Interactive Babies Playground

Last weeks I spent my time in summer school, and even when it had a more traditional approach than what I have been publishing in this blog, I have to say that I found it really productive, and I liked a lot the final result of this course.

As part of this project I had the opportunity to collaborate with a great group of people, learned a lot from them, and had the opportunity to try some things maybe would never have tried on my own.
Special thanks to Marisa Lozano, Verónica Badillo and Isai Zavala for allowing me to share and learn from them.

And well, we therefore had to design and build a model of a recreational area, with total freedom to choose the user, age range, social status, and so on. So we decided to focus our work on the development of an area of early childhood stimulation.

One of the things I enjoy most about this project was the way we approach the formal exploration of it, it was a job for which only had 2 weeks and whose final requirement was a model of study, so that everything was giving a fairly interactive, defining the design issues while we were going to build the model.

The first formal exploration model we did in dough, working all at the same time, adding and removing parts, changing in a very intuitive way, very nice.

After defining the base surface I began the process of digitizing, for this we had to build a height map that would translate what we had fashioned by hand, data that could enter a computer model that enables the implementation of a scheme digital fabrication in order to hasten the development of the model.

Although the process might seem a bit rudimentary, actually generated the needed data to develop from them a computer model that respects the characteristics of the original physical model.

I had worked with waffle construction method before running a Dimitrie Stefanescu RhinoScript, but I was feeling that even when it is a really good approximation for double curvature surfaces materialization it does not cover all the needs that as a designer you may have. anyway i took this as a starting point.

Cutting planes generated by RhinoNest , and even when it's needed to improve several aspects of the software it is actually very useful to speed the process

Main Structure Assembly

It has been a while since this idea came to my mind but I did not have the chance to try it out until now. I had already worked before with low density polyurethane foam and I find it a very interesting material, with the only drawback of the work on it is quite "sculpted" with a great lack of precision in hand modeling. but hovered in my mind the idea of mixing these two techniques (waffle construction and modeling of polyurethane foam) could generate a construction system that combines the best features of both ignoring its drawbacks

To get a more defined surface we used modeling clay.

Papering Process

Patching & Sanding.

Painting.

Detailing

The Final Result