A project that I Admire:

Link: http://www.disneyresearch.com/project/mechanical-characters/

Here is a project by Disney. It is a project that allows someone who hos does not have very high technical skills to create mechanized animals simply and easily. I really enjoy projects by Disney because they are always pushing for ways to augment the way we experience the digital and physical worlds. I particularly admire this project because their process is remarkable. They created software that analyzed curves generated by geared mechanisms. They then compiled the data into a database and using the collected data they were able to output a certain mechanism that produced a curve as close as possible to a custom curve that was then drawn by a use. Using this information they drew the movement of say leopard’s leg, the example they used, then they were able to generate the mechanisms needed to produce similar movement t the one studied. Finally they used this process to create a bunch of other mechanized creature, that are also very easy to build.

 A project that I found surprising:

Link: http://plethora-project.com/completeworks/2012/09/27/bloom/

This is the project that really surprised me. This project was done at the Bartlett by Jose Sanchez. This project initially caught my eye because it reminded me of a project the is currently being done by Madeline Gannon. The work flow is what I naturally expected. It was a generated mostly by a parametric script in Grasshopper. But the part that surprised me is that the complex form generated is composed of one singular component that repeats continuously across. As shown on the website, this one piece is able to create a plethora of objects ranging from benches and crawl-spaces to bikes and even humanoid objects. The piece is created through injection molding, which creates a strong seamless unit, and contributes to the strength of the over all products created by it. This is a very surprising project and really embodies the idea of using computational design to mass produce customizable objects.

A project that I found Disappointing:

Link: http://www.biothing.org/?p=343

Lastly this is the project I am a little disappointed by. It is a trend that has been showing up a lot in architecture recently. Its the idea of using algorithms to generate facades and other building conditions to help the deal with environmental impacts on its skin. This idea think is pretty awesome, and the process they have here is really cool as well. They have made a a Java applet that uses particle simulation to calculate how an element, be it water or sunlight will behave on a certain surface and then it simultaneously adjust the surface to optimize water flow or shading. Their example seems to deal with shading. The pit fall of the project is a bit under whelming and looks like a generic tessellated facade. That aside I think they have developed a great framework to produce compelling responsive work. The results of this framework needs a little fine tuning.