Design 5 Week 2

Jewellery design in week 1 

 

a pair of shell ear rings and a wool bracelet

The process of making the wool bracelet

Materials: 8 pieces of wool and a foam disk.  Wrap the coloured wool around the foam disk in any order to create patterns.

Detial drawings

The reason I chose this structure was because I like the delicacy of the building. The wood strips foms a beautiful surface, which act as a see through wall. The detail drawings shows the wood strips attached to a few horizontal steel beams, which was attached to a large steel column. Unfortunatelly the detail drawings did not show clearly how the wood strips was attached to the steel beams.

 mock up model

Artist - Buckminster Fuller

Buckminster Fuller (July, 1895 – July, 1983)

•   Born in Massachusetts, US

• An American engineer, author, designer, inventor and futurist.

• Published more than 30 books, inventing and popularizing terms such as “Spaceship Earth”, empemeralization, and synergetics.

• The best known of architectural design is the geodesic dome.

The Geodesic Dome 

"A geodesic dome is a spherical or partial-spherical shell structure based on a network of great circles lying on the surface of a sphere. The geodesics intersect to form triangular elements that have local triangular rigidity and also distribute the stress across the entire structure. When completed to form a complete sphere, it is known as a geodesic sphere."

 New experimental jewellery

 After the research of geodesic dome, I decided to use triangle as my overall shape for my new jewellery. 

• Firstly I used toothpicks to form some triangular frames. Then, using strings to wrap the frames diagonally to form internal triangular elements which relate to the geodesic dome concept. But then I found the appearance does not turn out to be very nice, so I changed material.

• Second trial: using wood strips to form four triangular frames,  and arranged them to form a pyramid. But it turn out to be too big to be an ear ring.

• Third trial: using office clips, bended them into triangles, and chained them together to form a bracelet.

• Lastly, using string to wrap around each frame to form another internal triangle.

Result 

Additional information  - Buckminster Fuller

"Apart from geodesic dome, Fuller designed and built three prototypes of 'dymaxion car'. They had three wheels two front drive wheels and one rear, steered wheel. The engine was in the rear, and the chassis and body were original designs."

 

Tensegrity

The term tensegrity was coined by Buckminster Fuller. Tensegrity is a type of structure with an integrity based on a balance between tension and compression components.

Concept: Tensegrity structures are structures based on the combination of a few simple but subtle and deep design patterns:

• loading members only in pure compression or pure tension, meaning the structure will only fail if the cables yield or the rods buckle

•  preload or tensional prestress, which allows cables to be rigid in tension

•  mechanical stability, which allows the members to remain in tension/compression as stress on the structure increases

Thank you very much.

                                                                                      --- Presented by Win Huang.

Bibliography

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller#Best-known_work
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodesic_dome
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_car
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensegrity