Day 50 – Aisha

This year at VCUQ I was able to do something I’d been wanting to do for a long time, which was working with people with intellectual or developmental disabilities. At the beginning of the year I joined Best Buddies of Qatar where I was paired with the sweetest soul I could ever ask for as a friend. I can’t fully express right now how or why meeting and working with Aisha represent a step in the direction of my thesis, but I know it belongs in my 60 day challenge. I’m just not ready to talk about it yet.

M&M + Design Studio Two

As part of the second half of my Design Studio Two future design prototype project I redesigned a familiar childhood toy. I don’t want to say anything else about it because I should have filmed people interacting with it before spring break, but I ran out of time.. and I don’t want to give away the main idea before I’ve asked people to play with it. Luckily Tom Modeen saved the day by letting my take stills of him interacting with it so I could have something to use in my presentation to the class. I think Paolo wants to kill me because I keep producing some pretty neat ideas, but then by the time I’m done working them out and putting them together my presentations suck.. I have one last chance to redeem myself in his class.. This time all the other classes will be put on hold for his class because I am super excited to get this idea worked out so I can finally see what people think about it.

For the Materials and Methods class we had to use paper pulp and an LED light to create anything we wanted. I actually got really stuck on this project, I found the paper to be extremely uninspiring for some reason. Their critique was that I was the only student who didn’t show off the qualities of paper and how it can interact with light.. I totally agree.. at least they said it had great balance as a piece.. I’m thinking of taking Ban’s sculpture class if he is offering it next year..

M&M: The Birds Nest

In our materials and methods (M&M) class we started the semester learning about natural materials. For our lab portion of the class, we were given two weeks to learn our way around the woodshop and build a container. I decided to build a birds nest. I used pine, I cut it into strips, sanded it, stained it with charcoal, and finally waxed it. For a person who cried twice while working in the woodshop, I think I did just fine.

During critique we discussed changing up the attachment method.. by either using a ton more string, or none at all. When I get a free minute I’ll see what I can do.

Design Studio One: Open Design (Part Two): Fab-Shoes

 

 

For the second half of the Open Design project in our studio one class we as groups exchanged projects. Our group inherited the Open Design shoe file. We decided we wanted to go two different directions with the project, one would be making a 3D printed heel, and the other would be modernizing a traditional Arab mens sandal. We ended up with two files for the heel, an illustrator file for the upper, and a Rhino file for the wedge, both files can be edited and printed at any fab lab in the world. The idea for the second shoe was actually to use an Eskafi (shoe makers) to build a shoe for us, and so we would be considering the labor of one man equivalent to the machines in a fab lab. But they actually didn’t have an Eskafi’s in Qatar (weird?) so we had to modify our idea and use a local shoe factory to assemble our shoe (which kind of makes it not an open design project, but there is nothing we could do about it..). For the sandal we created a basic illustrator upper that can easily be modified and cut.