Finished Projects – Page 92

Magnetic Water Carrier

These rambunctious neighborhood kids during a heat wave on a summer day were the inspiration for the fire hydrant extension. One of my favorite things about living in Brooklyn is the gathering around the fire hydrant to stay cool.

Supplies were investigated and gathered from hardware stores and summer clearance.

I decided to use a low-fi way of crafting to celebrate the ideas of play and fun this design embodies.

The extension has a magnetic attachment which holds to the cast iron of the fire hydrant. Most fire hydrant water isn’t potable so the magnets have a dual purpose of filtering the water. One can easily fill up a bottle to stay hydrated on those hot summer days.

Play can be diverted to the side walk, helping children stay safe from traffic.

Different nozzles on the hoses create different jets and streams of water.

Everyone enjoys cooling off!

DIY Light-up Blow-out Party Favor

The project dictated that I make an electric party favor. I chose to make a tutorial video describing the process by which one can take ordinary inexpensive party favors and “light them up”.

Initially I was very ambitious, thinking of ways to make a breath-sensitive switch to activate the light, or how to make a strip of lights along the blowout, but in the end I chose to make something that could be more readily replicable at home. Also, it was very important to me that what I made, being electrical, be fully functioning and I was not confident in the feasibility of my earlier ideas.

The instructional video I made is lengthy but comprehensive, as if it were made for someone with no real experience with circuitry. I hope that it’s length and thoroughness isn’t too much of a deterrent for it to be useful.

Here is an establishing shot of the supplies and a picture of the circuit concealed under the face.

Project One: Vegan Phone Dock

Research, Tutorials and Hacks:

Vegan 101

Etsy vegan iPhone cases

Potato battery

How fruit batteries work.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-eqmNVUh7Y

Everything you wanted to know about charging your ipod

The Vegan Iphone Dock:

This is an iphone dock designed specially for vegans. It is based on multi level Kit-set distribution model. The highest level is the Deluxe kit, with comes with everything needed excluding the fruit and crate. The Standard kit requires the user to find, hack or purchase a dog clip, copper wire, galvanized wire, fruit and a crate. There is also a free demo that shows hacker-vegans to make the entire kit from scratch by themselves.

The system works of a fairly well know chemical reaction that causes ions to move when the citric acid comes into contact with the zinc on the galvanized wire. Although sometime the iphone doesn’t indicate that it is charging it actually is, just at a much slower level than is required to switch on the charging indicator. Over time the fruit and wire will need replacing but that is the fun of the kit.

The kit was designed to suit a range of vegans from ‘standard vegans’ to ‘ultra vegans’ who criticize anything that removes natural landscapes and habitats from animals, sometimes this includes conventional electricity systems, thus the v-dock was born.

Coming to Etsy late 2013 starting at $49.90 + shipping.

Main Image 1.

by Richard Clarkson

Paperavioli (paper craft ravioli cutter)

My object was “Kitchen Utensil” and my descriptor was “Paper Craft.” I found a site online that described how to make a 16 pointed modular star: origami That made me think of a ravioli cutter that scores pasta. I also wanted to do something I had never done before and using the laser cutter for the first time seemed like a great way to do that!

For the handle I was inspired by Damon who ordered and assembled a deer and moose, cardboard laser cut model for our studio: cardboard safari

After printing the components I assembled and bonded the pieces. To make the ravioli cutter “semi” functional I proxy glued x-acto blades to the points in the star. Here is a slide show of some images from my process.

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Below is a demo video of the Paperavioli scoring pasta:

Paper Bag Pub Game

For Project #1 (Paper Bag Pub Game). I was really inspired by the beer coasters and the way recent designs have been made to incorporate the drinker with a game that is printed on the coaster. I cut up a green garbage bag and ironed it so it became a square. Then I cut out smaller pieces of plastic bags and wrote certain things that needed to be performed while at the bar. The top of coaster can be ripped open and inside the green plastic pouch would be all these pieces of plastic with dares written on them. Hopefully Your Still Standing When The Games Over!

Project One: Edible Email Notifier

At first I was a little skeptical at how I could make something so digital into an edible experience. I did some research on different email notifiers and found that they are usually audible, distracting and annoying, and they only indicate and email received without incentivizing the reading of emails. I decided to remedy these issues by creating a fun, bright, incentive system for reading your emails.

