Mengfei_Public Art Proposal & Computational Design

Email: mwang@gsd.harvard.edu TEL: +1 617 816 6869

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PORTFOLIO Sep.2017 - Nov. 2017

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SCI 6338 Introdu ctio

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Mengfei Wang | Art Design and Public Domain | Master of Design Studies | Harvard GSD

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The last semester (Sep. 2017-Dec. 2017), also the first semester I study at Harvard GSD, began with four courses chosen and ended with two projects completed. Although the four course are in completely different acdemic fields, I tried to find inter-connection among them, search for the “general aesthetic experience“ I have assumed to exist in different art fields. To my surprise, what I learnt in these four different disciplines could be apply to each other. Each project was achieved by two different discipliines waving togheher.. They witnessed the process I explored interdisciplinary design. It is only a start, and I wonder if the end of this direction will be the same with what I assumed. I hope you will enjoy this exploration as much as I do by reading this portfolio.

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1 On Site 2 Midterm Project 3 Physical Model 4 Final Project 5 Back to Granary Burying Ground- One man’s soliloquy 6 Paper: A Public Art Practice Influenced by Neuroaesthetics perspective

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Neuroaesthetics

1 “Blowing Bubbles” 2 Gallery Formation 3 Plan & Section & Interior View 4 Figure Coding 5 Gallery Coding 6 Fabriacaiton 7 Annimation Storyboard 1

PROJECT TYPE: Group Work with Mia Ming Guo, Jeungoon Ham, Jing Chang

INSTRUCTOR: Krzysztof Wodiczko DATE: November 2017 16 LOCATION: Historical Sites along the Boston Freedom Trail

THE FREEDOM BOOTH

1 On Site 2 Midterm Project 3 Physical Model 4 Final Project 5 Back to Granary Burying Ground - One man’s soliloquy 6 Paper: A Public Art Practice Influenced by Neuro-aesthetics Perspective

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“…The meaning or value of the art work does not reside in the object itself but is accrued over time through the interaction between the artist and the community. This interaction is considered to be integral to the art work and equal in significance” (Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another, 2004, p 95)

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1 On Site

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On Site

There are 16 historical sites on Boston Freedom Trail.

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On Site

Two main kinds of visitors’ behaviors Listening to tour guides’ introduction (L) and Walking to the next site (W).

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On Site

To improve the experience, we ask 3 questions.

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On Site

We expect visitor’s more behaviors as answers for these 3 questions.

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On Site During the experience of the Freedom Trail and conversations with tour guides and other tourists, we experienced two main issues: First, visitors found the entire Trail a little boring as they had little or no interaction with tour guides and were passively stuffed Information; secondly, the guides reflected that tourists who came to experience the Freedom Trail were from all over the world, while Bostonians rarely participated.

Our goal, therefore, is to make the Freedom Trail more interesting by using a deep-impression and interaction way for visitors to exchange ideas, push the depth of discussion of the Freedom Trail so that its meaning as a political and historical related site is deepened.

Our approach is to provide an interactive platform for visitors to problematize, contest or question the historical stories heard in the Freedom Trail. Through this platform, visitors can see the opinions of others and leave their own opinions; guides can make historical observations about specific locations and lead the public to comment on them; and Bostonians can feel the history of Boston and even the United States in the eyes of people around the world.

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2 Middle Term Project

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Middle Term Project Our project at the mid-term phrase is creating Site 0 and Site 17 where Displaying Booths are placed to show collected ideas; while dividing 16 historical sites to 4 groups, each group has a Collecting Booth to collect visitors’ ideas.

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Keywords in Collecting Booth

The keywords show up in each Collecting Booth are extracted according to the related historical sites’ background.

Site 1 Boston Common

Collecting Booth

2 State House 3 Park Street Church 4 Granary Buring Ground 5 King's Chapel 6 Benjamin Franklin Statue

1 keywords

7 Old Corner Bookstore 8 Old South Meeting House 9 Old State House 10 Boston Massacre 11 Faneuil Hall

2 keywords

12 Paul Revere House 13 Old North Church 14 Coop's Hill Burying Ground

3 keywords

15 USS Constitution 16 Bunker Hill Monument

4 keywords

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Collecting Booth Design

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Collecting Booth Design Inside the Collecting Booth, the visitor will be given one word related to the historical site. He will be required to a give one-word response.

Interior of Collecting Booth

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Displaying Booth Design

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Booth Design Inside the Displaying Booth, visitors will see collected ideas. They could also writing on the interior walls.

