Make it work

The last week’s focus was to be able to create a solid and working prototype. It was for us essential to be able to have a live demo on the presentation day where the public could experience our input device and its affection on the screen in real time.To achieve this goal, we choose to code everything from the scratch with Processing. Rhino and grasshopper were really good to prototype our idea but we felt more comfortable to build our end product in Processing.

The end result worked that way; We redesigned a clock to work within a work schedule. It starts at 8 am. and finishes at 6 pm. Within these boundaries, a dot is rotating according to the current time of the day. The circle starts off small and even. As soon as the user sends a signal by pressing on his input device, the circle starts to expand and become disrupted. The more the circle is disrupted, the more stressful of painful was your day.

But our process did not stop there. We also wanted to develop a fully working exportable system to be able to send, at the end of each day, the shape of the laser cutter. To achieve this, we developed a simple script that would, at the end of the day, export in SVG our circle. We also added a few extra information like the drilling hole in the middle, the date (year.month.day) and a small arrow to help the user position his plate at the right angle when stacking.

All of these goals were most helpful in the process of doing things right, rather than the look and feel of the end product. It was still very important for us to not only have a solid prototype but a solid work process behind to be able to test it in a real work environment as soon as possible, without requiring any Wizard of Oz technic.