Action designs

This week we were supposed to design some things based on verbs. It's a great way of thinking about design and I really liked this exercise. The words I chose were: -squeezing -focusing -ventilating -driving -straining For squeezing, I thought of spelunking, and how a cave-diver has to squeeze through a small space. I thought of an entire world designed this way (which went back to my idea of one day designing a world entirely made by women :) So it would have to make use of a small space and tight spaces. Was thinking that to enter you would have to be lowered down, and that people would sleep in these rock awnings with translucent, stretchy type bags that have cords that extend downwards to escape. I was also thinking about their cooking (as in high school we once made a cake by baking it in the Earth), and how they would mechanize their environment and use the earth to cook meals. For the Focusing, I was thinking of a lens (can you tell I was a prep tech once? Ha!), particularly the tilt/swing and bellows ones (like the large format; yay Weston. A. Eisenstaedt was so intriguing to me before I went to school). This was the hardest to think of but I was thinking of a boy who either ran away from home or got lost and was returning home. The only thing was that his city, which existed on the plane of the sea, could only be viewed at a certain time of the day, with a certain mech device in which you had to focus the rings and align the glass pieces exactly, and the city would reveal itself. For Ventilating, I was thinking of a building that was composed of these metal shutters that could open and close (like the vignette windows). On the base of these shutters were LEDs that would adjust to the angles so at night you could projection-map onto them and the shutters that look like metal (think aluminium sheeting like the WD concert hall) during the day would project huge billboards at night and become virtual promotions for corporations. I was also thinking about an air train that contained fins on the top that opened and closed (open when it is travelling, closed when it lets passengers out). For Driving, unlike the "I'm driving a car" thing, the first thing I was thinking about (since I'm obsessed with lighting) was LED drivers. It actually reminded me of high school, where you would take a battery, connect a black and red terminal and power a bulb and see what amperage it took to make the bulb actually light up. So I thought about an entire city floating on water that was powered by solar panels that have sturdy trace lines (like a circuit board). The solar panels were connected to a Quad core of some sort (because I think that raids and hard drives in the future could not only hold information; they could store power somehow) and that was connected to every single 'floating home' in the city. Essentially, it could disseminate power and information while constantly refreshing and accepting information such as how many people are in the house and what utilities they use, so it would be easier to charge for utilities and things like that. For Straining, I thought of an entire house that held multiple people that looked like it was teetering. I was thinking about straining not as filtering, but as Atlas holding the world, or as tensile stress (ha! Physics from high school) Anyways, sorry my mind is kind of weird but that's how I think all the time (not sure if it's a good thing or a bad thing yet..but sometimes it weirds out the kids in my classes LOL *who ARE you?* ) :)