Manus Et Machina

Engineering Design Studio (A5, 015)
Sunday, September 17, 2017, 9:00 am – 11:40 am

Foreword

List of topics


How will your machine be like??

Critique Session – Today everybody will present their idea. We will play the following game: Everybody has to say something BAD about the others idea and the related machine. Of course, just to say “I do not like your idea!” or “This looks ugly!” is not enough! This will help you to give and get negative feedback and also to be critiqued in a direct and sometimes unfair (?) matter.

Upcoming Project Phases

You are asked to continuously work on your machine project during the next weeks. Your project report will reflect your status of work. In parallel to the feedback during class you should have at least one weekly meeting with Felix.

Over the period of the next weeks you will iteratively go through the following project phases. You are asked to work with a high portion of personal involvement and responsibility:

  1. Time planning (Layout your time for the semester, What other things do you have to do? Have in mind that everybody will use the same resources (laser cutter, wood workshop etc.) at the end of the semester, check with Felix if your plan is realistic.)
  2. Research (Weeks 3–5 ⇒ Understand and Observe: Looking, Learning, Asking. Do more than just reading one Wikipedia article! Get inspired by related pictures (Pinterest), real books (NYUAD library) and by talking to people. You should deeply dive into researching your field of interest. You should know more about this specific field than everybody else on campus)
  3. Concept Development (Weeks 5–8 ⇒ Visualise and critically analyse. Produce mood boards, sketches, drawings, texts, morphological matrix, mind maps, user narration, etc. If those terms does not sound familiar meet with Felix.)
  4. Rapid Prototyping (Weeks 8–11 ⇒ Build mock-ups. Testing the principles that you would like to work with using rapid prototyping methods: quick and dirty prototypes, paper modelling, cardboard, electronics etc.)
  5. Detailed Design (Weeks 11–13 ⇒ Review. Learn from the mistakes you made so far. Make a detailed plan for your machine. List the components you need and layout your necessary steps to finalise your project. Make detailed drawings that display all the dimensions and specifications.)
  6. Final Prototype (Weeks 13–15 ⇒ Production. Now it is time to start building your final machine.)
  7. Documentation (Weeks 15–16 ⇒ Communicating: photos, movies, multilingual texts about your machine etc. All this will be very useful to apply for exhibiting your work e.g. at Media Arts Exhibitions.)
  8. Exhibition (Publicating. Go public with your project: text, flyer etc.)
  9. Party (Week 17 ⇒ You successfully made it through the Men & Machines Core. You can call yourself a Real Machine! You should now start with your next project to have a full portfolio of nice project works when you graduate from NYUAD.)

The more you talk to Felix the more feedback you get. Your goal is to make an outstanding project!

Homework

  1. Draw a dimetric drawing of your machine concept. Use a technical hatching style (see below).
  2. Reading: Making Interactive Art: Set the Stage, Then Shut Up and Listen, Physical Computing’s Greatest hits and misses
  3. Do not forget to write your Essay 1
  4. Check out Curta