Midterm Free Writing

Title of project: Building Cubicles by Youmna and Daniela

1- Daniela and I made a mini toy installation where users can interact with different mini doors from a cardboard building. When the user opens the door, a character would be represented and start to animate. Each character has a personality and tells a different story.

Building the gears for these different characters was pretty hard.

I started off by building one of the gear example from the Karakuri book because I wanted to make a character that has a tongue that wiggles. So I thought that making a gear that could push the tongue would be helpful.

The paper was really thin and it broke very easily.

After doing the first prototype, I decided to explore different materials such as cardboard and chipboard.

Working with these materials was better for me but sometimes the chipboard was too sturdy and it didn’t allow for the movement to happen.

So a mixture of light and heavy paper would have been ideal.

2-I really like the aesthetics of our project. Making the characters was really fun. Using different materials ranging from cardboard to poster boards to strings was very challenging. Thinking about the characters personalities was also very fun. Thinking about what emotion every character would incite in people lives was also in interesting process. I like the fact that our piece is a  combination of  humor and irony.

3-I think that the most unique thing about our piece is the fact that we created an environment for our characters through the structure of the building. We were inspired by the writer named Chris Ware and especially his piece called Building stories.