Wednesday 11/3 (29 days left)

I spent today working on assembling the model for the radial tessellation. It didn’t work. Here’s why:

1. Too Small. We made the tessellation to have a 5.5-inch diameter. This was not only smaller than most of the installation would end up being, but it made assembly much more difficult. I had to assemble the model in one go, and were I to have another shot at making this work I’d have done a few things differently, most importantly I’d have assembled it in a different order (one more time-effective).

2. Inexact. The file we used was traced from an illustrator file, and had we taken the time to make it ourselves, I think it would have been more accurate and easier to assemble. I ran into problem making all the pieces fir together, as it had been taken apart once or twice. Were I to be able to do it again (we are going to abandon this desgn) I would make the design on my own and start assembly from the sheet immediately after its cutting.

3. Not enough springs. I went to Home Depot this afternoon to get more of the right kind of spring (Diana had bought a variety pack earlier in the week) but they only had springs that were far too large, and I would have needed to buy 24 variety packs to get the correct number of springs (shockingly, Home Depot didn’t have 24 of them and I didn’t have $80).

4. I started too late. That’s not to say that all of this could have been avoided, but I think I would have made more progress had I been able to start earlier. Luckily, this prototype was secondary to the one that the rest of the team worked on, and theirs worked. They actuated the “spinning tiles” wall installation using mylar-wrapped pieces of chipboard on a Merkur frame that were connected by gears to a number of servos (one for each column, three of which we were able to actuate). This served as a proof of concept for our idea to have a wall’s worth of tiles that rotated as people walked by, which Pat rendered. (see "Photos!" post)