Diary writing / Midterm / Building Cubicles by Daniela & Youmna

Building Cubicles by Daniela & Youmna

One thing you found surprising about making your project?

We decided to build a set of mini cubicles all embedded into one single structure, a building. We wanted to have different characters living in there. The piece is like a small scale installation in which the public interacts with it in two ways: In an analog form (the public manually opens various doors in order to see the characters) and the second interactions comes from sensors. Once they open the doors, the characters react to the person’s presence and they start to do something.

During the building of one of the characters, I researched about different ways for making the gears and cams and the whole structure to move the way I envisioned it and surprisingly it was extremely hard. Surprisingly because even I have been practicing with different gears and cams and structures with the other paper toys, when I started playing with other materials such as chipboard I encountered naturally new challenges. I had to built three structures before I got one working the way I wanted it to work and still it is not completely functioning as good as I want it to function.

One thing you really like about your project?

I really like our aesthetics choice. I am very happy with the way our characters turned out and the look and feel that the materials we used give. We wanted for the piece to look animated, comic like, funny and unique. I think by using chipboard and combining it with thread and different textures we achieved the sketchy look we were looking for.

One thing you think is unique or important about your project?

I think the fact that we put both our automates (the characters) in a a building, having them live somewhere makes it unique. We really wanted for them to be shown in their cubicles and I am glad we did achieve that.