This week we had our first milestone for the project and it was the first wide-scale opportunity for us as a team to elicit feedback from the faculty as a whole. We spent the first half of the week preparing for our presentation, along with preparing our room for the faculty walkaround. On Saturday the four of us attended a CNC Routing workshop to familiarize ourselves with the tools for routing on the mill.

Our team also received some good news this week: We were selected to receive a microgrant from the The Frank-Ratchye Fund for Art @ the Frontier! We’re excited about this development because the grant will help us move forward to fabricating our installations in the second half of the semester.

Quarters, the First Milestone
Small groups of faculty spent about 20 minutes each in our project room, listened to a short overview of our project, and then spent the rest of the 20-minute period offering feedback. Feedback was generally positive regarding our project and the faculty seems really excited with our ideas so far.

Overwhelmingly, the faculty gravitated toward our Jars concept because they instantly understood it and connected with it. The Scales idea was tougher to communicate and the faculty expressed that they just didn’t care much about it. One issue with it is that while it absorbs information about a space, it displays that information back in a different language in a format that isn’t the most pleasing to the eye.

The faculty encouraged us to dig deeper in the Jars concept, to find a more apt title, and to consider how it would be used in a long term. We also received many recommendations to submit this idea to conferences such as SIGGRAPH Emerging Technologies. Needless to say, we are excited about the reception and eager to move forward!

Looking Forward
After Quarters, we sat down as a team to process through the feedback. We feel good about stepping away completely from the Scales project for now so we can focus on Jars. It’s important for us to deepen the experience and figure out how to really capture what intrigues people about the concept. We’re also fleshing out our third idea: the Lonely Column. There’s a column on the first floor of the building that is generally ignored because of the traffic that goes on around it. We want to make people become aware of it, and in effect generalize that awareness so that people become more conscious of the spaces that they walk through.

Current Challenge
Our biggest challenge right now is a technically problem. The sound modules that Jason had found are not recording and playing back audio at a decent quality. The recording sounds slightly garbled, and if we want to make the Jars concept then we will need the voices to be clearly heard inside of the jar.