Post final review thoughts.

It’s confirmed the actions upon large bodies of waste space is a provocative  and brings the sphere of urbanism closer to hand. A sense of relation is made scale-less through the network of the rail. And through the lexicon of the rail—rail road, site wrap, vessel vein, sushi track— the organism of the rail is a mobile factory that embeds itself into a site and sets in motion prototypical connectivity.

I’m thinking there needs to be a parasite organism that’s mobile via rail to latch onto derelict structure/grids to create a subset rail set that extends out into the site. This project is rapidly moving away from the small time action of Flint’s zero money solution start up that I initially adapted. Let’s say this is in full swing… hire the parasite to kick start a site with a set of objects developed through the project.

The time line I’ve been working with works with this indie style re-habitation framework. However, given the ambition of physical connectivity—it’s akin to the shift of snail mail to the internet in building terms.

Stepping back to look at large scale endeavors is probably the next step in this sine wave level of resolution I’ve been taking on. Also, rethinking how this all starts is looking like I’ll be designing a mobile factory.

Here’s a quote, “More and more new designers are asked to respond to decisions of the past.” That’s the potent truth of this studio: the ego of a project really cannot exist as a self sustaining object. Those decisions are not always the most responsible and may simply reflect an era of thoughtless corporate life. The bottom line is how can one address these past decisions that don’t lead to a similar result in the future.

I need to work for money now. Don’t move too much… I feel like this project is a wild 5 year old who’s only tentatively listening.

-Simon

The more exposure I see about fantasy exhibits of inhabitation, the disposition of the inquiry is similar to one of which speaking to a child. It’s supportive, never an argument, and always a subset of an overarching interest that drives the work and all other adjacent projects produced by the author.  The weight of intimacy spares the work as it grows and prods artforms of representation that the work finds.

With atomization, I realize this isn’t the feared whim I thought it was in the beginning of the semester but a summary of the education thus far, and it is in no way of summarizing what the worth of it all is. It’s a description of a mood and subsequent action upon an atmosphere of a project brief, and like the content of the work, it becomes a framework flexible to the evolution of seeking design identity.

While in Outlooks listening to classmates’ presentations, some clarity of my work was revealed in the discussion of successful architects and their fabrication of narrative. The work in atomizing material and property is related to the investigation in seam finding. The modern ruins found by the studio are immovably stubborn and typically they’ve been derelict for a long time and with unwieldy scale. Both with the Packard Plant and the Genesee Tower, my project finds the seams of where the old program was starting to tear, and where the materiality and formalistic approach literally finds and manipulates physical seams.

As I work on the component resolution of the project I’ve also settled on working on forklift styled rail system that not only gives vertical and horizontal mobility to vessels via a basic shifting mechanical operation, but also exploits the verticality of these void structures. Along the edge of the building the new structures have an accessible façade that can be serviced by the rail that would suggest the program is more industrial and built from highly networked spaces. Also, the horizontal rails are able to rotate a hinge and flip vessels onto a new plot of 17’ or 24’ gridded space.

Thinking about my project operations in terms of seams will hopefully help me draw up simple design intent diagrams to guide the actions I’ve made toward both studies so far, and possibly also provide a quick but informative way of including other sites by the datum of the seam.

-SR

I have 10 minutes before I CNC route my site plan for Wallenberg Studio 2010. I enjoyed this blog, a point of solace in the diluted group work of last Fall. 

For whatever reason I don’t have a running set of sketches and writing on this semester’s project, and while this was fine for the first 3rd of the semester, organizationally I need a supplement to help guide my concept cohesively through opportunities.

The class is over but I’m still learning. It’s interesting to hear and see how students of Smart Surfaces have each taken away from it something different. The professors pushed the ideas, the process and the ingenuity of learning students, and I will be the first to admit I was not dancing to the same rhythm.

Some components of the class based on communication and education is old news— being a homeschooler, learning on my own and being given problems without solutions is something I’ve been doing for a long time. The context of the class was not something I felt I needed to be taught (comparatively), although that’s what the goals of the class were. 

Long story short, the work I put into it wasn’t for my own benefit, but for some entity of a team that didn’t want to exist. I even recognized this in my blogs midway through the semester… I need to get on these interests I’ve had from the beginning, but these other group issues occupying my attention. It’s my own fault for not being able to perform in the class as I wanted… It’s hard to switch gears and let go and prioritize team needs. I took on a lot of various tasks and logistical components of our studies, but I didn’t spend enough time innovating ideas and linking resources at my disposal to elaborate on them.

From a group standpoint, I think I did everything I could to make it work. From a narcissist achieving student standpoint, I was not in the game. Both have rewards. But right now, I think I need (and needed to have) focused on improving my own skills and relationships with faculty. I’m almost a graduate… I need some real world and concrete material to exit with.

Besides the B+ was a sad thing.

We saved 2 square meters of forest in Madagascar by buying 4 Arduino megas. If we wanted to save all of Madagascar we’d only have to buy 1.17 trillion more! If we we actually bought them, that’d be 5 times more than our national debt.

Think about it. 

The end is in sight! Physical construction should be wrapping up tonight. Pat nailed the mechanism for connecting the top of the strands to the structure with an acrylic sandwich, small bolt, and rivets. Acrylic is cut, bolts were magically found on my desk, and the rivets have been tested and will work out fine. Diana is finishing up stringing the remaining five lines tonight, and I’ll be drilling holes in both the top and bottom boxes tonight and making sure the sizing is fit for the structure. Ideally after a late night tonight, all the strings will be mounted and installed.

