“I don’t need a drill, I need a hole on the wall”
产品导向 用户导向 结果导向
daily routines: what do you do
let them talk & dig in: 5 whys
DIVERSITY
visualizing
实地考察2次左右，选取active时段，
Remade week 2: reflection of interview and readings
- What did you learn?
- What is your position or point of view?
- How do you feel about it?
- Now what? What are you going to do about it and how?
For the talk with the trash collector 闫师傅, it was very informative. I actually had a community trash collector back in Beijing, so I did know about this job before. But there were something new for me to learn also.
What I did not know before was how the prices fluctuate throughout the “seasons” as the Shifu was calling it. It did make sense to me tho because they were selling the recyclables to the government but I truly assumed that they decide the prices all by themselves.
Also I didn’t know that so many things that I usually throw into the recycle bin were not taken by the collectors and that there were things that they wouldn’t bother to recycle just because of the price so that was also something new.
In terms of the opinion on the job, I realize there are many negative opinions especially among Chinese households against those seemingly “lesser” jobs so I’m glad that Shifu was treated with respect among his family.
For the reading:
I guess what I learned from it was the details on how people initially thought about plastic bags and the battle back and forth on the ban and fees against it in the USA. What I was most surprised about is how advertisements can diverge people’s attention from what problems they are interested in and what sounds “emergent” to them, and how corporates like ACC can abuse that characteristic about human beings to manipulate the public’s opinion and feelings towards plastics. Because in the end, public opinions are important and people are generally stupid……
For me personally, I’m all for any actions that go against the usage of plastic bags or paper bags or actually any human-made products that are not sustainable, but again, the success of them largely depends on how the public feels towards those products, which is hard because public’s mind is easily manipulated. So I guess the most long-term goal is to better educate the public, and also as we discussed, provide a way or option for the public to live more sustainably, such as labeling the kinds of plastic used in certain products to facilitate more effective recycling or provide plastic-free options in stores.
Remade blog 1: documentary and reading
- What are the things that surprised you the most?
- For me it was the fact that the movie was made so many years ago and the problem that it discusses is still not only relevant but getting worse. I have been exposed to a lot of materials about white pollution that no big numbers really surprised me anymore, in fact I’m fully expecting those numbers described in the documentary going up 10 times or more by today. So what got my attention was how little voice documentaries like this had and how little our mindsets has changed towards the issue.
- Did you previously know about the garbage patch before viewing the film?
- I know there are million tons of plastic garbage floating in the ocean but I thought they were just floating around, never expected for them to form a gigantic patch.
- What is your reaction to this? How does it make you feel?
- Honestly I’m accustomed to the problem. I used to feel incredibly angry at it but now I just feel pretty disappointed.
- A quote that appeared in the movie was:
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” – Margaret Mead
What does this statement mean to you? Reflect on a time when you made a small change and it resulted in a large result.- I guess for the environmental problem it’s not entirely accurate. Sure people like the makers of this film are really dedicated and influential, but the truth is the problem is not becoming less dire after this documentary. I do recognize the difference they make and sure they have won over a multibillion-dollar corporation for once but this does not solve the problem entirely, we still have to consider the international interactions with laws of different countries come into play, and also the interest of their own multibillion-dollar companies. All in all, I think the problem is a bit too complicated for a small group of people to solve, and the world is a bit too big for a small group of people to change.
- However, a small group of dedicated people can definitely make a difference for sure. Because the group is small, they are highly coordinated and there are fewer conflicts of interest. Just like the small group that won the campaign against ACC (if I remember it correctly).
- I guess for me, I can’t recall anything “physical” that had a big change in the result because of a small change I made. All the big “Yes this is working out!” moment has been the collective effort of changing and optimizing several critical parts of whatever the thing was that I was working on. So for me it was mostly the mental attitude or opinion or feeling that I could alter drastically by just making small changes. During the start of the pandemic in China, my social media was filled with negative news about the situation getting worse and worse everyday, and people’s emotions weren’t that stable during that time so there was also tons of complaining and ridicule and what we call 阴阳怪气 towards the situation on the internet. I was completely overwhelmed by the news, so I decided to protect myself and not be exposed to such negativity for a while. Felt better after doing that since I didn’t have to bear the emotional burden that I didn’t have to.
- Do you think anyone in your family or your friends is aware of this problem? What can you or your family do on a daily basis that may have a positive impact on the garbage patch?
- I don’t know of any family members who are, but my parents usually buy their vegetables in a local market where you can bring your own bags to carry the groceries.
- For me I carry my own bag whenever I go shopping, I buy big bottles of water that last me for weeks instead of small ones for single-use, I try to use my own bottle when I could, and I do my best at garbage sorting.
- What steps do you need to take to convince your family or friends to make a change in their habits?
- I think the biggest problem is to change their mindsets about how the problem NEEDS our collective effort to solve. Because most people I know are still under the impression that it is impossible for a single person to do anything just because of the sheer amount of force of the corporations and government. So it is important that they know that this problem needs everyone.
- What can be done about it? What should be done about it? Is recycling the answer to the problem?
- Do more ourselves, and do our best to educate others around us.
- Get as many people to be on the side of science and reasoning rather than on the side of their own opinion and conspiracy and feeling of hopelessness as individuals as possible so we have a chance to affect the policy; encourage wholesale stores; design and manufacture more eco-friendly options of plastic substitute; recycle or chemically alter what we already have dumped into useful products.
- No it’s not. As the documentary said, reduce and reuse comes before that. So cutting down the manufacturing of plastic should be of a higher priority (at least than what is is right now). But at the same time I would argue it is the most difficult problem to solve because it involves the interest of the biggest stakeholders and it roots deeply in our society.
- What is service-learning? What does it mean for different stakeholders? The community you are serving? The faculty teaching the course? The DSS program? And yourself?
- A form of experiential education in which students engage in activities that address human and community needs, together with structured opportunities for reflection designed to achieve desired learning outcomes. (Jacoby, 1996c)
- My own definition based on the reading: a combined experience of learning about the needs of a “client” and providing service towards them, experiences gained from the reflection of which can be used to optimize the service further and form a healthy loop.
- The community will benefit by receiving innovative help from the students that are designed to meet their needs, and also gain more visibility towards some of their problems and so on. (as discussed on page 12 of the reading)
- The faculty will explore new and more hands-on ways of teaching the same material, gain real-life experience which might be beneficial to researchers and so on. (as discussed on page 13 of the reading)
- For the DSS program, this brings effective solutions to the problem they are solving, helps to explore the needs of different communities and to build relationships; helps their students learn about the interests and needs of their communities.
- For me personally, although this needs time to be tested, I am envisioning myself learning a great bit about the community that I am working with, including their history, their visions, their attitude towards life as an ordinary person, but also more concrete things like how they operate, how they perceive our ideas, how they interact with us as who are generations apart, and how they try to suffice their own needs by working with us. I can also get into making real stuff for real person which could bring disagreements and conflict of ideas, which could facilitate the improvements of our approach.
- Time is very precious in our busy modern-day life. Why are you devoting your precious time to community service?
- Same as any other hands-on-experience based activities, doing this could gain me knowledge that could not be easily obtained only through studying in universities. Basically “see outside of the books” as I would say.
test blog for remade
HIIIIIIII
Woodworking for Art and Design final project blogpost
For the final project of this course I chose to make a Cajon drum out of selected material and with a custom design of the pattern.
Inspiration and Design:
The main design element of the cajon box is from the various cutting board designs on the internet, which usually use woods in high contrast in colors to make simple and colorful patterns. Usually one black one pale and one red, sometimes there is yellow but it is kinda rare.
For mine I designed it to be three major stripes of red (African padauk) and black (walnut), with white (maple but then decided beech might be better) thin stripes in the middle. (loosely inspired by my middle school uniform by the way)
I thought it gives a nice color contrast and would finish nicely.
So I directly ordered the wood boards at a rough size from Taobao and got them delivered.
Fabricating:
I trimmed my boards to size according to a relative size with each other on the table saw. Then I glued them all together according to my design. In this step I used a lot of clamps to eliminate as many gaps as I could, because in my research I found that for wood instruments it is important to avoid gaps in the walls of the sound chamber because it will muffle the sound by a lot.
The first picture was for the bottom, I just found a bunch of random walnut pieces and glued them together. I didn’t think it would work but it did, it came out of the planer much cleaner than I thought.
Speaking of the planer, I then proceed to plane all the wood boards i have for the side pieces (after getting rid of most of the glue squeeze-outs). They did not take too long to plane because I already had them pretty much to the sides.
I then went on the table saw to test out the rabbet joint I was gonna use for the box. I used a piece of scrap ply both to test if the joint fits my boards and also the depth into which I cut into the board (I was able to see this on the layers of the plywood).
I was not able t0 get the joints perfectly flat and parallel with the sides of the boards because the boards were slightly curved because I left them in the lab for a little too long before doing the joints. This turned out to be somewhat of a problem because I was not able to close the gaps in the sides of the box perfectly when I glued up the frame of the box. It looked kind of obvious but I will live with that.
Then using these random right angle clamps I found I was able to stand these boards up and glue them together. I probably did not clamp the perfect way so I ended up with some more gaps (especially in the back with the 5 mm plywood), which I did plan to fix with some epoxy and gold dye, I thought it might look nice when I fill them up, bit like Kintsuki.
I was planning to add some corner pieces like this to hold it up better but I talked to the professor and we decided it was not necessary.
then I used the router the rounded up the edges after I tested on a scrap wood about the bits. (this was roughly when one of the vacuums broke lol)
Then I sanded it to 240, applied water and sanded again with the ROS and repeated it until no wood fiber was raised after the water was applied.
The last step was to prepare the front panel. According to the sketch, I was able to decide where the screws go, so I first punched a small dent on the exact point of the screw, then drilled a small hole that was just slightly smaller than the screw size. Then using that drilled board, I was able to drill holes along the walls and installed the front panel. One highlight here was I used a bigger drill bit and drill in the opposite direction to make dents for the screw head to settle in so that the front of the Cajon would be completely flat. 
then using table saw I was able to make these little notches for the snare to go in (without glue) so that the snare would be detachable and replaceable.
Then after a bit of final finishing and sanding I will be done by tomorrow.
Discussion and reflection:
the slight curving of the glued board was honestly a little bit surprising, I might better off doing the joint cutting right after I glued up the boards and they have dried. Otherwise, there won’t be much for me to change if I were to do it again. However if I were to improve the project further on I might choose to use nicer plywoods and screws and probably use one solid piece for the bottom.
final project plan
Project title: custom-built Cajon drum (possibly with adjustable snare)
Description: a Cajon drum is a percussion instrument that can create the sound of a drum kit but can also be used in other applications such as a solo or in situations where drum kits would be too loud. It consists of the body which is a wooden box, a snare placed inside the box to create sound texture, and a hole in the back for spreading the vibration. My goal for this project is to make the box as perfect as possible and try out different patterns using different woods in the side walls. If everything works well, I may consider making the snare attachment adjustable.
Motivation:
i have been wanting to buy a Cajon for a long time but haven’t got the time to actually try one out in the music shop. So I want to take the chance and make one myself, if it worked then great, if it sounds terrible at least I could give this as a gift to someone else (lol).
Three examples of objects:
p1: solid wood cajon using maple and walnut, front and back panels are ply
p2: wood pattern on the sides, absolutely beautiful but really hard to get uniform shapes
p3: looks like a solid piece of wood is used for the side panels.
The biggest difference is how the side panels are made. And also how the walls are joined together. The first one uses box joint which I think would be time-consuming, plus I am not a big fan of that aesthetic. However, p1 is probably the way I am going to design my walls, just different kinds of wood with big color contrast in stripes of different width. I think that would make a very pretty design. For the joint I would go for the design in p2 and 3, I think it hides the seam well, especially 2.
There are no specific artists I could find who specify in making cajons but there are certainly lots of videos online……
Build plan:
Stock: two to three colors of wood that have fairly high contrast and are fairly strong. Like maple, walnut, and whatever that red panel used to demonstrate book matching was……
Construction steps:
(depending on the design, subject to change)
make the side panels: cut different types of stock into roughly the same thickness and width, glue and plane.
joints: make hidden joints with table saw.
figure out how to install the snare.
drill hole in the back panel.
assemble all the walls except the front
install the snare
add the front panel.
woodworking project3: bandsaw box
Inspiration and ideation:
For this bandsaw box project I wanted to re-create something from one of my favorite games Minecraft. I thought it would be fun to make a box based on one of the wooden blocks. I chose the crafting table because it has rather complicated pattern which I thought would look nice recreating with different types of wood.
I decided to use maple for the main body of the block, alternating with plywood boards for the darker stripes around the perimeter, and finally walnut for the dark vertical stripes. Rather than a regular drawer, I envisioned this box to be opened from the top, which means a different drawer design altogether (which I will discuss later).
The fabrication process:
I started by planing the maple and the walnut using the machine (which made a big mess) as well as by hand, I was curious to try out the method some of us did with their walnut which they glued them up and planed them by the machine, but later I found out it wasn’t necessary because I only needed thin strips of the wood.
I glued the different woods together and made sure they are aligned as best as I could at least on one side so as to minimize later cutting and sanding.
then I cut down the block to size, cut out the grooves along the sides using the router, and then inserted the walnut stripes.
one technical highlight here is that I used chisels and a hammer to flatten out the sides of the grooves (created by the inevitable errors of the router) so that the stripe fits easily into the groove.
then I did the regular procedure of cutting the core out of the block and creating a tray out of it, but when I was cutting the bottom the band saw blade curved and cut into the wall so I had to start from the other side.
unfortunately I didn’t have a photo documentation of what happened then but basically it did something like this: the blade curved and at a large margin. that mainly was because of the fence I was using, because I was cutting off such a great amount of wood, the blade (although I was using the half-inch wide one) was under so much pressure that it wants to bend to either side, in which case you are better off using your hand to adjust the direction of the wood (sometimes rotating as far as 45 degrees) to account for the bending of the saw blade.
When cutting the drawer I accidentally cut the bottom at a slight angle and it was not flat at all so I had to sand the middle section short a bit and replace the bottom with a piece of plywood that I know was flat but this ended up making the drawer a little too short for the shell, btu it was not a huge problem.
what was a huge problem though was I could have done some more planning and insert the walnut stripes after I had glued the walls and the bottom back together (even cutting the groove before that) so that the cutting won’t show as much on the outside (especially when the band saw went wrong). I will have to fill them in with fillers later.
Future plan:
in progress, laser-cut pieces almost ready to be added onto the box
Project 2: spice cabinet
Background Story
For this project I really didn’t think I have too many small object to store, mainly because I simply just put everything in my pocket. However I have always been a fan of smart kitchen gadgets so I thought it would be cool if I could build something for my kitchen. So I looked around, and found lots of small bottles of spice and small tasting spoons that were sort of just lying on the counter top and looked kinda messy, so I decided to build a little spice cabinet.
p 1, 2: the bottles of spices & the place I wanted to place the spice rack in my kitchen
Designing and Sketching:
So using a caliper I measured the dimensions of all the small bottles very presicely (which I later discovered I didn’t have to), and used that to finish the design of the cabinet. I also designed the way to hold the spoons in this stage.
Then I tried to design the Illustrator file. Here I rtied my best to fit everything into a 40*20 board, while the gaps in the middle were all exactly 6.35mms wide. However later when Andy was modifying the file he made all the gap 15mm wide to prevent the cnc going two times on the same line……
p 4, 5: before and after modifying.
Fabricating:
So I CNCed it, and a few things I thought were important: firstly the thickness of the board should be noted before anything because some of us were using 15mm while others were using 18mm, this changes the setting of the cnc so its important to take note of that before everything — even before designing; secondly, blue tape is usefull in preventing tearing.
technical highlights: I made a quick jig for cutting the 45-degree angle on the side pieces, which made the process a lot quicker and more precise.
