Almost Useless Machines

After the last week of disassembling the week has came to use almost all the machine parts for some almost useless machines.
This week we had to come up with useless products, but the methods and challenges this week were one of the most useful learnings for me. We formed groups based on our skills, this was important, because we had a really short time from creating the concept to shoot a short movie about our final product. This short time really required a teamwork where everyone could specialise in something from interactions, design, mechanics, to coding and fabrication.

Our useless concept was offensiveness. We came up with an analog interaction, when someone gets a slap on their face without no reason, and that surprising event makes someone resentful offended or annoyed. This was the base of our concept, a FABhaiku: “A slap in the face how offensive and random – quite useless indeed. Then we got the mechanical parts: a movement sensor and a centripetal motor. How can we create interactions with these to offend someone?” Then we got the mechanical parts: a movement sensor and a centripetal motor. How can we create interactions with these to offend someone?

Our group:

• reused a mirror from a disassembled cd driver
• built a house from reused laser cut gears to the motor
• designed and fabricated some small fitting parts to the already existing ones for a robot from plywood and pla
• Built a mechanical system
• designed a code for the sensing and the interactions

And by doing so we built a mirror that actually doesn’t want to see you. This robot became surprisingly humanoid and inescapably offensive. Although our aim wast to create a mirror that turns away randomly whenever you want to see yourself, we got comments from its “ almost users” like: “I’m like that too”, “It is so mean, but how cute”. Seems like all the members of our team smuggled in something very human to their field of working and by doing so we created a creature that created many useless feelings in us and many useful knowledge.

Here in our presentation you can learn more about our processes:

• how we designed it
• what it supposed to do or not to do
• how did we fabricate it
• its functions in a system diagram the coding logic
• the Iteration process: our failures a successes
• And more pictures about our little offensive creature… meh…