#ctec608

Showcase Posters - Studio

Since the last post, I’ve been printing out, making suggestions in pencil, going back into inDesign to try out suggestions and repeating the cycle. I’ve now done three of these cycles and am very close to printing (printing this Friday). In addition to my own suggestions on the design, I’ve been getting Eda, Liam and Dan to get different perspectives. Slowly but surely a quality product is on the way. 

Charles (Mr Blood) taught me about bleeds - printing bleeds that is. And how since I’ve got images that go right to the edge I need to add a bleed so nothing is chopped off once I print. 

I’ve changed the final page (previously the “visual guideline” page) to just about the chapters. There really wasn’t enough visual branding stuff to do a full page on, so instead I’ve focused it just on what each chapter contains and the meaning behind their respective colour. 

Dan helped out with ideas of what to do for the first few pages of the book since I just had it going straight into the content. This way there is a lead into the book. We are booked in to bind on Tuesday morning and once that is finished I’ll be stencilling a design on the black cover (black with white design for impact) and making acrylic advertising blocks. 

Exciting week so far, I began the day by working on the visual instructions for the side of the model. The old one was just a basic prototype image, a place holder if you will. So I began looking through a website called ‘thenounproject’, they have a large selection of images and icons to work with although they aren’t free to use commercially thus I will have to reference them all individually and much to my dismay I will probably forget about this by the time the hand-in comes around so I’ll be referencing them all here so I don’t have to write them all out at a later date, so please skip over this next part unless you want to see the raw images, which I doubt.

(Michiels, 2020) 

Michiels, Tony. (2020). stack [Image]. https://thenounproject.com/search/?q=stack&i=38086 

(Lauk, 2020)

Lauk, Icon. (2020). Arrow [Image]. https://thenounproject.com/term/arrow/1966953/

(Imam, 2020)

Imam. (2020). triangle [Image]. https://thenounproject.com/term/triangle/2452132/

(Colourcreatype, 2020)

Colourcreatype. (2020). triangle [Image]. https://thenounproject.com/term/triangle/2836922/

(iconpacks, 2020)

iconpacks. (2020). curved arrow [Image]. https://thenounproject.com/term/curved-arrow/3067945/

(Kipasangin, 2020)

Kipasangin, stock. (2020). crank [Image]. https://thenounproject.com/term/crank/2905753/

(Kevin, 2020)

Kevin. (2020). grip [Image]. https://thenounproject.com/term/grip/741337/

(Kevin, 2020)

Kevin. (2020). hold [Image]. https://thenounproject.com/term/hold/736838/

Any way now that’s all done we can move onto the the more exciting aspects. The finalized instructions! I used all the images linked above to create our visual instructions for the side of the structure. I cut and edited them to fit my purpose and made images that represent the action at each stage of construction. The instructions make sense to me, Zed and others that know the projects concept but the issue that arises is that the images are to vague for users who don’t know anything about the project which is exactly how the users will be interacting with it. I’ve learnt that good visual instructions like in airplanes and instruction manuals take top notch designers and hours and hours of work to narrow down instructions that give a good visual representation of the actions. We don’t have that kind of time or skill since we aren’t professional designers, thus we have create a base set of instructions that are understandable with explanation and in future if our project was to be produced then we would employ designers to construct proper instructions. The instructions are below:

Next up the physical model! Before we laser cut everything Zed said he could get his hands on some small actual tie downs for the model, this will give it a realistic feel for the showcase, studio and Lexus hand-ins. Now the laser cutting I did have to wait around for a whole day to get it done but it looks awesome. the model is an exact 1:5 scale making it 500mm in length. It’s cut completely from 9mm MDF. On one of the sides the instructions are engraved and other is the SHELL logo, small description and our slogan that Zed thought up, “A space to stay, not waste to stay”. Images of the model are below:

As I mentioned in the previous post we were thinking about making a book to go along with out project, this would be mostly for showcase but would also serve as an artifact for the hand-in for studio and may even be used for the Lexus showcase. The book will have pages for each major section of our work, a basic outline that I have mocked up is listed below:

book:

Intro

concept

research

development

prototypes  

restrictions and problems: not a designer

Final materials and design

Final renders and model

Closing statement

Final Fabrication Reflections

Week 13: 22-26/10/18

The whole fabrication process has been super hectic, stressful and challenging. Here is what I learnt:

1) You got to plan for the unplanned

While I did a pretty thorough construction plan and basic timetable, things still went wrong which ended up eating more time.

