It was a certainly good times working with Professor Joe Vidich as teaching assistant for the courses Intro to Digital Fabrication and Advanced Fabrication: Component Systems. In component systems we only had five students, and they were pushed really hard, but there was some great work. I appreciated the sensibility that yes, we would make some cool stuff with the machines, but we also would test it for performance using structural engineering analysis, and explore material properties using Solidworks parametric models. It was an ambitious agenda for a short course, and the waterjet was un-operational pretty much the whole time, but the students came through with some sweet projects using the laser cut plexi and the heat bender, the metal mill as well as the 3d printer. Visit the class blog here.
Student work above from left: HoKyung Lee, JiYoon Oh, Kiseok Oh, Dave Kwon and Christo Logan

Our lion in oil business card was chosen for submission in the Japanese Publication “World’s Business Card Collection.” Look for it in September 2009. Also, the wonderful Jackie was both co-designer and gracious hand model.
The card is made of laser cut museum board, with hand rubbed text via acetone transfer on the back, to give it that nice industrial as well as handmade quality.
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For our living architecture course, we created an interactive light installation in the elevator of Avery Hall, controllable by anyone with a cell phone and a twitter account. The simplified process includes texting an emotion to twitter from any cellular phone using the #livarch hashtag. That tweet is then picked up by a realtime search, fed through our twitterfeed rss, then added to our own twitter account. For a more detailed explanation, see this previous post on getting multiple twitter users onto one twitter feed. That emotion is then directed to our pachube feed and sent through processing to an arduino microcontroller that controls the color and pulsing of the individual leds. The installation non-invasively attaches to the surface of the elevator via magnets. Allowing it to be placed on any metal surface, such as a building exterior, furniture, or a vehicle.

The lights within the elevator respond to the mood of the user. For instance, if a student texted “happy #livarch” the space within the elevator would begin to slowly pulse with a greenish/blue hue. However, if another student sent “angry #livarch” the first light will quickly flash a bright red. There are twelve lights total and show the collective mood of the twelve most recent users.

In this way, the elevator becomes a living representation of the collective mood of the building, but it is also hoped that a feedback loop can be created, a loop that actually influences the mood of those that ride the elevator. The emotion felt in the lobby will be altered by the time you reach the sixth floor. And that new emotion becomes what gets texted back to the elevator.

Lastly, future installations will be physically located away from the target user. For instance, Avery’s mood will be projected to the elevator in Uris Hall and vice versa. In this manner, we can both create a new form of pen-pal with distant locations, but also hope that our mood, whether angry, sad, happy or nervous, will both manifest itself in a new form of architecture, but also have an effect on the greater world around us.

The project team also included Talya Jacobs and Guanghong Ou.
See more for video and code:
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After my final model from last summer was misplaced in the trash, then the compacter, the lazy days of the winter break seemed like a good time to rebuild. One of the benefits of digital fabrication is you just have to re-lasercut all the files, though there is a certain level of zen like calm in folding and gluing 300 panels. The modular panels and truss were created in grasshopper, then scripted in rhino to unroll onto sheets.
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Of the many things from Venice that I miss, this guy slinking around the apartment is a big one. Though our new tv-less apartment works pretty well too.
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We had free range of the lab last summer, and tried to use as many of the machines as possible: waterjet aluminum, foam milling with plaster casting, and metal cnc milling of a 1″ thick slab of aluminum (inaugural use!) for the joint capsules. It all came together in five minutes, ten minutes before the presentation.
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A very early fabrication project using laser cut plexi and the heat bender in the shop. It was super difficult to get a smooth deformation on the petal forms - using a heat gun to slump the plexi over a form would have been far superior.