Brandon Cernin Jackie Kosalka Jeni Lesser Felipe Lopez Jessica Vorthmann
"Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory." - Dr. Seuss
This quote was at the end of our project.
Empathy
To describe how we are incorporating empathy into the project, we created a user profile that describes who we are intending the user of our product to be:
User Profile:
The aim of our project is to encourage interaction and empathy within our fellow professors, students, and professional or intrigued guests. Our main target for users are individuals who have been through the UNL School of Design, or any other educational institution, along with the many countless hours of studio time, the final chaos of preparing for a final project, or the feeling of great success. We want these persons to share their most horrifying stories, most memorable moments, and any advice they wish they would have known beforehand with the first year students. Within the UNL school itself, the first year students do not usually interact with the upperclassman or professors, perhaps giving them the lower hand in their education. With our project we hope to eliminate some separation and find ways to make it through our first couple years.
Define
After our brainstorming process, we defined our user group and our POV statement which describes our goal of this project:
POV Statement:
The purpose of our project is to connect the first years to the rest of the design programs through experiences that we have had during our first year in architecture by creating together a mural of experiences, advice, and stories.
After coming up with our POV statement, we were asked to define our space through photo joiners. Our chosen place for the module was the corral in Architecture Hall:
This is a photo joiner of a panoramic view of the corral.
This a photo joiner that documents a section of the wall from floor to ceiling in the corral.
This is a photo joiner that documents the movement of the ceiling.
This is a photo joiner that documents the length of the wall in the corral.
Ideate & Prototype
At the beginning of the Module, our team decided we were going to make a large poster that would hang on the wall and in the middle of the poster in big bold letters it would read "When I was a first year..." Architecture students would be asked to write their stories of when they were a first year in the College of Architecture on the poster. Note cards would also be provided so the students could give new students advice.
From this idea, we came up with the idea of Construct vs. Destruct. We were going to have a stress block, so after the students constructed a story they could destruct the stress block with a hammer or other various objects. This idea expanded to putting a frame around the poster that would act as the destruction part.
After some thought, we decided the poster was too simple and that we could be more creative. With this in mind, we came up with the idea of creating walls of yarn that would act as the pages of a storybook. We would set up several floor-to-ceiling walls of yarn that the students would have to navigate through in order to hang their note cards to the yarn and to read the various stories left by other students.
As the project progressed, we decided to use the space available and take our project off the wall and have it suspended from the ceiling and go to the floor. We came up with the idea of having the students write their stories and advice on note cards and paper clip them to the yarn. When we found out that we weren't going to have much time to install our project, we had to come up with an alternative design. From this, we decided to create frames that had nails in the back so we could string yarn around them to create yarn designs within the frames so the note cards could be paper clipped on the yarn. This was our final design for the module. There was also a quote that sat at the end of our project that was created by incorporating the string art and is pictured above. Below are pictures and diagrams showing this process and our prototyping:
This shows our brainstorming process we did on the whiteboard.
This is another image of our brainstorming process on the whiteboard.
This diagram shows one of our ideas to incorrporate our theme of "When I Was A Freshman..."
This diagram shows our idea of a story book theme, where the pages of the book would be the yarn walls.
This diagram shows our idea to have an arch for the entry way and a page of the story book with note cards attached.
This diagram shows how our frames were built. They are 4' x 4' and have about 90 nails on the back of them to hold the yarn.
This diagram shows three of our frame designs.
This diagram shows the final placement of the frames within the corral.
This diagram shows how we plan to attach the note cards to the yarn.
This diagram shows how we orginally planned to make the cards that the guests were going to fill out.
This shows the prototype of the quote that is written in yarn.
This is our first prototype of our frame with yarn wrapped around the nails.
Test
In order to come up with our final five yarn design frames we went through several colors and many different desings in order to find out what works best for our project.
This is a photo of our first hanging frame.
This photo shows one of the yarn designs in the frame.
This photo shows one of the yarn designs in the frame.
This photo shows all the frames hanging after we finished putting them up.
Throughout this process, as a team, we did a lot of prototyping and creating diagrams, which is shown above. We didn't test our product much throughout the process, but only to see if the frames would hang in the corral and if we could paper clip notecards to the yarn. Our big test of our product was on Feburary 7th at 8 pm at the event in Architecture Hall. This is when students of the College of Architecture and outside guests came to visit see our projects. Throughout the night we watched the frames fill up with note cards. We encourged people to come back and read the stories as they were being written and several people did. Our only feed back was to make the quote, that was at the end, more interactive, so as the night went on the quote would be created instead of it already being done. At the end of the night, we gathered all the note cards and placed them in a photo album in order to keep the memories. Below are photos of that night:
This was one of the note cards.
Collaboration
This is a panoramic photo of the frames at the end of the event.
This is our final board of our project.
This is a timelapse video of our project during the event.
By using the top strengths of the members of our group, we were able to come up with an interactive project that brings upper classman and first year architecture students together. We achieved this through story telling, which made this module such a rewarding experience.
