We met today to continue workshopping our designs and ideas. Here’s the meeting as summed up by Betsy:
“So here's just a recap of all the sorts of ideation we went through and the plan for this week.
Chris came in with the attached syringes and tubing and had found a way using water (when all the bubbles are removed) to have a pushing and pulling type mechanism that would allow for further actuation of the solenoid. The benefit would be a fairly silent mechanism and a nice ambient pulsating effect when the wall/piece was not coming in contact with direct interaction. We would still likely need a solenoid for each part still unless we could rig multiple ones to go off at the same time, but we also would face the issue of having to mechanize some sort of shutoff valve. We discussed that this was perhaps even more complicated than something like gears and also high risk due to the issues that would come about from bubbles in the water and parts popping off (which would be a pretty considerable problem if we had to go and fix malfunctioning parts while it's on display at pfizer). Still it is fairly cheap and silent. Another issue would be how many of these we could control with one arduino. There are only 13 digital pins and 6 analog pins (and I would imagine some of those would already be used by whatever sensors and power we needed for the breadboard). We will be purchasing an arduino mega to see if this would be of benefit to our design.
For a potential prototype for this week, we discussed a possible lightbox display. We also talked about creating our own solenoids with some non-conducting type tubing material and wire/springs wrapped around that. It's possible that we might be able to create a push-pull / dual-direction solenoid. At this point in the meeting we thought it was important to focus on simple squares and mechanize those and deal with the design later. But, in light of the professors saying that we should approach this week as what could we do if the entire project was due in one week, it made a little more sense to focus on the physical form too.
Simon then presented his idea of a folding extender much like a "lift" (kind of like those folding stands for air drying clothes - anyone?) that would be made up of criss-cross parts that could fully extend or fold back up to lie almost flush. We could make them different lengths to help create a series of levels that the panels could extend out to, helping with the kind of random design we want to appear. This would definitely help actuate the pushing motion, but would still require some sort of elastic thread or spring to bring the piece back to it's original flush state.
Then Diana showed us a small model she had made of four chipboard squares on top of springs with a small blue fan under them. This went off of the suggestion we received in class to possibly use computer fans and have air blowing at people and playing with a variety of both visual and sensory or perhaps "felt" interaction. Unfortunately the fan had very little effect at moving the pieces and they just sort of slightly wiggled around. This did get us talking about creating some sort of walled area that could trap maybe hot air and release it at people as they walked by and played around with our "window wall."
We decided to revisit the idea of the "agave" wall that had these scale, like, tiled elements that could angle outwards. We starting calling these flaps and discussed the benefits to inverting the direction and having these pieces hinged at the top (instead of the bottom) and open out and upward (instead of out and down) so that people could look more straight and up into in instead of only seeing down into the mechanism. This would also likely allow for more diffuse light to come through and would provide the pullback of gravity instead of having to use some other sort of mechanism. We also started to discuss that if we had scale like flaps angling out instead of pixel designs, it might be smart to have some sort of three-dimensionality to the actual flap pieces. We could probably achieve this with a frame wrapped in fabric and either given form by air or some sort of stuffing inside the piece.
We were concerned over using way too many mechanized parts (one solenoid per flap / pixel / piece thing didn't seem as well designed as our professors might like). We talked about having "dummy" panels connected to a live panel that would sort of pull along the surrounding pieces. Pat drew a little sketch of a way we could have the fixed pieces attached to multiple live panels in a set pattern. We wondered if we could alternate which inactive panels are dragged by the fixed panel. We would definitely have to play around with that but it would help it be less predictable so that someone doesn't notice one panel always moves and the ones around it are dragged along. We could also have some sort of rotating piece that would push all the pieces out, one by one, as it rotated. A full turn would mean all pieces were pushed outward in some way.
Pat then presented the idea of a multi-layered surface that would have translucency and each layer would react to a different stimuli (ei. sound, motion, heat, etc.) The angled panels would be on the outside and you would have to get close enough for the panels to lift up to see the other motions inside. We worried this would leave the surface fairly undiscovered most of the time and also be incredibly difficult to hide the mechanics between each layer. There was also some brainstorming on rotation, and fanning out elements like a flower, some sort of spinning or crossing over of colors. While we definitely should play around with color in our piece, I think it's important not to lose sight of a textured, dynamic wall not just sliding color panels.
There was more talk about filtering light, scattering light, diffusing it. We could have spinning pieces with a different color on each side, we could use a dyed fabric that wasn't consistent (sort of gradient like) to give an added visual pattern and overlay. We could use pearlized / opalescent type stuff like that shoalfish video. We could spray paint over some screen type thing to give more pixelated and see-through color on acrylic. We could also maybe pierce holes into a panel to allow for light patterns to play on the floor and opposite wall while still having the diffuse light outlining the pieces.
We talked about using hooks instead of hinges for the angling-out design. We also discussed the importance of maybe doing material studies like a frame with fabric, spraypaint techniques, lightness of material in relation to the mechanisms.
At this point we felt we had come up with a lot of ideas and directions to go if anything didn't work out, but it was super important to have concrete, working prototypes. The plan is to have Pat and Chris work on the "agave" prototype and find a way to mechanize that and Dan and Betsy will work on getting the "radial tessellation" wall to work so that we have a clear prototype of both designs we seem to be talking about at the moment. Simon will help sketch things out and bounce between these two groups helping where we need him to (and probably giving Betsy and Dan crash courses in Rhino). Diana will be submitting our budget to John (acrylic, 10 small solenoids, 5 large solenoids, one mega arduino, and I think perhaps some other sensor). Dan might pick up some springs from the hardware store. Diana could also help with material studies or prototypes of the mechanisms we want to use, and should probably make sure we have some sort of record of all the prototypes we are making. That way we can upload pictures to the flickr and hopefully put more videos on the youtube channel.
We will be meeting on Tuesday night to see where we're all at with these prototypes and fix anything that isn't working and decide our plan for what we want to finalize wednesday night for class Thursday. I believe John asked for our installation sites pretty much immediately so if Pat and Simon can get any photos they need from Diana and maybe let John know, that would be great.
Sorry for the long email, team snax, but it was a productive meeting for sure! :)
-Betsy”
I thought this was a very comprehensive summation of our meeting. I felt good leaving the meeting because we had two major designs that we were working on- it was good to settle on a few definite directions. Pat and I were both tossing different ideas and inspirations at the end of the meeting, so hopefully he and I will be able to make a few extra prototypes for presentation on Thursday. My hope is to have the physical models for the top two prototypes ready by the end of Tuesday so that we can actuate Wednesday. Or even get most of both done Tuesday and continue workshopping these and other designs on Wednesday.
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