The Brief:
Create a miniature walking machine (youtube: kinetic sculpture, Theo Jansen (not me :P)) able to complete 10 full steps, without the use of electronics.

Materials:
- anything that isn't powered by electricity eg. motor.
-rubber bands
-water
-wind etc.
-balsa wood
-polystyrene etc.

Method:

My first ideas were based around Theo Jansen's work, using joints and pivots to mimic human walking. This worked to some extent, but i found minor flaws in it, so decided to move away from that idea and go back to the basic movement; and aerofoil.

I decided to incorporate a simpler aerofoil into the mechanism, a triangle, to transfer that motion to the feet.

Ok i haven't posted anything for a while, so i'm gonna go through all the things i missed in the development process of creating my lantern for Studio.

My group got rejected from our first preference, the asian restaurant/bar in Melbourne Central, so we went around the city for a while, looking for other suitable places. We didn't find much, but Jiyoon knew a Korean restaurant on Latrobe street. So we went there, it looked pretty good, it had a ledge at the front, just behind a long window with all the menus on it. The ledge would fit our lanterns comfortably.

There were a few hiccups in the development of my lantern, we first decided on an asian theme to suit the first restaurant, but after we were rejected, we re-thought our strategy. Our next idea was geometric shapes, this worked fairly well.

My original idea was inspired by the art of origami. here a some pics of what i created after hours of playing with paper:

After i made this initial shape, i created 5 more of the same and joined them with glue, in the shape of a flower.

This flower shape looked good so i made many more and thought about ways of connecting them together. first i thought of sticking them to a square lantern box, but this idea didn't really put the shape to its full use. So, using wire, i connected the paper flowers together, this created a sort of 'net' of flowers, which i could bend into any shape, i wanted to make a complete sphere initially, but i realised that would take a lot more paper so i bent it into something like an elongated dome.

the lantern wasn't complete at this point because it didn't really have a basic covering of rice paper, i decided this could wait so i moved onto electronics.

We went to Jaycar electronics and after talking to a sales assistant for a while we realised the best way to illuminate the lanterns would be to buy a ready made strip of LEDs and extend the wire to suit our needs. so we bought a pack of 10 strips with 3 LEDs in each strip all connected to each other in a parallel circuit. i took some of my dads wire and extended the strip. so the final strip of LEDs was 3 (strips with 3 LEDs in each strip) - 2 - 3 - 2.

we figured as a group that mine and fiona's lanterns would need 3 strips of LEDs in each.
so this was the final circuit:and here are the individual strips with my connections:

I finally realised that i still hadnt solved the problem of my unfinised lantern, the lights would look too exposed sitting inside it as it was. so i looked back at the earlier origami we did and found origami paper balls, this was perfect, i could put a strip of LEDs in each ball and put them inside my lantern.

After a while we agreed that the Korean restaurant was our best option, so we went in and showed a couple of unfinished lanterns to the General Manager and he said it would be fine.

first day

first day back, and what a day it was!
we have to design paper lanterns for 4 weeks and display our final in a cafe or other shop.
it was pretty much a chance to play around with paper.
here is our lantern fortress! muahahahhaa

FORTRESS OF DOOM

FORTRESS OF DOOM (in negative, i love my camera phone)

Origami puff ball things, on a string made of paper, stuck to the wall

until the second half of the day.....
my group went looking for a shop that would let us display our lanterns, and after a few failed attemps, we found the coolest place!
this asian bar/restaurant in melbourne central. it's so cool!


the manager said he 'didnt see why not' when we asked if we could display our lanterns, he even offered to take down some of the expensive ones and replace them with ours!
but he has to check with the owner first....fingers crossed...

now we have to think of some really nice designs and sketch them out for the owner.

bye for now

The 1st semester of Industrial Design at RMIT City campus wasn't exactly a breeze, i didn't expect it to be easy and i knew that with my bad studying habits from high school, it was going to be tough.

Although, in the rush of finishing all of my assignments for the mid-year assessment i did actually learn a few things about design.

- It's almost impossible to explain what design means to someone who isn't a designer, i'm even struggling to understand it, and i'm studying it! Most people have this image of designers who draw pretty pictures and have an easy life. Well...they're wrong, so terribly wrong.

- To further complicate design, it's meaning varies from person to person. Each designer has a different 'language', a method of communicating their ideas through any number of methods.

- Design requires both sides of the brain, 'creativity' and logic. This appealed to me because i don't favour either side, so design helps my right and left side to meet somewhere in the middle.

- You can spend your entire life on one image in Photoshop or Illustrator trying to make it look as realistic as possible. You need to judge when your work displays just enough relevant information.

- I really can't draw. If you take a pencil, eraser and ruler out of someones hand and replace them with a pen, they become a 3 year old all over again. Even something as simple as an ellipse or a 3D cube becomes the most difficult and frustrating task.

- To cap it all off, i'm doing Industrial Design, which reminds people of oil refineries and factories, and sure, if you're into that, its great, but thats not what it's all about. Industrial Designers can specialise in almost any field you can think of, toys, furniture, automotive, product, pretty much anything that is designed.

Well that's all i can think of right now. Second semester is starting tomorrow, i'll try to make the time to use this blog to expand a little on my ideas, and hopefully get a little feedback :)