The electronics are the remaining wildcard. Chris has been struggling testing all the H-bridge circuits for the motors. I think we have 12 yet to be figured out although they’re built. Electronics have come in, so PIR sensors can be mounted right away as well as the wiring put in place.  I just can’t wait until Chris emails back with direction for us to get this thing working by tomorrow night so we can refine code/etc Wednesday. I mean, I’d love it that’d happen tomorrow, but I think that’s more realistic. I’m worried Chris will burn out before Wednesday and not be able to troubleshoot power issues and last minute wiring stuff.

I just hope I can manage all of this without studio taking a nose dive! Already I feel like something is going to give class work wise.

Also, Betsy has been absolutely excellent at figuring out how to refine the flaps from cutting to finish spray painting. I’m super glad she took on that responsibility and figured out elegant solutions. It’s made this process possible. I’m thankful we don’t have to put any more time into them… and it turns out we made 200 extra. Oops. I think we should’ve had Dan’s number brain on this the whole time. There’s a good chance I didn’t need to spend all of last Wednesday vacuum forming and cutting down 300 more panels… and Pat didn’t have to burn holes into all of those either. Oh well, we’re obviously ready to mass produce our project. Haha.

Also happy Diana decided to show up and help clean panels, string panels and do some soldering. We really needed a sixth member cranking on this stuff too! Photo update later. 

I should have approx 1000 photos in stop motion for a video. Let’s see when that’ll happen….

We act as one.

We’ve taken over the East crit space on the 3^rd floor architecture building. It’s the only space in the building that has switched lights because the rest of the lights have been disabled for break (I’m still asking around to figure out what that word means). It’s really great—we’re all able to be in one well lit room with space enough to assemble our stupidly large framework and tables for circuitry work. We’ve tapped into the audio system in the room and playing our ipods for all to enjoy. It’s a lot of fun so far, and when we eventually get to stringing our panels onto ribbon, we’ll hook up a laptop to the audio/visual components of the room and watch a marathon of movies. Half of our job this break is to keep our spirits up! Bakers’ dozen bagels and tubs of cream cheese, pizza—it’s the good stuff folks.

The second module of framework is nearing completion. I have the two halves made, and when I return again tonight around midnight I’ll put them together. Right now I’m cooling the jets by doing some childcare. The kid is playing with legos independently so I’m able to update. It’s good to see kids still play with legos and design their own play-worlds! Maybe he’ll make a smart surface someday!!

Dan and Chris are taking on the motor circuits. I hope they work. So far testing them has  been successful 20% of the time. Chris said that means we only need to make 180 or so to have enough that work. Haha. It also makes me cry. I’m concerned, but I trust them to make it work.  And soon! The circuits are so hard to troubleshoot when they’re not right… and it’s so easy for there to be a short or one wire in the wrong spot. Hooking the motors up to their H-bridge circuits to the megas along with the PIR sensors, Ping sensors and power source—- it’ll be a long shot, especially considering the hang ups we’ve had in the past. It’s never quite worked perfectly.

The boxes that hold the PIR sensors and weights for the ribbon strands at the bottom, and the boxes that hold the motors and arduinos at the top have yet to be built. I bought a bunch of quarter inch MDF 2x4’ boards to cut down on my Dad’s table saw at home, so that’s what I’m doing before I return to school tonight.

This should have the time stamp of being updated Saturday evening instead of Sunday evening— interrupted as always

Alright, in the interest of keeping this blog at least semi-current, I’ll let the photo montage of the past week or so speak for itself and move on with the final production decision.

After building a six-foot tall prototype of our final wall, we got some feedback that if our inspiration is the aspen leaf, then this structure is a little too loud, sharp and rigid to reflect any of the aesthetic and mechanical grace of the leaf. The motors also still lacked control to make the device produce the effect we’re looking for. The next week we explored using different connecting method from panel to panel to get a cascading effect from top to bottom. First we used a single thread of fishing line and it spun for a long time before transferring its’ torque to the panels below.

Then we tried using two fishing lines adjacent to each other, but spaced so they would wrap around each other and help it transfer its spin downward. It worked a little better, but it broke when the motors went fast. Finally we tried some  .5” width ribbon both running the length and little segments connecting the panels together. The cascading effect was pretty smooth in both— if not best in the continuous ribbon line. Hopefully we can be more accurate in attaching the small segments because aesthetically the ribbon running down the entire length is not so good.

We also tried some metal cord I bought if we needed to cross-brace the 6-foot prototype as the connector strand between panels. It was too thick of a gauge and turned very similarly to the initial 3/16^th metal rods we used.

A potential problem we ran into was the kinking of the cords/ribbons could throw the overall strand off center and the panels may hit each other in rotation. Attaching the strands to a weight or rotating pin at the bottom of the structure is making sense. It’ll also allow the cascading to stop given the inertia or frictional resistance.

I’m pretty sure we’ve figured out just enough to start mass producing our components and deal with the inevitable problems as they happen. We’re down to the wire as it is. One of our team members isn’t contributing as much as one would wish from a fellow equal team member. It’s disheartening that not all of us share the passion to make this project work—It’s pretty frustrating, in fact. I think of the time I put into this class in excess of what a 3-credit class should ask for and there are things such as portfolio, ramping up studio work, working for money that I could be taking on. I like Smart Surfaces for sure, but I don’t like when team-mates don’t respect the time necessary to make this classwork WORK. And then there’s pushing our working work further… I regret that sometimes the attitude the team acquires is one of disheartened labor. Snax help though. Best advice so far.