Two day project
Mark Bolas had lectured about client/designer relationships and toward the end of class asked everyone to think of a short two day project that they have been meaning to work on, but haven't yet gotten around two. Once everyone indicated they had a project in mind, we were paired up and asked to give our partner the project we were thinking of.
I ended up being partnered with Scott Gillies. Both of us are getting a bit bored of working completely on computer screens and are leaning toward more physical experiences and interfaces. Our projects tended to coincide that notion as we were the only pair in class that built or modified physical objects.
Scott's assignment to me was to build a fog chiller. The fog that comes out of a fog machine is hot and will rise to the ceiling of a room. A fog chiller is used to cool the fog as it comes out of the machine so that it will lay very close to the floor.
The plans that were given to me called for a trashcan, some metal tubing used for laundry ducts, and bags of plain old ice. I drilled a couple of 4-inch holes into the side of a plastic trashcan, ran some tubing, added ice, and attached it to the fog machine.
My project for Scott was a little more complicated. For a while now, I've wanted to make some stuff out of silicone, and so I told Scott I wanted a big gummy bear made out of silicone with a hollow stomach to store real gummy bears in, and a hole to access them (apparently Dragon Skin silicone will stretch 1000 % before it tears).
We headed over to Hastings Plastics in Santa Monica and told the guy about our little birthing gummy bear project and he was very helpful in pointing us in the right direction. We picked up some plaster, Holly already had some clay we could use for making the cast. We needed a transparent platinum based silicone, which hastings didn't carry, but the opaque stuff they did have cost $150 a gallon, so we held off on that purchase until we were sure we had a good mold.
