week5

Maker Skills and Attitude:

What did i learn?

This week, our assignment will focus on the knowledge walk. We can choose an assignment in teams of four people and into the city to collect data. Our choice fell on cuisine. The three people I am linked to are Duy, Elisa and Audrey. I learned to think of one concept with all different data. We even managed to process a lot of data in one project. This means that the location of the restaurants, origin of the restaurant, smells of restaurants, types of herbs from different countries, smells mapped, wind directions and of course the knowledge mile route all got in one project. It was a nice experience to explore the route together and do research.

Collaborative Learning:

This week I was finally linked to Audrey. The nice thing about this whole project is that we are the ones with a small language barrier. Since we both have trouble with it, it went very well with communicating. Maybe the pressure is less high to make mistakes if the other person doesn't know better. We both saw it as a challenge. Looking back at our collaboration at the end of the project, it was the best so far. That was because our creativity matched each other exactly. We brainstormed for half an hour and then built an incredibly cool project of which we were both very proud and where we paid a lot of attention to details. I hadn't thought this beforehand.

First we went into town with the four of us and all have a different kind of data collected.

Rick: Business cards
Duy: Music in Restaurant
Elisa: Pictures of entrance
Audrey: Interior color

After the investigation I was linked to Audrey and we chose to use this data:

business cards - names & locations of restaurants - smells of restaurants

Concept:

Audrey said "in France smells everything to waste here at every corner of the street a different tasty smell. I just don't know where those smells come from..."

This was the basic for our concept.

Brainstorming with Audrey!

List of restaurants and location from the Knowledge Mile

First sketches of end result

Inspiration for making smells visible

We collected the herbs!

Our plan was to incorporate the herbs into the final product so that the user could always smell them. The only problem is that the smell also comes from herbs. So we had to come up with something to put the herbs in so that they would keep for a long time.

Audrey came up with a brilliant small envelop for the herbs

Suddenly I thought about how they keep weed. So I called the Coffeeshop the Boerenjongens if they might have cups for me to keep our herbs in.

We measured the trays and cut them out of MDF with the laser printer.

Note: The hole must be 2mm larger than the trays to allow them to be properly clamped in the MDF.

Now that we have all the data, it needs to be converted into a visual. I have experience with this before and have taught Audrey how to create data visuals. She picked it up very quickly and also came up with additional ideas.

Datavisual in Illustrator

For the back we have chosen foam. The reason for this is that we can then clamp the business cards in it. Especially a practical choice.

WHAT DID I LEARN?

TECNICS:
- Collecting datas
- Mapping

MATERIALS:
- MDF
- Paper
- Glass boxes
- Herbs/spices
- Foam
- Photo paper

MACHINES/SOFTWARES:
- Illustrator
- Laser cut

We had an idea that would take time, but that wasn't much time for. So we made a tight schedule and did everything together to learn from each other. We used a lot of different materials to make the product. But we also experimented with materials to improve the shelf life of herbs. We also used the laser printer a lot and applied it to several materials.