The industrial revolution with its focus on efficiency and quantity took the craft workers out of the equation. While much of the world’s economy had relied on artisans before this, ‘making’ has returned to individuals and communities now with an extension of technology.
The prototypes are reflection of crafts-based making and digital fabrication charted through multiple historical and social perspectives. Each of the following examples are intend to reinterpret the terminologies of the technology involved.
For instance, 3d scanning doesn’t intend to invent a new scanning machine but rather invent/replicate/reiterate the steps or the concepts of 3d scanning. I hope through the examples, I can explain the difference between the two explanations of 3d scanning.
Julley translates to ‘hello’ in ladakhi dialect. I chose to generate terrain scans of the areas I inhabited during my time in Ladakh, India. These scans are not results of a singular tool like a lidar scanner, but rather a process of documentation. My understanding for the 3d scanning was to showcase how to demonstrate a physical space through building layers.
For Ladakh, due to the region’s remoteness, acquiring data on its terrain and topology posed significant challenges. Moreover, these areas were susceptible to flooding. Beyond the utilitarian purpose of 3d scanning, my intention was to convert these topology scans into artistic representations that echo personal memories, resembling artifacts. As a result, I translated the data into color formats, culminating in the creation of exquisite hillside art maps.
I think of prosthetics as a device to improve/replace the function of a particular body part. Shoe in my understanding was the most common extension of our body outside its natural being. The tinkering part was why shoes are considered as a layer to the living and not the living being in itself.
I am drawn to understand nature through tech and the coral shoe was an attempt to replace a prosthetics with an entity established as a living being in common knowledge,’Reefs’.
The Coral shoe is a speculative representation of an ever changing nature of reefs while maintaining the uniqueness for every user. I consider this shoe more of an habitat requiring us to have a symbiotic relationship with it. It challenges the mundane presence of a shoe derived to have a monolithic use of protecting a foot.
Cardboard is mostly utilized as a packaging material for the adults, for a kid its a toy. I wanted to make something playful with it as well. All of us, at some point played around with cardboard. I had a thought to combine perpetual motion with cardboard. Perpetual motion is a paradox as it doesn’t obey the laws of nature. But the intention was to create a playful prototype of it using cardboard.
We all know about the marble machines. I just made one that theoretically continues forever. Rationally speaking, with a bit of the human effort serving as reloading mechanism, the user rotates the stairs taking the marbles up. This exercise was also my first introduction to user prototyping.
