Empathize: The Design Challenge this week was to create an octahedron out of cardboard and use our artistic prowess to create a design that is well executed.
Define: The materials required for this challenge include: a cutting board, an X-acto knife, ruler, cardboard, and hot glue. Other materials that I used to create my octahedron were sharpie pens and markers to fill in the empty space. The process of getting the octahedron ready were measuring out each side with a stencil and cut out each piece individually with an X-acto knife and ruler for precision.
Ideate: We were given a paper octahedron to practice on before we started cutting out cardboard pieces. On this paper cut-out I sketched a design based on the hedrons on the plane of Zendikar in the Trading Card Game Magic: the Gathering. After I sketched I cut out the excess paper and started to fold the paper to give myself a visual of how the octahedron will look and feel when I start assembling it together. During this I knew that the design I was going for was going to be very time intensive and reptitive.
Prototype: Despite using a ruler to make straight cuts, I made awful cuts to the cardboard. This is more likely largely due to the fact that this was the first time I have used an X-acto knife and my first time cutting cardboard. After I cut out each piece I used a rule to help create a straight triangle to border each side. After that I tried to recreate the sides of the hedrons onto the cardboard by drawing many congruent and equilateral polygons. These all result in many different shapes, some look like "L"s and others look like other objects but mainly these shapes look like extended rectangles and squares. After I finished outlining the shapes and filling in the spaces with Sharpie, I started hot gluing the pieces together. I had a friend help me hold each piece together so they can be glued together fine. During this process I realized that the different sized cardboard pieces will really mess with the final product. Compromises had to be made.
Test/Feedback: At certain angles, the octahedron looks fine but at other angles it looks really bad. When I was putting it together, viewing the inside of it really showed how awful each side really was. I knew from the beginning with the weird cuts of the X-acto knife never going completely straight, that this was going to ruin my design. I still enjoy it, it looks nice but this is the prototype and if I want to continue with it I'll hopefully have better cutting skills by then. Feedback given to me explains that, "it's not that bad," but if you really look into it, it isn't that pretty to look at. I forgot to remove the outlines too and people pointed that out as well.
