Figure 7 (above): Attempt at cutting out an entire skin out of plywood (instead of connecting individual strips together). The fabricated model was not successful as the skin remained rigid and was hard to bend. Figure 8 (below): Changing the base shape from the normal strip to circles. This offered more looping possibilities.
technique development SECTION B.4.
The materialisation process for our prototypes was relatively straightforward as the main premise for our area of focus was to experiment with how we could alter the typical rigid properties of timber and make it a fluid and flexible form. We were heavily inspired by the Dukta/Wood Loop project by Christian Kuhn and Serge Lunin (mentioned in section B.1.), in particularly, how simple but precise incisions dramatically transformed the wood into something that was able to be flexed into different forms. Hence, our technique development mainly focuses on strips and platonic shapes, and how varying the amount we cut out of these base forms had an affect on the flexibility of the plywood. For our technique development, we felt that we needed to experiment first with the plywood material in the form of physical prototypes, and from these prototypes
we would encounter its limitations, which we can then input as parameters into our Grasshopper algorithms at a later stage. We opted to computate our physical prototypes in Autocad, as it was a program that we were very comfortable in using (in comparison to Grasshopper) and it was quicker for us to directly draw the shapes we wanted cut on Autocad rather than attempting to make it in Grasshopper first, as at the beginning stages, we did not know what would’ve been important to have as variables for later alterations in the Grasshopper definitions. We realise that this manner of development by choosing not to engage fully with Grasshopper from the beginning is quite different to the way other groups have approached the design, but we feel that this manner of development has worked well for us and what we wanted to focus on with timber: that is, how to increase its flexibility.