Time Capsule Part 2
Prompt: Design and prototype the container for your time capsule.
For this assignment, I chose to keep my time capsule container relatively simple, but embellish it with images in the same way I used layered in images in the social media collages from part 1.
The first step in my process was to sketch several versions of the container. My first idea was to create a cylindrical container that could look like something you would find at the bottom of the ocean. In one of the stories from The Arabian Nights, a fisherman finds a container caught in his net that holds a genie, so I wanted to reference that in my time capsule container. However, I realized it would have to be very large in order to fit a copy of The Arabian Nights and that the book would also have to be wedged in diagonally.
So, due to the shape of my objects, I settled on a rectangular container. In keeping with the theme of something you would find at the bottom of the ocean, I decided to work with wood as my primary material.
My final design featured a wood box with various illustrations from The Arabian Nights and my tarot cards covering the box. To prototype the design, I created a model in TinkerCad.
Following the digital prototype, I began to build a physical prototype. I used a wooden planter as the bottom of the chest and glued together scrap wood to create the lid. I tried to attach the lid and base together using a hinge, but I could not get this to work. So instead, I remade the lid to be slightly bigger than the base so that it would fit snugly on top.
The last step was to select illustrations to embellish the box with. I sourced several postcards illustrated with animals and mythical creatures that appear in The Arabian Nights to cover the sides of the lid. To cover the top of the lid, I used the back of some of my tarot cards. I chose to cover all of the lid because the scrap wood was a different color than the planter and I had to hide some construction mistakes. In another iteration, I would only cover parts of the lid with illustrations.
The most challenging part of this assignment was building the lid for my container. Since that took the most time, I was left with very little time to spend on the embellishments. Thus, I relied heavily on the postcards. If I were to do this again, I would budget more time for the illustrations. Instead of taping paper onto the wood, I would try to carve engravings into it. I would also use illustrations taken directly from my copy of The Arabian Nights. I tried to do this by tracing them onto tracing paper and taping that onto the box instead of the postcards, but it did not transfer well so I went with the postcards. I think they make look a lot better as wood carvings. If not wood carvings, I would also like to create my own vinyl decals and stickers to place on the box.
