Personal Contributions

Stephanie McDonell
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My major contributions to this project were in the areas of ideation, representation, construction of the final product, and aesthetic design. I had a large part in coming up with the concept of a living box and the poetry behind it's shape and function, as well as it's overall shape and colours, etc. I did many of the sketches presented on the website. While Obi did the vast majority of the work in developing the core mechanisms, such as the breathing and heartbeat gears and systems, I helped to design the different configurations of them, as did we all. I also did the writing for phase 2. In designing the final configuration of the project that we built to completion, I designed the box shape and colour, the outer membrane, the spine piece, the lighting, the overall look, and helped with the position of the mechanisms within the box. In the construction of the first iteration of the final piece (shown on monday in lab before the updates got us to build it again), I did around a third of the work (working alongside Maryam and Obi). In the construction of the final piece, I did a large portion(working alongside Maryam for essentially the whole time).


Mariam Khan
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For this project my role was to work alongside my teammates in creating the final concept and form for the Solidworks models in the beginning phases. Throughout the later stages, it was to gather materials, get them cut, as well as assemble them with the help of another teammate. I also contributed in ideating some of the product forms within our platform. As we developed the physical form, we realized that the Solidworks model was a good starting point in terms of how many gears we would need and how they would connect to create the desired movement. However, there were many trials and errors that we came across during the construction of the prototypes and final model. We chose to use a cardboard for our prototype, which was tedious to cut and caused unwanted friction between gears. The prototype was helpful though, in determining what the shape of our levers needed to be and how we would keep them from moving in all directions. Afterwards, we cut them out of acrylic, which was specifically chosen in order to allow light to shine through the mechanical parts of our mechanism. This was a rewarding and challenging material to work with, as it caused very little friction and allowed for smooth movements between our parts. The bond between our parts was often times not strong enough to hold the heavy parts together. We solved this problem by securing the unstable pieces with our own version of “nuts and bolts” that we created from acrylic. Our final outcome for the presentation was a fully functioning kinetic sculpture that mimicked the movements of a heartbeat and of the breathing in and out of lungs. I hope to further improve this sculpture by polishing the outer “skin” of our box, making it cleaner and easier to view the natural movements of the technology. I will also be creating a flap for the skin that will allow for viewing of the inner mechanics, showing our concept of creating taking the natural and confining them with technological boxes. 


Obi Vattanawong 
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For the final project, my responsibilities were mostly on creating dimensions, preparing files for laser cut and planning for assembly. Some tasks were difficult as I later learned that working on different medium would have different constraints. When putting pieces of the sculpture together, the challenge was that they would not work the way I expected as other forces come into play in physical environment. My teammates who are responsible for the assembly of the project took care of the problem well.

Physical Model with "Skin"/Membrane

The material used to create this membrane was Nylon. Not only did Nylon look and feel like a real skin, it was also very flexible. Kinda the perfect material, eh?

Product Platform Table

SolidWorks Model Renders

Isometric

Right Side

Front

Exploded

Phase 3: Completion

We have practically finished assembling our physical model, what's changed is the addition of the engine.

Motor housed within a spinal column of the model, again going with the theme of "living being".

 

Phase 3: Nearing Completion

Final product nearing completion, as we can see we used a push light to illuminate the inside.

Phase 3: Acrylic Parts and Model

Gear

Lever

Top View, can see the wooden crank, as well as the cam used to move the top portion

Phase 3: Acrylic Model Early Stages

Phase 3: Laser Cut

 Our gears ready to be laser cut on acrylic

Phase 2: Cardboard Prototype

Our prototype lever being made of sticks

Our Cardboard prototype of the base

Cardboard Gear, in comparison to the render, we needed to make changes because a ring in real lif couldn't stand up by itself. We designed a normal gear but with a whole at the top to act like a disjointed cam.

 

 

Phase 2: SolidWorks Model Preview

This solidworks video perfectly shows the motion we are trying to accomplish on the physical model.

Phase 1: Configurations

We created a set of two gears that mimic heartbeat and breathing. The heartbeat gear, pictured in green, uses a round gear with two closely placed half-circle shaped tabs, with the first being taller than the second. As the gear turns, the lever (in yellow) on top is pushed up by the first tab and fall abruptly onto the second tab as the first tab ends. The lever then pushes upward and drops again in a heartbeat pattern. The other gear works in a similar way to mimic the slow rising and falling movements of the chest in breathing. This gear, pictured in red, is a circle with the hole it turns around placed halfway between the edge and the center-point of the circle. This causes the lever resting on it to rise and fall slowly, simulating the movement of breathing. The entire sculpture is surrounded by a rectilinear support frame that has a thin membrane strethed over it. As the gears turn the levers are pushed up against the fabric, mimicking the natural movements of the organs in the body.

Configuration 1
The first of our configurations is exactly what was described above in a square block, with one heart gear and one lung gear with one lever each that move the levers as the gear is turned. This serves as our base configuration.

Configuration 2: The Wave
The second configuration is a long rectangular creature with seven heart gears in a row that are all set up to raise the lever a moment after each other in a wave formation as the crank is turned. It is meant to replicate the way that a pulse looks and how blood moves through veins in a creature.

 

Configuration 3: Heart Noise
The third configuration uses the movement of several lung gears moving two support bars up and down at opposite times. The moving bars each support half of a lever that is hollow and filled with dry rice. When the crank is turned the lever is tipped back and forth length-wise and the rice runs back and forth, creating the sound of breathing.

Phase 1: Configuration Sketches

Initial sketches of our heart beat prototype, with this being our 1st configuration and base model:

 

Sketch of our 2nd configuration: The Wave

Sketches of our 3rd configuration: Heart Noise

 

Phase 1: How a Heart Works?

Inspired by Theo Jansen's Strandbeest, we challenged ourselves in this project to recreate the complex internal movements and functions of a living creature. 

We wanted to literally mimic how animals might breathe, which drove us to explore how the heart and lungs functioned. 

Phase 1: Design Precedents

Analysis of Existing KSs
In developing our own kinetic sculpture and product platform, we looked at several successful sculptures, particularly with regards to how they used key pieces with particular functions to create a product platform that could be translated easily into creative new sculptures.

Strandbeest
Theo Jansen's Strandbeest is a mechanical creature that live and walks on beaches using only the power of wind. We were interested in it's exceedingly simple and elegant use of circular motion in powering it's legs, as well as the translation of the beautiful wave of motion created in it's wind-collecting sail into the movement of it's feet. The leg mechanism was also very interesting to us, as it uses a very simple structure and set of connecting parts to mimic a complex natural movement: walking.
http://www.strandbeest.com/



Wood That Works
The second set of sculptures that inspired us was David C. Roy's Wood That Works collection. What we found most interesting about his work was his use of several very simple mechanisms in all of his work, such as gears, pulleys, and decorative pieces, and his ability to quickly combine these pieces in different ways to create entirely new and unique sculptures that are beautiful every time with minimal effort in their design and construction (he is able to mass-produce the individual parts without fear of not being able to use them on a future product. This is an excellent example of the product platform being applied to kinetic sculptures.
http://www.woodthatworks.com/gallery-sculptures/