Building a self supporting structure out of random materials in a classroom is harder than you might think it would be. Just figuring out the way that materials work together and stand are tough enough and you feel like every time you do something the entire thing is going to fall down and you’re left kinda feeling like this:

anyway,

The assignment was to create a track for a marble to travel through. You would get extra points by doing certain things like, height, amount of turns, creativity, length of the travel time, ext…

 

We were put into small groups and were told we could use the materials around the room, whatever we wanted. My group and I went for the cardboard and other strong materials.

 

     

 

I had done something like this in the past so I knew the importance of having a strong foundation was, as well as an overall stable construction because it was important that every time we tested it, the marble would make its way through the entire course, it was part of the scoring process.

We began by using right shaped pieces of cardboard and built up the base of the project.

The entire process was all about trial and error, figuring out what works and what doesn’t, a lot like the Design Process that we learned about in class.

The project reflects this idea of “design theory” because when designing you are constantly going through these moments where you have to evaluate, find the problem, figure out how to fix that problem and then actually do it, and then do it all over again.

 

During this process we came to a lot of points where we needed to fix a problem, without even knowing it we went through this cycle of “ask, imagine, build, evaluate and share”

 

 

This project was a lot like glitch art in the sense that we didn’t know exactly what we were doing when we did it. For example when editing the text file for glitch art we were unsure of the outcome and when we were taping all fo this cardboard together and making a path for the marble to go down, we had no idea if it would work, if that marble would go the way we planned or not at all. It is a lot of trial and error in both projects.