AUTOMATA
An exercise in rapid prototyping, done over the course of two weeks.
We were tasked with creating a working automaton under the material restrictions of only using foam core, glue, construction paper, and wooden dowels. We ideated themes and mechanisms that would align with these themes, tentatively settling on a pond-themed automaton.
We developed prototypes for each of the five mechanisms we wanted to include and created basic visual elements to asses how they would change the mechanisms' functionality. These were quite ugly and effectively just a series of rapid iterating, failing, and morbidly piecing things together like a more-sane Dr. Frankenstein to see what worked.
Once these mechanisms were working separately, I prototyped the fully integrated automaton with all five elements, and my teammates put some of the aesthetic details to see if that would change anything (one small change the aesthetics made was having our duck-duck-goose being duck-duck-duck-goose to maintain functional balance). We tracked our various measurements, failings, and elements we had to add or remove to make the mechanisms work with each other.
I had to kill one of my darlings here: From the beginning, I had this idea for a visual element of a drop rippling into concentric circles that would rise and fall using cams. While the cams worked independently, the addition of concentric circles inhibited them. As it turns out, the dowels were spinning in an unexpected, non-linear manner, which was inconsistent with the concentric-circle model. Thus, I had to scrap this visual element and replace it with a series of fish.
We also shifted our pond-focused theme to a "Lake Day" theme, to incorporate more elements of a picnic, a person flying a kite, ducks, geese, and other aspects of a holistic day at the lake to make our visual pattern less repetitive and more interesting. I also went out and sourced a specific color palette for our construction paper, to create a more vibrant, cohesive look than the paper used in our first prototype, as I felt bright colors more adequately matched the spirit of our theme.
Here is our final working automata:
We were tasked with creating a working automaton under the material restrictions of only using foam core, glue, construction paper, and wooden dowels. We ideated themes and mechanisms that would align with these themes, tentatively settling on a pond-themed automaton.
We developed prototypes for each of the five mechanisms we wanted to include and created basic visual elements to asses how they would change the mechanisms' functionality. These were quite ugly and effectively just a series of rapid iterating, failing, and morbidly piecing things together like a more-sane Dr. Frankenstein to see what worked.
Once these mechanisms were working separately, I prototyped the fully integrated automaton with all five elements, and my teammates put some of the aesthetic details to see if that would change anything (one small change the aesthetics made was having our duck-duck-goose being duck-duck-duck-goose to maintain functional balance). We tracked our various measurements, failings, and elements we had to add or remove to make the mechanisms work with each other.
I had to kill one of my darlings here: From the beginning, I had this idea for a visual element of a drop rippling into concentric circles that would rise and fall using cams. While the cams worked independently, the addition of concentric circles inhibited them. As it turns out, the dowels were spinning in an unexpected, non-linear manner, which was inconsistent with the concentric-circle model. Thus, I had to scrap this visual element and replace it with a series of fish.
We also shifted our pond-focused theme to a "Lake Day" theme, to incorporate more elements of a picnic, a person flying a kite, ducks, geese, and other aspects of a holistic day at the lake to make our visual pattern less repetitive and more interesting. I also went out and sourced a specific color palette for our construction paper, to create a more vibrant, cohesive look than the paper used in our first prototype, as I felt bright colors more adequately matched the spirit of our theme.
Here is our final working automata: