Memory Box Morph

For this project I combined the memory containers of Krista Giles, at top, and Lauren Foster, bottom right. These sketches proved highly useful because when drawing them I unknowingly accentuated features that became important to me later on, making future steps much easier... Lesson learned: sketch and don't photograph at this point. My projects look nothing at all like these two because I was really striving to capture their essence and not their physique. This is why I chose balsa when both Krista and Lauren used mat board, I was concerned that if any part of my project had similar material as the originals, that would be all people see. Thus they would make physical connections, as opposed to essential ones when considering similarities of my work and Krista or Lauren's.

From Krista's moving box I took the idea of being divided as shown with the piece of Plexiglas through the middle. Lauren's container, on the other hand struck me as a great contrast between a smooth, graceful shape, and sharp spires holding it up. The curve inside the slats of my three projects became my conduit for combining these two qualities. By making the curve flatter the project leaned towards Krista's, while making it smoother and more round pulled it closer to Lauren's. That being said having three different iterations to do with varying levels of involvement from the two originals, was very well facilitated by this design.


These are some of my thumbnail sketches, the one at the bottom left was done by Jake.


This drawing gave me the idea for how I did these three projects. It originally was a sketch of a heat sink that I drew to explain to Anna how computer processors are cooled. It wasn't until a day or two later that it really struck me when I was looking for clean paper in my sketchbook.




This has stuff piled on it to hold it together while the glue was setting.


This version closer to Lauren's project had no hangups at all in construction, it pretty much just fell together. This is why I have only this picture of the it's process, by the time I realized I needed to take a picture it was nearly complete.



These are some construction photos of each of the three iterations. The fabrication was very strait-forward using only bond glue. Due to the fragile nature of balsa however, it did take several attempts at first to get a feel for the material, and understand how things needed to go together. After that first rough part, they pretty much built themselves with few major problems.





These are the final pictures. The top one is closer to Krista's moving box, followed by a "middle mix" and at bottom a version closer to Lauren's.