The Fast And Furious

Rapid prototyping, product design, just making cool stuff in general hasn’t always been a hobby of mine. To be honest, I never really knew I had a love for it until I took a design thinking course during my undergraduate studies. It introduced me to a whole different type of thinking, an approach I had never considered. It opened my mind up to the possibilities that lie within normal everyday things. How their processes could be altered and tweaked in order to elicit new and thought provoking experiences.

The design thinking course that I took essentially consisted of a semester long design sprint; in which we were tasked with redesigning an experience. The scope of the redesign was open to anything, so we decided to try redesign a zoo. It was a benign idea to begin with, we originally just assumed that we could redesign the layout and flow of an existing zoo to make it more entertaining and fun.

But as we began to research zoo’s more we realized how horrible they really are. The idea behind a zoo is a very good one. By showing the beauty and power of nature to ordinary everyday citizens you can entice them to learn more about other living beings, and hopefully care for the beauty all around us. But nowadays zoos are prisons for animals. Most of the animals are kept in enclosures that are far too small for them to truly thrive.

So instead of redesigning the exhibits we decided to redesign the experience as a whole. No longer would we have actual real life animals involved in the process. If we truly want to show the beauty, and our respect of it, we needed to create something entirely different. What we ended up deciding on was an immersive 3D experience where you were taken to the animal's actual homelands. From their hunting grounds, to the plains they roamed, and the seas in which they swam. The consumer would actually be able to witness different species in all their majesty. The result would be similar to a mix between an imax movie, and a cirque du soleil show.

The project culminated with my group creating a diorama like model to show how the experience would exist on a very, very basic level. That was my first dip into the water, and it was short but sweet. After the class I kept in touch with a few of the group members, but we never ended up taking the idea any further. I still think about it from time to time, and don’t think I’ll ever forget my first. From there I continued with my advertising track, I thought about product design every now and again, but never really got back into making cool things until a physical computing class a year and a half later.

Again I felt like my mind was being opened up to new possibilities. Things that I had never even considered considering. And then the next thing I knew the semester was over. I still continued to read about different physical computing project, and I thought about the basic processes of most working things more. But again, I never really continued to make, or tinker with anything after the class finished up.

But with a new project, and a renewed sense of vigor toward making awesome shit, I am back on the track. I just worked on a project where we were instructed to make Kelty products into smart products. Utilizing the IOT to simplify the camping process without detracting from it. It was a super compelling brief to try and design around, and my partner and I ended up settling on redesigning the rainfly for their tents. We decided that the process should be automated, so when bad weather was approaching the rainfly would descend down around the tent keeping everything, and everyone inside dry. But having a good idea is usually the easiest part of the rapid prototyping process.

From there we had to figure out how it would actually work; which we found out was much easier said than done. In our original thinking the rainfly would be controlled through a series of servos, but that was about the extent of it. We needed to learn more about how a tent and a rainfly worked together in order to better approach the redesign. So we went to an outdoors store and talked to a man who looked like he had a lot of experience with the outdoors.

We ended up learning a lot, and got the basis for how our first design would work. We decided that in order to ease the automation process we needed the rainfly to be on top of the tent, that way we could potentially utilize gravity to help pull it down. But we were still swimming up shits creek without a paddle. We had no idea how we were going to actually complete this process.

We needed to break it down to it’s most fundamental elements, so that we could better comprehend how we could go about build it. What we ended up deciding to prototype was the process of how the rainfly, or piece of paper, could unfold down a tent of popsicle sticks. In order to complete the first step of this process we decided to use magnets. And like most birds, we flew back down south to diarama land to create this first prototype of our idea.

After it was created we continued to test the feasibility of our idea, and quickly recognized all of it’s inherent problems. The most notable being that we could only actually make the rainfly go down, but thanks to the magic of video editing we were able to create the “appearance” of it going back up. We also recognized the issues surrounding the magnets, such as their weight and the fact that they don’t work on aluminum; which is the material most tent poles are made out of.

The whole process helped me realize how narrow of a scope you have to start with when it comes to rapid prototyping. The whole night after our presentation I continued to think about how I could automate a rainfly, and where I could try and take this idea next. Eventually coming to the theory that the key to automating the rainfly rests in the poles of the tent.

If the poles had a little track that ran along both sides with hooks in them, then the rainfly could be attached to the hooks when the tent was first set up, and then through a series of servos be pulled down along the tent poles. But I realize again that this is easier said than done. In order to truly understand the feasibility of this idea, I need to know more about the aluminum used in poles, and the elastic cord that lies in the center.

I really do want to continue this project, and in order to do so I need to make one section of a pole that is able to pull something along it. But also able to reverse its operations and pull something in the opposite way. That way the tent could be deployed and retracted. And the most important thing that I have learned through this process is that it doesn’t matter what I make this piece of tent pole out of. As long as it works in it’s most basic form, so stay tuned, because I should have some spare time around Thanksgiving.