Sunday 21 August 2011
Design Process Reflection
This assignment has vastly enhanced my knowledge and awareness of emerging technologies and their uses within everyday life. Apart from being inspiring and interesting, these augmented reality activities have also been highly enjoyable.
My design is a large curved building with segments branching off both the upper and lower floors. I considered a number of factors when designing this structure to make it visually appealing, manageable in an augmented reality environment as well as relating to and drawing from the required influences. Many features of the building relate to the designer Santiago Calatrava and many others are drawn from custom creatures created in Spore Creature Creator.
Santiago Calatrava is famously known for his large, eccentric structures with curved and often uncomfortable areas. I adopted this notion of extensive use of curves to initially develop concepts for my building incorporating wave like structures and broad arcs to develop a basic layout. Through incorporating the “branched” rooms, a sense of discomfort was created which also concurred with Calatrava’s seemingly gravity-defying structures. A simplistic concrete render texture was implemented to act in accordance with Calatrava’s extensive use of very plain colours (white). This draws attention to the intricate structure of his buildings. By using a lot of windows and transparent surfaces inside and out, I was able to replicate Calatrava’s ability to connect the exterior environment with the building.
The main concept adopted from my Spore Creature was the landscape I used; being a forest. This directly relates to the personality and habitat of my creature. The concepts of strength and balance were also drawn upon by providing two solid concrete footings on which the building stands.
I had difficulties getting textures to appear in my augmented reality model which became my biggest problem. Through extensive research and trialling, I got my textures to work in both my model and my augmented reality model. The construction of the cube proved difficult once constructed as my markers didn’t work the first few times. This took further planning and trialling of construction techniques.
Sunday 14 August 2011
Designers Poster
This poster effectively displays both information regarding Santiago Calatrava as well as a clear demonstration of his work. Using simple colours, the poster conveys the nature of Calatrava’s work being very plain in colour but elaborate in design. White space is used to a minimum but is instead replaced with a simplistic dark to light blue gradient; a scheme followed by the displayed architecture. Through the use contrasting colours, the text is allowed to be prominent, in particular the quote from Calatrava.
The fonts used by all sections of text are simplistic sans-serif fonts and are placed so as not to draw attention away from the architectural image in the background while still providing a secondary focal point of information for the poster. The quote from Calatrava is displayed in the top right hand corner initially drawing the responder’s attention and providing an insight into his design philosophy. The large image in the background of the poster is captured and positioned in a way that accentuates the curved lines that are present in all of Calatrava’s work. This image also provides a basis for the use of a calm blue and white colour scheme.
Sunday 7 August 2011
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