Today, for our last day of 3DCP rotation, we started off by learning about interactive design in depth and looking at past 3D pathway students' final projects, this was very interesting to see the wide variety of routes you could go down for your final piece, such as installations, sculptures, products, paintings and animations.
We then were told to go around the campus and the O2 to find and take pictures of spanners, bridges and things holding up structures for inspiration for our next task.
Then we were given our task, which was to get into groups and create a bridge from one table to another, using cardboard, elastic bands, tape and bamboo sticks. The bridge had to stand by itself and be stable enough to drive a 20cmX60cm electric car over it.
As a group, instead of overthinking the task, we first decided a basic rough design, which was to make lots of small cardboard rectangles that we would layer, using tape to hold them together, and then started the actual construction of the bridge.
We also decided to curve the bridge to challenge us and our design, hence, to ensure that the car would not fall off around the curves, we also included cardboard side 'rails'.
The layering idea worked well and the construction of the cardboard surface went smoothly. We then used the bamboo to create spanners to hold up the cardboard, ensuring that the bridge was tall and stable enough.
Overall, our finished bridge was very successful and the car was able to drive over the bridge without the construct giving way. I think this success was due to how we decided to go straight into construction instead of spending a lot of time on the design, which allowed us more room for trial and error. I found, because of this, it was similar to our last 'spaghetti' form project, in that sometimes it's better to not get too caught up in or too attached to initial designs and allow the project to take its own path. However, I do think we could have made our curves a little less sharp so the car could steer easily around the bends but I think we had good time management and worked well as a group.
