The Almost useless machine

Throughout this seminar we were asked to create a machine that would be apparently useless and that would express a sentiment or just a completely absurd machine. My group was formed by Andrea, Aparna, Audrey, Pippa and myself. All the groups were assigned to their members by their skills, which I personally find quite useful to be able to learn from our colleagues. We decided to deconstruct the feeling of vulnerability.

We all realised that we have different conceptions of when we've felt vulnerable, but the feeling of being exposed somehow was for all of us our most vulnerable moments.

Fab Haiku to express our concept: 

Edging on the inside and outside,
In an instant
you'll see the real me

We wanted to express this feeling by developing a machine that would apparently look strong from outside but once you tell it a secret it would become vulnerable, hide its spikes and light up so you'll see its insites. Being completely exposed to its real self. After agreeing on the design of the artifact we needed to choose the materials and the methods that we’ll use to fabricate it. All of the groups were asked to reuse some pieces from the previous dismantled machines in a forensic report. 

Presentation A3P2

During this intense but fun week we get to learn a lot from each other's skills. I got to work closer with Aparna to develop the code that we’ll use to run the mechanism and it was a really rewarding experience. Victor also helped us a lot and I learned so much about coding. I would love to have more time to work side by side with my classmates to learn more about 3D and 2D fabrication. I had a really good experience working with this group, I would totally repeat the course. I also felt like in these two weeks I learned a lot and my motivation increased much more.

Was really cool to see how our concept evolved as the days were passing. Our little robot had human attributes, beyond being vulnerable it was also able to express the empathy that we were looking for, it was cute and approachable. Makes you want to take care of it and to be part of your family. I love how our "useless" creature has this technoromanticism approach. We developed further the concept to explain better it function in the following video: