ATELIER WUNDERKAMMER
The Atelier Wunderkammer project took place in my 3rd Year module 'Interaction Design: Physical Digital Spatial'. This was a group project with students from Product Design and Interior Design as well as Digital Interaction Design.
atelier
/əˈtɛlɪeɪ/
noun
1. a workshop or studio, especially one
used by an artist or designer.
Each year group of students who take this module receive a theme. For my year group this theme was Wunderkammer, which translates from German as a 'room of wonder' or a 'Cabinet of Curiosities'. Other previous themes have included 'Paper' and 'Water' so this was a slightly more obscure and specific brief to work to.
The brief included studying and writing about a type of collection, then working in multi-disciplinary groups to create an installation relating to the theme of cabinet of curiosities, which would be displayed in an exhibition at the end of the module.
My group consisted of myself plus three product designers. We chose to create an abstract 'cabinet' featuring four floor-standing podiums and four drawers hanging from a metal framework.
The podiums were to display the sort of collections we all have and choose to show off, like pictures, mugs, china and ornaments.
The drawers were to show the other side of collecting, the things we have hidden in drawers, that might be interesting but we are less proud of, for example train tickets, junk drawer, etc.
The idea was that you would see the showy collection on the podium and then you could press a button and see that person's hidden collection, which would be unveiled by the drawer opening to unveil what was inside.
As the Interaction Designer in the team, my main role was managing the technology required to open the drawers at the push of a button. I created an Arduino based solution with four push-buttons, four motors and great lengths of cable to run along the metal framework and take the button pressed signals from the podiums to the Arduino, and then over to the motors in the drawers.
The Arduino ran a piece of code I wrote to monitor the state of each button, and if a button was pressed, it would tell the corresponding motor to move.
I also took on my fair share of building our abstract 'cabinet'. I built one of the drawers and its housing out of MDF in the wood workshop, also installing drawer runners and a laser-cut rack and pinion cog system for the motor to connect to. I also gained some experience working with metal, helping to build the metal framework, which was cut from lengths of steel box section and then welded together. I created a CAD model of our framework design to provide the accurate sizes required for cutting the metal.
ICON MAGAZINE
This was a sub-brief within the Atelier Wunderkammer project, to write a three-spread article about collections. We were given a template to use for the article to make it look like a piece for the design magazine, ICON.