The Beginning

Hello! I realize that this is kind of late since it's technically supposed to be a "weekly" blog and here I am writing about the first week in the wee hours of the second Thursday of the semester. If you're already confused, here's a quick summary:

I'm in a crazy but hopefully awesome design course (on top of my crazy senior design course) where we actually get to build stuff. I like actually building things, because for the past 3 years I feel like equations and numbers have been thrown at my head with very little application attached. We're in groups of 6, most of which have 2 Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) students, 2 Art & Design (A&D) students, and 2 Architecture (Arch) students. The class is called SmartSurfaces, and the theme for this year is biomimetics, or biomimicry. If you want more info, go to http://www.smartsurfaces.net. As part of the class, each student is supposed to keep a blog that's updated at least once a week. Personally, because I find it hard to keep thoughts in my head for long, I'll probably try to update more often than that, if that's allowed, just so I have a good recording of what I was thinking about throughout the semester.

The first week was interesting. We were told to build a surface with at least 9 interlocking parts, and we drew random other criteria out of envelopes. Our other criteria were "orients" and "folds allow efficient deployment of modules". For this week, it was to be made out of chipboard and could be moved manually, but next week we'll have to figure out how to make it move using the Arduino. When we were first thinking of ideas, we kept running into the problem of some people were thinking more of a robot rather than a surface. I think this may have been due to the modules and the folding. When I think surface, at least, I don't think of stuff coming out of the surface.

After class we continued to share and review ideas via the discussion forum on our group's CTools site. We also met a few times, but it was difficult getting everyone together all at the same time, and at first there wasn't much continual communication between members. I feel like if not everyone is at a meeting, perhaps something should be posted about what was accomplished, what was discussed, etc., so that group members don't find themselves lost or left behind, so at the next meeting, even if it's a completely different set of people (say, if 3 people met one afternoon but the other 3 weren't free until later in the evening but by then the first 3 people all had to be somewhere else) progress can still be made.

After several good ideas had been brought up and some had been tossed aside, we moved forward in starting to try to build our ideas with chipboard. This caused some ideas to be tossed out. For example, I found a very cool origami-like design where a octagonal paper could be folded into a spiral. Another limitation that the Arch students explained was that since chipboard was thicker and less flexible than paper, the space taken up by folds in the material had to be accounted for when sketching out the cuts for the design on the chipboard.

We tried several different folding techniques, including a bunch with triangles, and it looks like we're going to present 3 tomorrow...er...later today. I also created a PowerPoint presentation just in case we're expected to have that - the description wasn't entirely clear. There's one where these flaps fold out as spiraling rectangles from a central rod, with telescoping legs to tilt it to catch the most sunlight. Another is this pod of triangular prisms that unfolds into a long flat chain of triangles, also possibly to catch sunlight - it would be very portable if we could get it to work. The last is possibly the prettiest - 4 tiles of 6 of the folding triangular prisms, fit together so each tile is a hexagon. Theoretically we could put the tiles on arms to move around so they can all catch sunlight without blocking each other with shadow.

I am kind of nervous as the first prototype isn't entirely assembled yet with...less than 8 hours to go now. The second prototype was also giving us trouble folding up nicely, so we had to tape it to make it stay, which is probably going to give us trouble for the unfolding part. The third prototype is pretty much complete. Now all we have to do is figure out what we're going to say, which apparently we'll figure out when we meet an hour before class. While we finish building. Hmm...seems like we need to get stuff done a bit earlier.

One last thought: I think I may look into making a flickr account for our entire group, so we have a way to easily view and share photos between everyone. I'll ask the group about it, see what other people think. It would be simpler than looking all over facebook at everyone's individual albums, and it would be easier to get the photo you want since CTools doesn't have any way to show images without making you download the file.

The next post will likely detail how all of our ideas were hacked to bits by the class critique after we presented our prototypes. :)