Things take time

Before heading into final construction, I had completely forgotten about the prototyping phase for construction. While I had done cardboard mock-ups, I still had to do iterations on how that would translate into the final materials. So, although I had planned to leave a month for final fabrication, the prototyping phase took up about 3 weeks of that. Thus, in the end I was left with about 1 week for final fabrication. At the time, I thought that would be just enough time, now I realise that this was not enough time at all because things took longer than I expected.

On top of that, my design has a lot of complex components and I didn’t fully realise was how long each component would take. Especially regarding the mass production of the blocks. Making a few blocks was a very quick process, however, making about 120 was a very long process. And upon reflection, to save time I could’ve worked a bit smarter. E.g. instead of cutting up all the blocks and then gluing them, I could’ve glued the arcs all together and then cut them up once they had dried.

Thus, in future, I’ve should slightly over-estimate how long each element takes so that I leave sufficient time for each.

Planning a Plan B is important

Before going into construction, I didn’t create a plan B. So, when things got behind, I had to think on the spot about what I should prioritise next. Upon reflection, as a result, I may not have made the most informed decision compared to if I had considered this beforehand. For example, when I was running out of time near the end of the week, I pushed the first coat of stain to Friday afternoon. Now, I realise I should have prioritised the functionality of the design over the aesthetic, and I could have left the staining till Saturday afternoon/Sunday morning.  Had I planned for this earlier, this would have bought me 2 more hours in the 3D lab to really work on the slider mechanism.

Thus next time, I should make a contingency plan of some sort as well as fully prioritise what is necessary to fulfilling the purpose. Which leads onto…..

2) Going back to the purpose.

Amidst the whole process of sorting out the fabrication, it was easy to lose sight of the overall purpose of the project. Thus, it was a matter or prioritising the different agents of necessities i.e. functionality vs. aesthetics. I don’t think I did this particularly well because I was rushed and this was reflected in the overall design of the kinetic table.

Upon reflection, there were some aspects of the design that were more complicated than they needed to be. For example, I could’ve fulfilled my purpose in a much simpler way by just creating a rectangular table. While this wouldn’t have necessarily fulfilled my aesthetic desire, in the end I would have more easily gotten a working prototype that people could interact with.  

This then leads onto….

3) Keep it Simple Stupid

Throughout this process, I had to continually consider how I could simplify the design so that it could still achieve the same outcome but in a more efficient way. From this, I was reminded that the first idea generally is not the best idea and that there are other ways to do it. For example, with the sliders, I realised that I didn’t need to use a dowel to support the slider, but I could instead just double the wooden insert leftover from cutting the base board

4) Two is better than One

So many of my friends were so kind and helped me out with my project where they could. This meant so much and really sped up the process. While I have really enjoyed working by myself this semester regarding the idea development and prototyping phase, for the fabrication, I really struggled to do everything by myself.

Shout out to Olivia, Carol, Andrew, Vaani and Sheena. You guys are the best :)

Method

My contribution to the group involved working on the Augmented Reality research and implementation, as well as the app development and 3D modelling. I used Google’s HelloAR as a base, to further develop and learn AR development in Unity.

https://developers.google.com/ar/develop/unity/tutorials/hello-ar-sample

I used ‘SpeedTutor’ to understand the basics of building the app, including learning to import UI, making the buttons, implemented the AR models and resizing them to fit the screen, as well as scripting the music to run throughout the play mode.

https://youtu.be/FrJogRBSzFo

At first, Vaani and I tried using MapBox SKD for the geolocation aspect of the app, although we didn’t end up using it, we still would have liked it in our app. During the holidays, I looked at many tutorials to follow them, to have a map that in order to have a map that displays the accurate location of the user during the time of use. This was a difficult process and required more time and research, which why we postponed learning this aspect. Instead, we decided to have a still image of the map that highlights the three locations using a 'location pin,' to inform the users to walk to that site.

https://www.mapbox.com/

 Techniques used:

·         Unity: I used this software for the App and AR development/building

·         Fusion360: This was used to create the 3D models for the AR section.

·         S8 prototyping: I’ve used the S8 Samsung phone to a prototype version of the app/AR/Stories.

·         Mapbox: I used the Mapbox SDK for Unity to learn the geolocation part of the app.

