Monday 26 December 2011

Merry Christmas

Hope you all had a lovely Christmas yesterday, and that you are enjoying the festive season!


The last week of term, we had a project which bridged the gaps between the years; our teams contained members from every year of the course. 

We were given a section of the university campus and told to improve it in order to enhance the learning experience of uni. So followed ideas for interventions.
These interventions were translated to 1:50 scale models, which - when joined together - gave us a mini campus inside the main building. 

Lots of festive cheer
Abi




My contribution... a little silhouette army

Campus within a campus

The studio took a beating

Feeling like godzilla


Assembly

Friday 9 December 2011

Updates...

I haven’t written in a while; I’ve been busy as a bee.

We had project 4 to contend with, which was a mind-pushing struggle.  Our brief was to create a device which would simulate the movement of a personal daily ritual. I chose cutting a lemon (for morning tea), so I explored the movements involved in that. I looked at the leaning and the pressure. I took this further to create my device which was a foot pedal mechanism, which tilted you forward and a hand pad which you pressed down into to release a lemon fragrance.

I shan’t bore you with any more than that; it was a whimsical project, heavily based on the ‘body’ and the emotional qualities that accompany movement. We even had a choreographer come in...

Which has all made us think; “this is not what I expected to be doing.” We expected to be drawing buildings and learning of the inner workings of walls, not thinking about concepts and ‘feeling’ ideas.
I think this is a good thing. As the saying goes, “form follows function”, but what if we looked at how things affect us before thinking of build cost and technicalities? How the proportions of a room affect our mood, how social situations call for architectural help... surely the built environment would be a better place.

A great use of the deserted Dulux building

My daily walk; beautiful bit of plymplom

The charity shop I volunteer in got a psychedelic makeover

A short trip home included baking a cake...

... and seeing my beautiful dogs (and the family of course!)

Model showing the travels around the kitchen 


A bit of festive procrastination

exploring tilt and pressure


a mock up model

buffet at the charity shop christmas do

demo of my final device.