Tuesday, September 13, 2011

A Good Start

I confess to experiencing many different feelings after completing my first week of SmartSurfaces. First of all, I've never worked in a class that has had it's own clients before. To be working on projects that will perhaps find their way into the PowerHouse in Detroit is a unique experience. It means that there's more at stake than a grade in the course. I know that the projects we are working on now are probably not the same ones (or the same embodiments) that will end up as our final projects, but they are challenging first steps in the process of defining/building a smart surface. In the same vein, the project assignment is so much different than any coursework I've attempted throughout my formal education. To be told to define our own "high value problems," instead of being given explicit problems to solve, leaves a lot of room open for interpretation. I admit that working on "under-specified problems" was at first a very frustrating concept for me, but I'm trying to look at it now as an opportunity to perceive the World in an inquisitive and thought-provoking manner. To summarize the statements above- challenge accepted.

For the "first surface" assignment, my team (team 3) was given the design criteria: daily, wind, and inflation. We were pretty stumped, which was evident in our first cardboard/chipboard embodiment (shown below) that lacked utility and aesthetic value. I believe that the problem with this design was that it had many individual components that didn't function well as a whole. We were probably trying to do too much with it at one time.



The 1.5 hour build during the first class functioned to teach me that sometimes it is best to just jump into a design, or to think with my hands and brain simultaneously. We met the following day to discuss our previous design and to build on what we did well and what we could improve on, as well as to rethink our high value problem. We were originally focused on harnessing wind energy as a means of generating electricity, but we missed thinking about how wind directly could be used to serve some purpose, such as the regulation of temperature and airflow within a living space. The turning point in this brainstorming session came when we looked towards nature for inspiration. We thought about how the skin functions to protect the body and to regulate its temperature. We tossed around ideas about a semipermeable window that would be able to sense the conditions of the outdoors and react to stimuli like light and heat in order to enable a shading and cooling device that would make the conditions of the living space more comfortable. Ideally, the ability to regulate temperature (through ventilation) would be independent of the surface's ability to regulate shade. We split for the evening after we agreed on these general goals and planned to meet on Sunday with our own ideas semi-developed in prototype form.

In our final collaboration session we combined the elements that we liked from each individual design into a prototype, shown below. This took a while to do, but we all agreed on the end product. I am extremely excited to see what the next team comes up with to amend some of the design issues we experienced when conceiving/building this surface. And since I am still on this project, there will be more specifics (and hopefully animations) to come!



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