Future Artefact
- Angela Huang
- Oct 31, 2020
- 4 min read
For the last assignment for my class 'The Future of Work and Play' we were given the brief to create a artifact that is set in the future of when our insights has been achieved, in my case this is the year 2030. The future I am looking into is 'The Future of Tangible Cultural Heritage' and my insight is 'Government and specialist will work collectively with the community to build a strong online database that acknowledges the diversity of tangible cultural heritage that everyone can connect with.'
To begin we did some exercise to get a better picture of who, what and where we could work with. Here is my people, places, things model and system map.
PEOPLE, PLACES, THINGS
SYSTEM MAP
Through this I wanted to focus my physical artifact towards the community and target them as an individual.
Next step is to brainstorm ideas, using the precedent research completed from my previous assignment I was able to come up with a list of good and bad ideas.
-Camera that creates 3D models
-Device that projects holograms
-Hologram statue and artifacts on streets
-Personal portable museum
-VR interactive museum
-QR code that records artifacts
-AR diary
-AR Photograph recording
From this I picked ones that I like the most and began creating some quick sketches.
After creating these sketches and talking to different people, I decided that I am really happy with the app aspect of the idea but the actual model I initially wanted to build may be too big and bulky so it isn't very effective.
Keeping similar ideas I decided to change the physical product into a jewellery, necklace in particular. I have never done anything regarding jewellery design so I began with looking at existing products and creating some mood boards.
With these I created more sketches to what I envision my product may look like.
For the app, at first the app only act as a way to record an individuals own stories very similar to a blog, the only twist is that in order to access these stories they must use the jewellery as a key. The problem with this is that it is basically like any social media app and doesn't really mean anything and why would users want to keep a physical key.
To solve this I made another mechanism which is timing. There are certain posts that the user can set a time in the future to view and will only be available at that special moment, I thought it would be an interesting way for users to see what they are like in the past. I also really liked the idea that if they set the time long enough they may have forgotten about it and opening this message would be a surprise.
I also made a few changes to the jewellery and made it customization to it is more personalized to the individual. The reason why I didn't want to get rid of the physical aspect is because linking back to the future i'm exploring, I wanted the user to understand the importance of keeping and preserving because these objects tells the story of a generation. Also the fact of having a jewellery that you can pass down instead of just phone seems to me a little more lively.
Then it come to creating the prototype, because the jewellery part is customization so I didn't really have anything in particular, there are a few rules with the creation of the jewellery which is: made up of simple shapes and needs to include a clear component(possibly acrylic plastic). To make these I ordered clay and resin online.
While waiting for them to arrive I went and explored possibilities with chain. The most common now are silver and gold chains, but to make it more customization and cultural I thought some designs from friendship bracelet could be a interesting option so I went on to make some.
This experience was very interesting and I can imagine myself creating hundreds of different patterns with just three colours.
Finally the materials arrived and I faced my biggest problem yet. The resin bottle has cracked during the delivery and I was only able to save a very small portion. Being my very first time using clay and resin that didn't help at all, also I didn't have time to order more so I had to use what I got. On the left are the sad little surviving resin
And I don't know If it's obvious but this is me trying to remove the resin from the mold but failing because I hasn't completely dried yet. It went over time because I didn't measure the proportion of the two resins properly
Finally after much struggles I was able to produce two semi alright pendents.
Still not the best results but and if you look clearly you can see the clay cracked when it went into the oven. Because of this I quickly changed my main focus to the presentation of the app because that is the biggest focus of my project and I was able to create a mock up poster of my design which shows the interfaces and features.
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