Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Project 2: Final Iteration








The crit didn't go over as well as I would have liked. We had stayed up all night fabricating the model, and I know Melany, Josiah and Keegan worked extremely hard to figure out the arduino, the sensors and LEDS.

As frustrating as it is, we did get a lot of valuable feedback. Jordan in our class mentioned Directed Attention Fatigue, and how our design addressed that issue by being placed outside the duderstadt. It was also mentioned that we focused too much on the practical application, instead of getting our model to work properly. This critique was contradictory to last weeks, but is still pretty valid. I think next time we should focus more on the building, and get our model to be fully functioning. This stage of the class is still about building skills, and is not our final project.

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Project 2: Interim Report



After doing some research on current designs, we decided to redesign the green/living wall while making some changes that would solve problems we found in existing walls.

To start off the design process. Carlo made some renderings in Rhino, so we could get some ideas for the form we wanted our prototype to take. To address the issue of the soil falling out, we placed the plants in individual holders, which also allowed us to have different sorts of flora on the same wall.

To make this structure, we laser cut the acrylic and then bent it using a heat gun. Although we had some ideas of how we wanted the form to look, it was kind of an intuitive process which consisted of heating up certain areas, bending it in different ways and then having the group decide on which form they liked before the acrylic cooled down again.


Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Week 2: Interim Report


Our group decided to completely change our project and think of another practical application for our criteria of optimally packed spheres. Last week we thought of an application for which our design could be used after had already created our spheres. This time, we came up with an existing problem we wanted to solve.

The two main problems with already existing green/living walls are:

1) The soil can easily fall out and onto the ground when it dries, because it is packed into the wall and the plants are growing horizontally, not vertically.
2) Most green walls can only have one or two plants that have the same nutritional requirements and can be uniformly watered

Project 1: Optimally Packed Spheres

Our design for week one consisted of eight spheres, made up of two separate hemispheres each that would fold up into each other and use up half ( four spheres) worth of space. When brainstorming for practical applications for our design, we were thinking about using these spheres as containers. The containers would be optimally packed into four spheres when not in use, and could open up into eight, which would create twice as much storage space.