First 3 Days
Understanding the ideas and our roles. Immaterial Vs. Material.
Being in one of the immaterial groups we have worked out that our role is less about the design and more about creating a system that can create the "ghost" of the design. This system is then fed with information and decisions driven by the material groups, to develop this "ghost" into a design.
The first part of the process, being an immaterial group was to work out how we can create the 'Ghost' of a design. We explored tutorials on ExplodeBReps and Parametric Monkey to find things we thought would be useful in the creation of our system. Through these Rhino and Grasshopper tutorials we initially were able to create a series of scripts based primarily around metaballs linked to points, that creates some representation of space, we really weren't sure what it was we were creating at this point, and while the metaball "blobs" looked cool, they didn't really mean anything.
This is my first metaball script in Grasshopper. The inputs of the screen are a series of points determining the centrepoint of the metaballs.
and this is how they came out in Rhino.
After some discussion with the adjacent material group we were able to come to a few concepts that could use these metaballs to create something more tangible. By using points to represent places where people gather, or where certain focal points of the space are, these metaballs gather on these points, creating larger spaces at points of chaos where the most "stuff" happened.
Physically, the biggest problem with metaballs is that they don't generate a surface, they're actually just a series of 2D lines, stacked in the Z axis. No matter how much we tried to overcome this we couldn't work out a way to create a surface on these metaballs. Luckily, I found a freely available Grasshopper definition that creates solid metaballs.
Metaball script that saved this idea.
and this is how they appear in Rhino.
The rest of Wednesday was then spent on a client meeting, where we showed some of what we had made up until this point, and discussed ideas of what they want out of the space. The general consensus was that the focus should be on dividing the public from the private, creating some more effective wayfinding, and separating the stairs from the exhibition space.
