Wear Me Out(12-14)

Space And Materiality Week 12-14

I decided to make this one proper blog instead of splitting it weekwise since doing the latter would completely break the flow of our process!

Since we were paired together for this project,Murtaza and I knew what our strengths and weaknesses were,academically.I’m better at conceptualizing and sketching,while he’s better with the physical work and execution.But both our brains work the same and so thankfully,we can play off of each other’s thoughts till we come to a consensus.We had made it pretty clear that while I will help for the first half of the project,Murtaza will take charge in the second half.An (almost) fair distribution of who does what.So he has primarily been responsible for making the concepts I decided into a usable reality.

We were pretty clear that we wanted to spear no expense for our wearables to be sturdy and firm,starting right from the prototypes.We’d heard of and seen enough prototypes snapping into two immediately or failing miserably over and over again,so we thought,why not start off like our prototype itself can be used as a final?(Spoiler alert: This thought was really useful later.)

So he went on his usual adventure to find the toughest items possible in the cheapest prices possible(later racking up quite a bill),and by the beginning of week 12 we had quite a few things to play with.Below are a few snapshots from Murtaza’s blog,describing his said adventure through markets and the materials he managed to find.

We then slowly began making our prototypes,being in no hurry since we knew that these were probably more important than the final models.These are a few of them:

Leg to leg model.The ankle support was a struggle and would NOT get hot glued to the pipes with ease.So we changed the material from cardboard to the grey PVC pipe.Since it was a polymer material,it worked better with the hot glue.

leg to leg model.Pretty much exactly like the prototype!
It almost looked like a proper shoe.

knee to knee model.This model is the simplest of the three,but is the most effective probably.
The pulling of the strings works perfectly to tighten around the knee and bring both knees closer.

knee to knee model.The two curves on the sides go to the backs of our knees and they move along the slits in the MDF,with the help of nuts,bolts and washers.This model was a little bit of a problem concerning the sliding of our knees and having to manually bring our knees closer,which wasn’t even the point.Yet,this was a lot more unique compared to the others,so we decided to base our final on this.

leg to leg model.We had to improvise the length of the straps and the tube at the top as we made it,but they now fit our shoulder and height perfectly.When initially shown to our faculty,she said the support on top was slanting due to difference in the sloping of our shoulders.So we added foam underneath on my side to even it out.

knee to knee model.Again quite simple,but did the job efficiently.initially we thought of keeping the pvc pipe in between attached to one part of the model and keeping the other with a hole the size of the pvc pipe,but this would break the model into two parts,which wasn’t allowed.So we joined the pipe with both sides.

Back to back model.the blocks prevent our backs from touching.The fault in this model was that we used a softer foam for our prototype.So when we wore our model the blocks were too squishy to actually show any separation.We kept this in mind as we progressed towards our final.

back to back model.featuring creative presentation,courtesy of Murtaza.This prototype gives me major stress.It is so frustrating to wear and remove! Plus by now we realized that it wasn’t going to make sense as a model at all.So it is a half-failed attempt.

back to back model.Used velcro strips to stick each other’s backs together.Almost instantly.we realized that the kind of velcro strength we needed to keep our backs attached would easily cross the 1ft limit.This is a completely failed attempt.

Those were a glimpse of what our prototypes looked like along week 14.We were sick of our classmates tormenting us, asking,”is this your final??no???” over and over again!But that just meant our prototypes were that solid.These are just a gallery of photos,but they took an insane amount of effort to accomplish,especially on Murtaza’s part.I helped out with the donkey tasks,like cutting,sanding,measuring,and sticking,but it all came together after he put in his work.Here’s some memories over these three weeks,of how our prototyping process slowly unfolded:

After all this was over,we had to start gearing up for our final.As our prototypes are life size,sturdy models,the only thing different that we could do for the finals was change up the material choice.More of that in the next blog!

Meanwhile,I’d recommend checking on my partner’s blog simultaneously with mine.We agreed to work in collaboration on our blog,so they make sense if viewed together!

Murtazart

Prototype Blog