional sector, has drastically declined, supplanted first by pen plotters, by large-format inkjet printers
Technical drawing tool
Technical drawing tools include and are not limited to: pens, compasses and drawing utilities. Drafting tools may be used for measurement and layout of drawings, or to improve the consistency and speed of creation of standard drawing elements; the tools used for manual technical drawing have been displaced by the advent of the personal computer and its common utilization as the main tool in computer-aided drawing and design. The ancient Egyptians are known to have used wooden corner rulers. Ancient Nuragic people in Sardinia used compasses made of bronze, like the one displayed in showcase 25 in the Nuragic department of the National Archeological Museum G. A. Sanna in Sassari. In ancient Greece, evidence has been found of the use of styli and metal chisels, scale rulers and triangle rulers. Excavations in Pompeii have found a bronze tool kit used by the Romans, which contained triangle rulers, compasses and a ruler to use with a pen. Although a variety of styli were developed in ancient times and were still being used in the 18th century, quills were used as the main drawing tool.
Styli were used in the form of ivory or ebony pencils. Protractors have been used to measure and draw angles and arcs of a circle since about the 13th century, although mathematics and science demanded more detailed drawing instruments; the adjustable corner ruler was developed in the 17th century, but a feasible screw-tightened version not until the 1920s. In the 17th century, a stylus that could draw a line with a specific width called a ruling pen was developed; the stylus had two curved metal pieces. Ink was trickled between the blades; the basic model was maintained for a long time, with minor modifications, until the 1930s when the German technical drawing pens came to the market. Artists made drawing tools for themselves. Industrial production of technical drawing instruments started in 1853, when Englishman William Stanley founded a technical manufacturing company in London. However, most tools were still made by hand. In the 1930s the equipment available expanded: drawing apparatus and Rapidograph-drawing pens appeared, improving the line quality and producing consistent line width.
In addition to the Rapidograph stylus, a more traditional Grafos-type stylus was used for a long time, where different line widths were achieved by changing the pen nib. For instance in Finland Grafos was used as a primary drawing tool still in the early 1970s. Equipment changed radically during the 1990s, when computer-aided design completely ousted drawing by hand. Technical design has changed from drawing by hand to producing computer-aided design drawings, where drawings are no longer "drawn", but are built from a virtually-produced model. Drawings are not produced in hard copy at all, if they are needed they are printed automatically by a computer program. Hand-drawn designs, are still used in the draft design stage. Traditional and typical styli used for technical drawing are technical pens. Pencils in use are mechanical pencils with a standard lead thickness; the usual line widths are 0.25 mm, 0.5 mm and 0.7 mm. Hardness varies from HB to 2H. Softer lead gives a better contrast. Bad contrast of the lead line in general is problematic when photocopying, but new scanning copy techniques have improved the final result.
Paper or plastic surfaces require their own lead types. In most cases, the final drawings are drawn on either plastic or tracing paper; the pen is a Rapidograph-type technical pen, a marker pen that draws lines of consistent width. The pen has an ink container which contains a metal tube, inside, a thin metal needle or wire, the soul. Ink is absorbed between the needle and the tube wall, preventing an excessive amount of ink from being released; the needle has a weight and by waving the pen back and forth the needle is released and the ink can run. The tank was filled from an ink bottle; each line width has its own stylus. The line width is standardized: In Finland, the most used set is 0.13 mm, 0.18 mm, 0.25 mm, 0.35 mm, 0.50 mm and 0.70 mm. Separate styli are used for tracing plastic, because plastic requires a harder pen tip. To function well they require the finest marker pens in particular; the drawing board is an essential tool. Paper will be kept straight and still, so that the drawing can be done with accuracy.
Different kind of assistance rulers are used in drawing. The drawing board is mounted to a floor pedestal in which the board turns to a different position, its height can be adjustable. Smaller drawing boards are produced for table-top use. In the 18th and 19th centuries,drawing paper was dampened and its edges glued to the drawing board. After drying the paper would be smooth; the completed drawing was cut free. Paper could be secured to the drawing board with drawing pins or C-clamps. More recent practice is to use self-adhesive tape to secure paper to the board, including the sophisticated use of individualized adhesive dots from a dispensing roll; some drawing boards are magnetized. Boards used for overlay drafting or animation may include registration pins or peg bars to ensure alignment of multiple layers of drawing media. A T-square is a straightedge, it is used with the drafting board
