Categories
New Making

Restricted Data

Through the increase in digital devices coming between us as People, the capture of data has become a prevalent tool to learn more about the routines of day to day living. These personal devices have disrupted the Souvenir marketplace, through offering the capabilities to record, track and capture the unique elements which make-up each individuals experiences.

‘Data-trope’

This project looks at how the art of data visualisation can be brought to traditional product design. Offering the consumer a personalised data-set through a tangible interface, which can only be interpreted with permission from the individual.

By creating a Data Animation Kit, it offers a gateway to show consumers the importance of their personal data.

In the beginning, I took interest in a study investigating the location that souvenirs are placed across our homes, drawing focus to the function a souvenir offers when back at home.

My focus throughout this project considered the interaction across the Fringe period through to arriving back home. Exploring how the perceived value of the product can change once it’s taken out of context. This lead me to propose a multi-functional Animation tool and Memory Box.

The art of data visualisation provides a universal language enabling each individual to create a unique set of data identifiable to only themselves. By developing a guide to introduce the users into the curation of personal data, it provides them with a platform to explore their data portrait, what sort of data they value about an experience.

This Zoetrope kit embodies an essence of the fringe with posters from previous years and captures the present by animating personalised datasets to timelessly capture their unique experiences across the city.

Categories
New Making

Developing Parametric Organisms

Designing through parameters produces a series of constraints and rules the model has to follow, my final artefact looks to visually interpret these boundaries and demonstrate the affordances in-between.

Working with software such as OpenScad provides a simple set of rules which can be applied to producing 3-Dimensional models. I found that using this tool to enclose a sphere within a cube was quite Ironic, constraining the model within it’s own parameter.

Collaborating with a machine is often a one sided conversation, yet throughout New Making, I’ve found that working with the Cura and the Unimaker printers has been an interesting conversation. Showing me how to look through my print and adapt the travels to make it possible to print aspects without support, while also teaching me what support infill to use, based on the individual model shape.


While I harnesses digital fabrication to produce a value driven design, I wanted to change the structure post print. To do this, I reduced the infill density, increasing the malleability of the PLA when exposed to high heat.

Across the experiments I’ve carried out, returning back to deconstruct the printed piece gave me the most satisfaction. I feel that this is due to removing my hands from the craft of making, watching a machine process a binary code which can be replicated infinitely.

Categories
Projects Social Narratives

A detached Population

Social media has connection users with the wider world and enabled the population to explore new cultures and follow people of interest.

However, these platforms have become our second nature, evident in the way we commute to university or our places of work. Looking at our mobile devices, messaging or scrolling our Instagram feeds.

This has negatively impacted our ability to form new contacts in the physical world, limiting us to our digital identities and detaching us from the physical world.

Anxiety, depression and lowered self-esteem has increased by 70% of the past 15 years, which is in line with the increasing number of social media platforms emerging from the world wide web.

IunGo, our mobile application uses environmental ques to engage users with their surroundings in order to reach their destination. We feel this is more beneficial for the user due to studies of which have highlighted how the use of linear directions dis-engages part of the brain used for problem solving, whereas manually planning routes stimulate memory and enable the user to gain much more knowledge of their immediate environments.

Our application uses techniques from Eco-Therapy which helps to combat patients suffering from depressive tendencies become mentally fit once more. By immersing users in their surroundings, we hope to reduce the increasingly level of depression and anxiety within our society.

Please follow this link to watch our short promotional video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmuPVIQ0mLA

Social Narratives Project – Findlay Macdonald, Amos WheeldonÂ