Sanding and finishing:
to be done……
project 1 documentation: food serving board
part 1: the fabrication process:
0. researching and sketching:
the original title of the project is cutting board so I thought that it would be fun to make a cutting board that looks like it can cut stuff. So I found this image on pinterest which is a cleaver-shaped food platter. (I wasn’t able to find the original image I was referencing to originally but here is a similar one also on pinterest)
- drafting and cutting the shape out of the wood:
the band saw was used and its thinner blade gave me a bit more control over cutting corners and sharper turns.
luckily I didn’t have any inner holes to cut otherwise I would have to use the string saw (the one with the super-thin detachable blade with which you could cut inside a shape) which I do not like to use because it is very slow and pretty hard to control.
I chose the shape and design for it is fun to hold and play with while having enough area to actually hold a substantial amount of things on it. Also with the two holes, it is easy to be hung on walls thus easy to store.
2. drilling and sanding:
I drilled the two holes using the drill press and the hand driller. The bottom hole got snapped a bit because I was changing up the drill bits a bit too fast and one of the bigger bits got stuck in the hole.
Also I didn’t take the time to sand the inside of the bigger hole enough and I wasn’t able to sand the smaller hole entirely because I wasn’t sure how to. So next time I would avoid small holes like that if possible (or find some rods to glue the sandpaper on probably?).
3. routing and finishing:
using the router I was able to smooth out the angles in the handle and the back of the cleaver. The processor went not as messy as I thought because it was my first time using a router. I burned some of the areas because I stayed at the same spot for a little too long but it was easy to just sand it off later.
When applying the finishing I saw some irregularities which I didn’t see when I was sanding: there were some grooves that might have been created due to the sawdust on the table where my piece was touching and moving so I might need to sand once again to eliminate them. Otherwise I thought the finishing worked great, the surface looked smooth, just not as dark as I wanted it to be but it’s not a huge problem.
Final Project Reflection and Documentation
IMG_1559 This is the final project for Digital + Sculpture. The prompt for it is to create a digital sculpture that speaks to repetition, pattern, or multiple in some ways.
Project description
In the time of social media when people can share information and opinions freely, some of the more serious terms and concepts were used and misused in social media as the title of a “hashtag” or a trend, so repeatedly that their original meaning begins to fade away into nothingness. More often than not, the hashtag posters on social media haven’t even thought of the meaning of the concept they are posting — they just think that it is cool to follow the trend and pretend to be thinking about the deeper concepts.
This project is the first piece of a group of kinetic sculptures that tries to convey the idea above. It consists of the main part which is a group of laser cut pieces with the shape of a hashtag, placed in specific ways to form a shadow that has the shape of the Chinese word “女权” (feminism) when the light was cast on at a specific angle. When the main part rotates, the shadow turns into the original form of the laser cut pieces, which are just meaningless hashtags. The rotation of the main part is determined by a dataset of the frequency the word “女权” has been used on Weibo (a social media platform) over the years. The more frequently the word is used, the more the piece will rotate towards the ‘hashtag’ side.
video documentation:
The ideation process:
I have always been obsessed with shadow arts, I think through the shadow they tell one time more story than ordinary sculptures so I wanted to expand in this field myself. The initial inspirations come from a pinterest post that I saw, and the work of Mr. Hu Weiyi. (linked in the images below)
I wanted to build something like the first piece but also want to have my own narrative inside just like the second one. So I pondered upon the feeling of “fragments” in the first piece and came up with the idea of “meaning becomes fragmented or dissolves”.
The fabrication and prototyping process:
p1: 2 plans, rotating the light or rotating the sculpture
p2: testing the definition of the shadow with cardboard
p3: hand drilling the holes in the supporting plate, to have more control over where precisely I want to put the sticks
p4: printing the characters out and use them as building templates
p5: detailed look at how are the individual pieces were put together: Laser cut pieces, hot glued on a wooden stick, then fixed in a hole on the grid board at the exact position.
p6: the finished piece (light is distorted by the projector)
Reflection and future improvements:
I think this piece is one of my more completed projects recently, it speaks to my true feelings about the internet and social media in a precise way, and it is clean and pleasing to look at. So, as for this single piece, I wouldn’t say there is too much to be improved, however, I do plan to make this into a series of sculptures in which each one has a different word that, similar to the word “feminism”, got also so overused that their meaning dissolved. So for the future, I will have a more factory-line fabrication process and change the plan of displaying them.