Reflection

 Reflection

  This Semester I built an app with the help of my team members.  I utilised Unity as my main tool for building the app and used ARCore to develop the Augmented Reality aspects. ARCore requires the use of a compatible phone which meant I had to purchase one. Using this technology meant our AR had a more interactive quality to it and was easier to use in Unity. This meant I had an easier time learning how to use ARCore.  Unity has a lot of online tutorials, utilising these resources meant I could rapidly prototype in unity to test what could work. We changed from Unreal to Unity which was one of the best decisions we made as a group. We tried using geolocation with Mapbox and while it didn’t end up working it still taught us a lot. We used MapBox to build our static map and postponed using geolocation in this version of the app. If we were to continue building on this app I would implement geolocation.

I used Fusion 360 to build my 3D models. While I was able to create models fast and efficiently I could not export with the fusion textures. This is a fusion problem, but I should have thought about this and tried building these models in blender where I could add UV maps.

My blogging this year was always late as I never knew what to include. I spent a long time trying to write the perfect bogs and this meant I took a much longer time then I should have written them. Next year I hope to keep a constant stream of well-written blogs posted on time so I can follow what I had done. Taking progress notes and images was also something I forget to do and next year I want to try and keep better notes on my self-reflection during prototyping.

A Sad Reflection

This project has been a big let down and a disappointment.

Conceptually, everything we need is there. We had the research, we were well informed in our decisions, we had a great project in our hands. 

The execution, however, was not there.

More than half the semester was spent on research. Comparatively to last semester, it was a big step up, and gave us a solid foundation to base our project on. What we lacked was the time to go through an iterative process, to find out what works and what doesn’t, as we did last semester.

Was it poor planning? I definitely feel this was a part of it. We should have spent some time, especially early in the semester, to plan out when we wanted to finish doing research, when we needed our first iteration, and when we expected to have a finished product. Instead, we took the “chug along until we know where we’re going” approach.  Also, we started the semester knowing we wanted to continue with and improve on last semesters project, but we didn’t really think about how we would go about this until the semester began. Perhaps taking some time during the break to really figure out what we wanted would have been smart, and time saving.

Was it poor advice? There was a lot of pushing from lecturers to continue with research, to really delve deep into our chosen topics, until we could talk about them with confidence. Of course this is important, and I understand the impact this had in our project’s foundation. However, taking up over half our time with research really cut into our fabrication time, leading to the disappointing outcome we had. It was not bad advice that we were given. I believe that at some point, we really needed to take the advice with a grain of salt. The lecturer’s words are not law, we don’t have to take on everything they say. We should have recognised when we were falling behind. 

Was it a lack of technical skill? For me, definitely. I feel that perhaps the outcome of my contributions to the project would’ve been better if I really had the skills necessary.  I’m not very good at creative writing. My narrative is a big let down for me. Last semester’s narrative was cringy and ill-informed. This semester’s is still cringy, but at least it was well informed right? This is an aspect of our project I wish I had more time to execute better. I would have like to playtest more to ensure my writing wasn’t going to be cringy. I didn’t allow myself time to do this though. My drawing skills also aren’t the best. I tried to inform myself to ensure I knew the direction I wanted to take. I think what I would have liked from this was the time to iterate on designs, until I came to one I was truly happy with. With this technique, even with a lack in skill, I could’ve found a style which worked for our project.

Looking at our final product, Andrew and I both agree this was not the outcome we were wanting to achieve. These last few weeks in which we had finally settled on an idea, we worked our butts off to complete it. We were rushed for time. We rushed our work. We knew we weren’t producing our best work, but it just had to do.

Don’t get me wrong, I still believe in the concept of our project. As previously mentioned, we had the beginnings of a great project in our hands. I was excited for the potential our project had. We haven’t completely missed our project goal, we did conceptually achieve what we wanted. But the work we did produce just isn’t something we can truly say we’re proud of.

So, what do I take away from this whole experience?

More planning. Plan out the semester at the beginning. Set due dates. When it comes around to it, re plan. Don’t let time be an enemy to my project work. 

Research is so important. I cannot assume, I must learn, read, experience, talk to someone who does know what I need to know. Good research is fundamental for a great foundation to a project. But don’t let it consume the project. Know when it’s time to put the research on pause and work on iterations. 

Work on aspects of the project in which I have the required skills, or allow for the time to learn the skills I need. I always joke about how my best skill is being very average at every skill, but it’s coming to the point where I need to hone in a certain skill or set of skills. This may (probably will) require me to think about my future and where I want to head with this degree.

Although it is a bit heart breaking to end my second year in this way, this project has been a big learning curve. I can take away a lot from this semester, and utilise it in future.