Some weeks don’t go as planned. This was one of them. Our assignment was to make something with the laser cutter— simple, right? Well, sometimes the unbounded constraints of a project like this end up becoming a noose for creativity; I let it become one this time around. I struggled to zero in on an idea and, instead of quickly prototyping the more ambitious ones, I worked on other assignments in the hope that something clearer would emerge over the week.
My Visual Language project centered around using waveforms as a visual element in a series of illustrations. Initially, I’d hoped to combine some of the conceptual underpinnings of that project with this laser cutting work. I considered creating a series of small laser-cut stencils of different waveforms that could be inserted into the top of a small box. The box would have holes drilled in the sides, through which I could insert dowels to hold and stretch a scroll of canvas. Pouring paint on the stencil would drip paint roughly in the shape of the waveform on the canvas underneath, and, ideally, turning one dowel would turn the canvas to paint on different canvas terrain.
I did not achieve this. I didn’t even get a chance to prototype the box. I did try to create a (bigger) stencil of a waveform along with an etched QR code to the song on Soundcloud, but the laser did not cut all the way through the waveform outlines and all of the places on the QR code that should have been black were etched white— which broke the QR code :(
Although this was a really disappointing result for the week, I learned a number of important lessons about the design process. The main one- I should have started converting my ideas, however ambitious, in to concrete, testable chunks as soon as possible.
