Redefining - again

Friday's class was extremely valuable in its ability to help my team identify problems with our project. It was surprisingly fulfilling to be able to find these problems out ourselves, instead of simply having one of the professors point them out. The idea of "reverse brainstorming" is definitely something which I am planning on utilizing on projects outside of this course.

Although the self criticism was good, I think everyone on team one felt a little daunted at the idea of seriously rethinking our project for a third time. We realized that the entire function of our project was a bit shaky, and that it required far to much money, material, and space to implement. I think that everyone in the team feels that the task before us is to make our project stronger, while at the same time making it easier to manage. In order to do this I think that we need to identify the things that are working well in our project, and scrap the rest.

The things which I think are working well are:

• modularity - this allows us to make a surface
• solar collection - this is necessary to make our project heliotropic
• Inter-Surface interaction - having each module of the surface comunicating with the other modules makes it smart
• Lighting - while people may not need to be shaded in parks, and may not want to spend time getting their laptop or phone charged, they still need to walk through parks when it is dark.

Hoberman

I probably should have posted this when it was more relevant, but it is still interesting. Hoberman's portfolio has a lot more in it than just expandable spheres. There are some amazing kinetic architecture projects too.

The problem of why

Now that we are starting the final project for Smart Surfaces, Ive been doing a lot of thinking about the design processes we've been using, and what the best way is to settle on a proposal for the final project. This class has given me an opportunity to explore new design techniques and strategies. In normal studio settings, I am given a set of problems which I then find an architectural solution for. However, in this class things are sort of turned around. We are given constraints about what our solution must be (a heliotropic smart surface), but not given a specific problem. This has been directly reflected in many of the projects which I have worked on this semester, especially the Hoberman aperture which my team designed last week. In that instance we designed a mechanism which was well thought out, but still had no specific reason for existing. Julian Bleeker was present for our project review, and had some excellent insight on our method of working which he wrote about on his blog.

As the deadline for the final project proposal closes in, I think that the most important task at hand is for us to synthesize our design strategies. We cannot simply produce work. We need to design our own "why", and also settle on an implementation strategy. Both of these need to be in place for us to have a strong project.

10/GUI

I ran across this video of a new computer interface which is being developed by 10/GUI. It has some correlations with Julian Bleeker's talk about the computer interface in Minority Report.

Surface Update

Progress is going pretty well on the mechanism. We have the aperture mostly assembled, and Taylor is figuring out the framework for it. Here are some stills from the digital project file we used to figure out the proportions and angles, as well as a video of the completed aperture.

Future of Design and Solar Surface

The current assignment for Smart Surfaces is to develop a solar responsive surface which integrates technologies which we have been using through out the semester (arduino, LEDs, LRDs, servos). The future of design conference was also this week, and one speaker whose talk was especially relevant to our class was Ila Berman, the Chair of Architecture at CCA. She talked about the development of responsive and component based architecture, as well as new strategies for re-usable materials. I had a chance to talk with her after the conference about uses for parametric architecture and surfaces, and how she thought that they would be used in the future. Her response wass that parametric modeling is just like any other new innovation, in that people have a tendency to get really excited about it and play with it for a while before actually figuring out how it can be best applied. I feel that Smart Surfaces falls into this category. We are playing around with tons of new technology, not knowing what we are going to be able to do with it, and thats exciting.

Turning back to the current project, my team decided to work on a surface which contains apertures which can open and close with a mechanism based off of the Hoberman Sphere. We first used Digital Project to analyze the mechanism and determine the necessary proportions. We are now in the process of integrating the aperture into a structure which could be arrayed into a surface.

4

Solar Tracking Field

Last week's assignment for smart surfaces was to develop a field of solar tracking components using digital project and modeling. The basis for my team's design was a sheer plane which could control the movement of multiple poles simultaneously.

We used servos and rubber bands to control the x and y axis movement of the plane. We also attached LEDs and a LDR to the machine in order to make the system responsive to the amount of sunlight present.

Finally we worked on developing a series of flower like mechanisms which would attach to the end of the poles. The flowers would be able to open and close in order to collect more or less sunlight depending on the light intensity levels

measured by the LDR.

More images and videos of the project are available here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/parsnipsncelery/sets/72157622468356900/