Research retreat

Interim reviews this week. For me, this was a new (and obviously exciting) experience, since I have managed to miss all of the interim assessments up til now somehow. The process was relatively casual which, at this stage is a good thing as the work I (and plenty of others) have is still a bit loose - Im happy with where the design is at this point  - I've got a fairly clear concept which is open to being adapted in a number of ways and directions but I'm still happy that, if it gets too close to crunch time I can just sort of halt development and go for a final design without the whole thing being too much of a compromise - again, this level of flexibility at this stage in the game is sort of new for me, though obviously it's a good position to be and really running out of time isn't something I should be worrying about if I'm being all organised and a good student and stuff.

Tower Project

A slightly randomly slotted in week away from the research retreat project to work on structures - For me, this week has been easier to engage with - structures is something I'd like to think I have a pretty good grasp of and the week flowed really nicely with the final result being pretty much what I had in my head at the very start.

From the very beginning, I had a fairly clear idea in my head of what our tower would be like - I managed to persuade the rest of the group that it was a good idea and things went into motion pretty quickly. The final design was - in my heavily biased opinion - really cool. I decided that anyone can just build a straight up tower and make it pretty and, seeing as this was a structures project, I should do something a bit more structural so we ended up with a sort-of-cantilevered-tower-crane-type arrangement which relied on tension to stand up. Aesthetically, the final result was a bit of a Russian constructivist pylon affair, but it worked and, come the presentation, I could actually talk and argue coherently about it, since I actually had a clear vision and idea of what was going on, which was sort of a first for me at presentation time...

I reckon this clear vision carried right through the (brief) project was what made it successful - there wasn't too much going on so I could actually present properly, rather than meaning to say things and being side tracked. I'd call it a success...

It was a highly elegant affair as these photos accurately document...