SUMMARY I’ve seen a full circle this last week of study standing in the architectural firm’s workshop, an Aladdin's Cave of equipment. The ‘circle’ of my thoughts is the realisation that I feel am at home in a workshop, a design playroom full of tools, gadgets and materials, the ‘Playdough’ of design and innovation, the place where I started learning with the things I enjoy, a sense of possibility. The Core 3 project; the process of ideation to prototype is an example of cross-disciplinary thinking and processes. Watching the model-maker demonstrate how to solder a series of wires and components together, his hands skillfully held tiny EL wire that separate the hairline radial wires from its core, copper tape, pigtails, quads and inverters. My vocabulary expanded by the minute. My first workshop experience, at four years old, watching my father solder electronic components onto a circuit board, the oscilloscope screen moving with green traces of sound, the shelves of loudspeakers with their precious, soft centre, a cone that must not be touched, of course I did invert one just to see. All the sound and light measuring equipment and his intensity of concentration, this was his playroom of inventions. These observations gave an early appreciation of things that technology could deliver, labour saving and marvellous. I knew that a combination of studied knowledge such as Algebra and Binary Codes with an idea could deliver a product after many hours of human processing, trial and error. The process of studying a suite of Art and Design electives has reaffirmed my abilities and removed the fear factor of learning ‘apparently hard’ technologies to discover these can be unwrapped by a strategic process of compare and contrast, keys used as stepping stones, quite literally on the computer, soon to be touch screens. Core 3 facilitates enquiry, experiment and the propelling impetus of a twelve week deadline that completes the course. My interests are drawn to the new, equipment that can deliver a service, actions and functions that appear seamless, experiences that are fun until moving to its next iteration. Humans have short lived satisfaction of experiences, we pause briefly to enjoy, our nature propels us to enquire or take it further, the ‘more’ please of our culture. The design processes of refinement of more deliverables are intuitive, the fun is in exploration, the ‘making it happen’ is the time intensive and ‘stepping stone’ activity that is hard to accurately quantify. My misjudgment of time to build and deliver an App was made on insufficient knowledge of the process, however I know coded functionality can be leveraged to action what I want to achieve, the old adage don’t ‘redesign the wheel’. I re-evaluated my objectives and returned to the basics of discovery with cardboard and sticky tape models, scaling and sketching, trying different materials and fabrications, talking with people who have skills in the areas I was working in, model making, construction, video editing, electronics and printing materials.
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