Alien Pod (Collaborative Project) Design 5 : Fall 2012
Designing a project is a completely separate challenge from building a reality. In this studio a short amount of time was given for a group of students to do something more critical than the traditional studio project. With the original direction of designing a skate park, the implication was that a final piece was going to be created using a 5-axis router. At a large scale, limestone is carved using a variety of drill bits at angles using the additional 2 axes on this CNC router. Alien Pod was designed to represent this new technology while still capturing the essence of parametric skating. Technology has enabled us to produce at an accelerated rate, but do we retain the same level of clarity? Another added benefit is the ability to create parametric pieces that create a coherent system that can be ensured to work with itself. Does this take away from the project as a whole or make it more powerful? My personal role in the project was to help design the final sculptural piece and create the ability to recursively nest. After the design of the piece was completed, we organized a team to simulate routing paths and estimate 5-axis machine time using EasyStone and RhinoCAM.