My concept was for an M&M to drop into a glass every time an email is received, and the M&Ms are “released” to you once you have read all the emails. I drew inspiration from other DIY candy dispensers, especially this one, but decided to design my own acrylic candy stand. I designed the stand around a repurposed wine bottle and laser cut it out of acrylic so the bright colored M&Ms are visible throughout the spinning. The stand is adhered together by silicon sealer, for a solid attachment with some flexibility and give.

If this was a fully-functional unit, the white box would be a servo, to rotate the wheel, and it would connect to the circuit board that is programmed to relay when an email is sent and read. My goal is to make this unit fully functional once I’ve learned the necessary skills.

I also made a stop-motion video of the email notifier working. This video is my first time making and editing a stop-motion, so I used a few different tutorials to learn how to make one. I got a general idea of how to do stop-motion at this Instructables website: http://www.instructables.com/id/Stop-Motion-3/. I used iMovie to make the video, and this youtube video was the most helpful: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipE3nCjI0IU. The final tutorial I used helped me with the music on the video: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=596923.

Project #1 Embroidergram

For Project #1 i have created what I like to call the Embroidergram, derived directly from my mashup of Embroidered + Telegram. Although it seems very straightforward, having never embroidered, nor sent a telegraph, I was at a bit of a loss.

I was easily able to find out how to embroider, and found these two YouTube videos to be very novice friendly. Video #1 Video #2.

I came across this telegram which was sent by Mark Twain the morning after his obituary was posted in the NY Times. As the story goes, he sent this from his hotel in London to his editor in New York. In todays age this probably would have been Tweeted. I thought it fitting for my telegram.

Final Steps — How does one properly display embroidery? My thoughts were it looks the best stretched in the hoop.

There she is… I was happily surprised with how this turned out. One last iteration would be to sew the edges up a bit, but I wanted to get this up for you all to see before I potentially ruin the work.

The Space Creator

To create a 3D Privacy Device, I dived into the research process by asking friends about when they felt a privacy breach and wished for a device to prevent that. A lot of answers I received were around their identity on the internet. By far, the cutest story was from my friend, Mel, who was very embarrassed as a seventh grader when her father found her diary, read it, and found out about her crush on the Filipino boy in class. Anyhow, I decided to make a “space creator” for this project. Watch and enjoy!

The space creator is a somewhat scary piece of clothing that creates a physical space around your unattended body – the back. It is inspired from having grown up in India where there is essentially no sense of physical space.

I used a tube shirt, double sided tape and artists tape to create this prototype. The bright colors make it cute and fashionable!

space_creator_1 — Looks great! Protects awesomely!

Let me know if you need to borrow it 😉

Project 1: Awkward Musical Instrument by Samantha Moore

The Thighbraphone is a two piece instrument worn on the thighs, an area everyone loves to touch and have touched. I focused on the definition of awkward as “lacking ease or grace” and chose a material that is rigid and I have little experience using – metal. The lower interior of each piece is padded with foam tape to cushion those smaller lower thighs. If you do a lot of squats, this can easily be removed to fit your gams.

Each piece of the Thighbraphone is pulled up the legs to rest above the knees. The instrument can make different sounds by being played in different ways: scraping the front with the metal wand, walking or moving to shake the bells or clamping the inner thighs together to slam the cups. You could even do a combination of these moves for a whole range of unique sounds, or grab a friend to join in on the fun!

In keeping with my upcycled ways, I used a lot of materials that can be found including baking cups, duct tubing and a metal skewer.

Project 1: Tyvek Portrait by Clay Kippen

I couldn’t help but want to do a traditional two-dimensional portrait at first. I was thinking about coating my FedEX envelopes with cyanotype emulsion and “burning” an image onto the surface. But I didn’t feel like cyanotype said anything about the versatility and durabilty of Tyvek. This material can be twisted and pulled without tearing, making it more akin to textile than paper. I did away with the cyanotype idea and went in a 3d direction. Since Tyvek is super strong, I wanted my portrait to stand on its own without a structural frame. That’s when it seemed inevitable that I would make an inflatable sculpture!

The first step was to figure out how to get air into the sculpture. I didn’t want to buy a fan or waste new material in the making of this portrait, so I ran to Sid’s bikes on 19th Street where I picked up some old tubes with presta valves.