the city project, field groups | Becoming a Designer.

group PDP

Posted on May 5, 2014 by Nicholas Jones PD

in my opinion the group work when very well, as soon as i was assigned to my group we instantly clicked and came up with an idea on the day, we decided to do a miniature underground city because it linked all our work into one piece instead of doing a few little pieces and collectively putting them together in one final outcome, at the start we were all working very well together, but as the project ran its course we began to lack connection and we lacked in talking together massively, we also had trouble actually making the final piece because we couldn’t decide on how we wanted to make it.

i think that that i worked very well in a group enviroment, i did all the work that was expected of me by the rest of the group, and i also did very well in the making and production of the final piece, collectively as a group member i did research, material gathering for the final pice, i made my own pod like structure to go inside our final piece, my pod was based on the bicycle storage that I’m designing in my personal project.

i t hgibnk we could of worked little bit better as a group, in terms of communicating with each other, and i think we could of put more time in to the work we did, also we had problems with the final piece idea because one of the group wanted to do something that wasn’t what we decided when the project began, and that really slowed down our development because we had to keep tweaking the idea until it was suitable for the other group member.

final piece for group work

Posted on March 17, 2014 by Nicholas Jones PD

here is our final piece that we achieved, im really happy with the outcome, I think we made it look very similar to what we imagined an underground city would look like. my pod is the middle right on the image, I think our final piece looks really realistic and not to fantasy, however an underground city is fantasy, we used mud, gravel and sticks to fill in the middle, I used clay to make my pod and I used copper wire for the accessories on the inside.

My pod

Posted on March 16, 2014 by Nicholas Jones PD

I’ve finished making my pod for the group project, I decode to use my personally project as an influence and made my pod a bike Rack and a bedroom for the person to live in! I like the way it looks and I think it will look great in the fish tank.

Vacuum forming

Posted on March 15, 2014 by Nicholas Jones PD

So we have vacuum formed all the pod for our underground city, they came out amazingly well, no bubbles or cracks which is a massive bonus, I think they will look great in the tank.

The city project; field group, clay modelling

Posted on March 6, 2014 by Nicholas Jones PD

Today I decided to use clay to make the miniature bike Storage pieces that I will be putting in my pod on the project, they look pretty similar to what I’m doing for my city project (personal project), I thought clay would be the best medium to use because when it’s fired it becomes very strong.

The city project; field groups, vacuum forming

Posted on March 6, 2014 by Nicholas Jones PD

So we all collectively decided that we wanted to use the vacuum former to make our own individual pods for the underground city, we decided this would be the most effective because the plastic is strong and will with stand the force and weight of the mud/clay.
For vacuum forming you need to make a mould on which the plastic can be heated and wrapped around to creat the shape that is desired, I’m using wood to make my mould because it’s strong and won’t buckle under the pressure from the vacuum, also it means I can make what ever shape I want with ease,

Here is the shape I made, I’m using a long but shallow shape for my pod because I have to e able to fit miniature bike storage in them.

the city project; field group; locations

Posted on February 16, 2014 by Nicholas Jones PD

we walked around Cardiff for hidden places that we could possibly build a miniature city, we looked at pieces of land where there where no buildings and population, we also looked at holes in walls, gaps in stones, little gaps on the pavements etc.

the last two pictures were taken in Venice, I think little alley ways like theses would be quite good to build a miniature city in, I like the 8th photo in because its an abandoned railway station that no one uses and to do something with this would be great, t would breath new life into something that is hidden and forgotten by the people in the city.

the city project; field group; experimenting with shapes

Posted on February 12, 2014 by Nicholas Jones PD

so this week we started making little pieces and experimenting with shapes and different materials, we are looking for the best way to display the underground city in the tank, here is what we made,

here are the ones we made from, cardboard, and blue foam, we also made some from clay which in my opinion, and the others in the group, had the best outcome from them all, however im going to make some from wood/MDF, the clay worked so well because you can mould it perfectly to what you want and it will also be easy to hid and se at the same time, the foam works well because its simple to form shape from, however its pretty weak and wont hold much weight and its blue which wont look very nice surrounded by mud.

The city project; field group, research

Posted on February 10, 2014 by Nicholas Jones PD

So today we decided to look at architects to inspire our work, the first architect I would like to tell you about is Lebbeus Woods, at a certain stage in his career he moved his work more towards experimental projects, such as the little underground pieces he did (below) I really like the idea of his work and he makes the idea of underground cities not such a silly idea however it would be a difficult idea to execute because if you excavate the earth away from underneath big heavy buildings that are already situated on the surface they will surly fall inwards unless there is some sort of structure that can withstand the strain of the weight, I think we would like to used his style and in our work to help us work towards a final out come.

we also looked at Giovanni Piranesi, who did work about and underground type city, we felt like his work was very inspirational; towards what we want to achieve.

the city project; group idea

Posted on February 4, 2014 by Nicholas Jones PD

in our field groups today we came up with an direction on which we would like to take our project, firstly we all spoke about what we wanted to do and what we were already doing in our personal field project, and collaborated all our ideas into one, I wanted to do fining storage space in city centres and as you know im trying to improve the safety and quality of bike storage within the city centre, and the others in my group all had a similar idea about making miniature cities and something to do with underground cities or underground buildings which I found very fascinating to talk about, after talking about this we made a few mind maps which we could us to find common ground on which we could start building a idea, and pretty much instantly we came up with a really good and interesting idea which was to build a miniature city underground, and we threw a few ideas around to find the best was to execute this idea and we came up with using layers of mud to build the ground and we were looking at doing this in a fish tank sort of thing, so that’s our idea. also today we had to build a mini model of our idea using only the materials we were given by our tutors, if we had more time we would of executed our model more accurately and more tidier too, however we didn’t have that time to our expense so this is an image of what we managed to do with the materials we were given.

here is some images of our mind maps and ideas.