Tag: New Making

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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.

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New Making

Edinburgh Fringe Posters

Data encapsulates our everyday lives, affecting us in  both positive and negative ways. This project makes use of your data whilst at The Edinburgh Fringe and creates a personalised poster as a souvenir of your experience.

I wanted to create a personalised souvenir that encompasses the Fringe’s lively nature and traditional, iconic posters. Through the use of an app, users document their festival experience with shows and dates. After they have finished their time at the Fringe, a unique poster is created. Each shape in the design correlates with a show the user has been to, with a large organic shape representing the location of venues throughout the city. The app allows users to customise their poster before ordering, with shapes and colours being adaptable. 

Flyers and posters are such an iconic element of the Fringe, however they create tonnes of waste each year. I have decided to create my posters out of recycled flyers and posters from the previous year to help reduce  the festival’s overall wastage.  This project contributes towards The Fringe Society’s goals of a more eco- friendly fringe whilst providing attendees with a personalised souvenir that they can collect year after year.  

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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.

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New Making

Parametric Design Exploration

Throughout the New Making course, I explored multiple techniques that can be used together to create elements of design that would not otherwise have been possible 50 years ago. The exploration of parametric design was something that I found particularly interesting within the course. Parametric design is ‘a process based on algorithmic thinking that enables the expression of parameters and rules that, together, define, encode and clarify the relationship between design intent and design response’. By defining different parameters, you are able to digitally create intricate shapes, sculptures and structures within a matter of minutes that without the use of technology would take hours and hours of man power, if not, being impossible. 

The ability to create these shapes was something that I found very interesting. I started my exploration within the software ‘Processing’. This was something that I had never tried before but saw a similar resemblance to Arduino coding which I have done in the past. Through iteration and exploration, I was able to create an immediate visual, on screen 3D shape that was adaptable and theoretically printable. I struggled to figure out how to actually export the code from Processing as an STL file for printing which led me to try new software. 

The second software I tried was ‘Open sCAD’, I found this relatively easy to get to grips with and immediately started experimenting with different shapes whilst watching different tutorials online for help. I felt slightly limited with this software in terms of what I would have liked to make versus what the software would allow me to do, however that may have just been down to my lack of knowledge. One thing that I did appreciate about the Open sCAD software was the easy of exporting an STL for print. This is where I made my first two prints, both iterations of the same parametric shape, made from multiple different sized triangles pieced together. I had to print both structures with scaffolding to support them which unfortunately detracted from the defined, geometric finish I intended. 

The most enjoyable part of my parametric exploration was when I started using Grasshopper, a plugin for Rhino. This took a lot of tutorial watching to get the fundamentals and I still feel as if I only know a small portion of the software but it allowed me to create organic shapes with a fluidity and satisfying aesthetic. I found these objects to replicate that of some architecture pieces where there is a juxtaposition between the brutalist nature of the external façade with the fluidity of the shape and structure. I went on to use parametric design within my final artefact where I also put to use the brim created by the 3d print as part of my final shape. Often the adhesion plate is discarded and only used for printing, however I thought it would be interesting to incorporate this into my design itself. 

I think that the exploration of parametric design is something that will take a huge amount more practice to learn how to incorporate it into my real-world designs, however as an exploration point of view, I have learnt enough to get me started.