Interior of Displaying Booth 16

3 Physical Model

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We followed KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) principle, try to make our booth more effective to collect information, yet its instructions easier to be understood by visitors.

4 Final Project

How about combine two types of booth together?

What’s the effective way to trigger visitors’ desire of thinking and talking?

How to let visitor understand how to use booth the moment they see it? …

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1. Where to put Freedom Booth?

Every historical site along the Freedom Trail houses several Freedom Booths that gives visitors a degree of intimate space to think and express personal opinions rather than being exposed to surrounding. (shown in white dots)

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2. When to use the Freedom Booth?

Tourists should use Freedom Booth after the tour guide’s introduction for each site.

Other public people (mainly Bostonians) could use Freedom Booth whenever they want..

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3. How to use the Freedom Booth?

Tourists carefully listen to the tour guide’s explanation, then they are guided to the Freedom Booth. They see a collection of the projected public opinions about this historical site on the booth's exterior wall. After that, they can enter Freedom Booth individually. When a person comes in, he will first see the opinion of the previous person projected on the inner wall of the booth, which can stimulate his own feelings; when he types in his opinion, his opinion will cover the already-existing comments on it, and inspire the next person who enters booth to comment. After 10 minutes the visitor's opinion will be cast on the exterior wall of the Freedom Booth and shown to public.

Type in thoughts

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thoughts display

Booth Design 1. Booth's facade material reflects the surrounding environment and the faรงade can serve as a display screen to project the public comments collected by the system.

2. Booth is suitable for only one person to enter and is designed to be semi-closed rather than totally enclosed to avoid long-term occupancy by homeless people thus losing its function.

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https://drive.google.com/ open?id=1DMCXjlIB9yTN7klj3pSOcPYL8wliZSAc

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https://drive.google.com/ open?id=1QGpMCRVxhmi4IWtE3PeD7KZNRfrnURzJ

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6 Paper

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PROJECT TYPE: Group Work with YongHwan Kim, Mari Jo, Lubin Liu INSTRUCTOR: Prof. Sawako Kaijima & Prof. Panagiotis Michalatos DATE: November 2017 LOCATION: N/A SOFTWARE: Rhino+Grasshopper+C#+Unity+Premiere+Aftereffect

BUBBLE DOME

1 Concept: “Blowing Bubbles” 2 Gallery Formation 3 Plan & Section & Interior View 4 The coding of the Figure 5 The coding of the Gallery 6 Physical Model Fabriacaiton 7 Annimation Storyboard

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1 “Blowing Bubbles”

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We are trying to design a gallery that integrates the sculpture, the structure and the spatial experience together. The sculpture is one part of the gallery and vice versa, meaning the gallery is the sculpture itself. The visitors enter the inside of the big sculpture, the gallery, when they appreciate the smaller one, the figure.

We applied blowing bubbles as the concept of the design. A lather is a prototype of light, thin and translucent sphere structure.

Potentially, bubbles can shape spaces, and a great number of them interlocking with each other can be transformed into structures.

The gallery can be built by membrane structure that several precedents employed.

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2 Gallery Formation

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Conceptually, the gallery is a translucent dome consisting of the interlocking bubbles that the figure makes with blowing.

The sculpture is not only the origin of the architectural design but also the center of the space and the structure.

Transforming it into the structure

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3 Plan & Section & Interior View

The gallery and the sculpture become an inseparable integration, which creates a special spatial experience for the visitors. The people inside can see not only the landscape outside through the translucent material but also the reflections of them on each “bubble� unit.

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7.40 m

Section

15.25 m

Plan

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4 Figure Coding

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Input the original figure mesh

Generate a group of slicing planes.

Get the intersections (lines) of slicing planes and figure mesh.

Extrude intersection lines to solid surfaces.

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C# Script of The Figure

For C# script, there are basically four steps: Step 1: Declaration; Step 2: Generating slicing planes; Step 3: Intersecting human mesh with slicing planes; Step 4: Extruding Intersecting contours to solids.

(See bellowing screenshot for details.)

Step1: Declarations

Step2: Generate slicing planes

Step3: Intersect

Step4: Extrude

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5 Gallery Coding

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Design an outline shape of the dome with curves at the top and base of the dorm and a point at the mouth of a figure.

Divide the outlines into segments by the number of points (“count”).

Connect the points and output a list of curves (“crvs”) as an input for C# script.

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Divide each curve (“crvs”) into “n-1” segments and create “n” points along the curve.

Duplicate a bubble mesh (“geo”) at the points.

Scale the bubbles by a scale factor (“scale”).

Scale each bubble according to the distance between adjacent points. (The bubbles become larger at the base of the dorm as the distance between adjacent points becomes larger.)

For the bubbles between the curves at the top and base of the dorm, scale them by a random scale factor (“random”) to give a sense of organic bubble formation. Skip the points to create geometries based on the random factor in order to avoid the overlapping bubbles.

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C# Script: Bubble Dorm

For C# script, there are basically six steps: Step 1: Declarations; Step 2: Create points to create bubbles; Step 3: (Optional) Openings; Step 4: Transform bubbles at the top of the dome; Step5: Transform bubbles at the bottom of the dome Step6: Output bubble geometries (See bellowing screenshot for details.)

Step1: Declarations

Step2: Create points to create bubbles

These two steps are for creation of a list of points along the dorm arches.

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Step3: (Optional) Openings

Step4: Transform bubbles at the top of the dome

Creation of a list of points along the dorm arches.

Step5: Transform bubbles at the bottom of the dome

Step6: Output bubble geometries

These four steps are for creation and transformation of bubble geometries at the points.

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6 Fabrication

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The Giant Sculpture (Laser cutting)

Since we wanted to effectively represent the figure of the stepped giant sculpture, we applied laser cutting into our fabrication process.

This process adds more transparency in physical model compared to other model making process. Also, it can reduce the fabrication time.

Since we wanted to effectively represent the figure of the stepped giant sculpture, we applied laser cutting into our fabrication process.

This process adds more transparency in physical model compared to other model making process. Also, it can reduce the fabrication time.

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Bubble Dome (3D Printing) For the fabrication of bubble dome parts, we used a 3D printer to represent the form in a more detailed way.

Since our bubble dome is agglomeration of sphere structure which is booleaned in rhino, traditional model making process cannot fully evoke the complexity of our design.

By using 3D printer, we were able to produce the detailed shapes of the bubble dome.

However, 3d printing technology also has some side effects. It cannot print very steep angles. Typically, it is hard to print angles more than 45 ~ 50 degrees. So, adding support material while slicing was considered during the g-code making process.

As shown in the picture, our model has many steep angles but the basic structure of our model consists of spheres which is very stable structure that can be printed with a 3d printer. I trusted the stability of the sphere structure and tried printing without support materials. Fortunately, the result was good even though there was some minor deflection at the bottom part of the parallel angles.

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Bubble Dome (3D Printing) & Giant Sculpture (Laser cutting) Finally, the 3D printed bubble dome and laser-cut giant sculpture were installed in the same space with the illumination of LED lights. The translucency of the bubble dome and the pink colored giant sculpture concerted with each other and made a subtle atmosphere. Also, the unintended layers evoked by the 3d printing process gave the 3d model directions and textured reflections which made the space more rich.

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7 Animation Storyboard

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Storyboard and Structure of Unity Scenes Unity Scene A

0:00 Camera 0

2. Conceptual Diagram Animation

1. Systematic Diagram Animation

Toggle

Tab key: Toggle between Scene A & B 75

0:52 Camera 3

E key: Skip

Unity Scene B

0:18 Camera 1

0:30 Camera 2

1:36 Camera 4

1:58 Camera 5

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p to next camera

3. Experiential Walkthrough Loop R key: Return to experiential walkthrough 76

List of Cameras and Corresponding States in Unity Scene B List of Cameras & Times: Camera switches to the next one after a given time (Game Time - Listed Camera - Listed Time)

0:00 Camera 0 - 18 seconds

0:18 - Camera 1 - 12 seconds

Activate

Global State ● Sky ● Figure ● Water

State 0

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Underwater plane Underwater bubble particles systems

List of States: State activates accor 77

0:30 - Camera 2 - 22 seconds

1:36 Camera 4 - 22 seconds

0:52 - Camera 3 - 44 seconds

1:58 Camera 5 - 47 seconds

Activate

State 2

State 1

â—?

Activate

â—?

Bubble dome particles systems

rding to the corresponding cameras 78

Solid bubble dome mesh

Background Music Analysis and Edit To achieve the perfect harmonious effect, we need to choose and edit background music to match with the storyboard.

Bandari’s Mars And Venus is the suitable one for our Bubble Dome in that the theme of music is a melody containing lively-jumping three-note group phrases., which could perfectly represent bubbles being blown out one after another.

By analyzing the music form, I deleted all the repeating parts, left only the most distinctive and complete melodies so that each of them could represent and be assign to a certain motion of camera (scene), such as long shoot, circling, wandering, etc, covering from beginning to the end.

The original sound track lasts 3’46’’. After editting, it is only 2’46’’.

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