IAT Spring 2011 Round-up

I find myself still weary from the last term. It was good, but throughly exhausted. My last day at school was last Friday, the 15th, to finish and hand in my IAT222 project. That day itself was extremely long not being able to sleep Thursday night in order to finish the presentation booklet... which ran into problems once our team realized that we couldn't print because Document Solutions' colour printer was broken, Staples wouldn't print it out in time, and we also spent 2 hours driving around Surrey to find an alternate printer and failing.
Short of 1 day, I was at school every day from January 31st. So.... 74 out of 75 days. Wow. Now that the term is over, I feel a very weird sensation of not being in Studio A or B everyday.

I'm pretty happy overall with my courses, though I think my 233 team's final project wasn't up to our standards. We had to prioritize other courses for the last week of classes for other final projects, so we only got about 2 days of solid work in. We were unhappy with the final presentation and knew we had problems but we didn't really have any choice and we were still pushing our time getting our slides done about 5 minutes before crit.

IAT 233 - Spatial Design
I'm still most proud of my team's work on the Sarphatistraat finish model just for the sheer amount of effort and time we put in. This is including our work on the 3d model. Also, I felt like my team really pushed the boundaries on our presentation on Urban Space regarding Piazza Navona/New York City (pdf).

Props goes out to the core team of Glue Wizards and Reconstructicons of Peter Zhao, Ramy Gorgis, Jason Procyk, and Andrew Wong. Also, thanks goes to our professor, Russell Taylor, for pushing us to the brink of madness. This course has really helped me to define who I am as a designer and in understanding the idea of 'process'.


IAT 235 - Information Design
I had a few assignments from this course resulting in results I was truly happy with.
The first assignment of creating a 'time management' schedule aided my organization immensely giving me a reference I could check back on a few times every week to double check dates using a very easy-to-read table (png).

Another design I was happy with was the icon design assignment. In order to create a 'time management' icon, I decided with using the blueprint analogy and have 'blueprint for time' (jpg).

Our final project (again thanks goes out to people from my IAT 233 team, Jason Procyk and Andrew Wong, for being awesome team members), was to do a wayfinding app for skaters, called skateNinja. We were relatively effortless in operating as a team in refining down to our final design and we each played a significant role in the development of the end product. (swf | pdf | mp4).

IAT 222 - Interactive Art
The final project was very hectic and stressful as we had to alter our idea three times. Starting from a nuclear shadow, talking about nuclear explosions and technology, shadows and light, and eventually ending up at an interactive art piece on beauty. We decided to go with 3d renders in Cinema 4d for our physical space model and it turned out relatively well. I stayed up for a whopping 34 hours on the last day to finish the booklet though there were some technical difficulties and we had to print with a simplified version of our final PDF (simplified pdf | booklet pdf).

Overall, I'm extremely happy with the projects I've done this term. I've poured my heart and soul into every one of my courses. Now, I'm going to try and get some R&R and hopefully de-stress all the built-up tension in my mind, body, and soul. (Time to go to Disneyland!)

IAT 233 Seattle Design Charette Day 3 - Post-presentation

Arriving home back in Vancouver, it's a relief and nice to be able to just relax from the exhaustion that set in. The less than 3 hours of sleep for the last 35 hours is ridiculous and clearly showed during our team's presentation.

We didn't win the design charette, though we, the Rem's Righteous Rebels, did come a close second. Ramy and Jason had come up with a solid urban space concept about focusing our space on highlighting the existing landmarks of Seattle, and Mark came up with the design for the current form we have in mind.

The proposal was meant to create a space that helps channel the people from the area to either channel them to the market or at least re-direct them back up the hill so that the flow is not merely going down towards the waterfront. It's hard to sum up the entire concept as there are so many elements that are going into the proposal including movement of people, way-finding and highlighting the landmarks of Seattle, incorporating denial and reward in our structure into the center of the pavilion space, entry/exit flow from the 3 streets flowing into the site, affordances built-in to the structure of the lighting and shade with our light fixtures, and the focus on the citizens of Seattle and the surrounding area instead of drawing tourists.

That's about as succinct as I can put it although hopefully our presentation next week with better fleshed out conceptual renders will be able to elaborate it more thoroughly.

Overall, I think we're happy with what we learned and the bond we've created through our blood, sweat, tears, and sleep deprivation. For me, I'm a little disappointed we didn't win first, though that's a little greedy as I'm surprised we even got second because our presentation was so fractured even though our concepts were mostly(not all) there. [N.B. We left out some key aspects because our slides broke and we forgot to mention them]

The trip to Seattle was awesome. I really enjoyed seeing the Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle Public Library (a Rem Koolhaas building!), and the tour of Knoll's Seattle office. I am sad we didn't get to visit the Chapel of St. Ignatius, especially so because my team did a previous precedent project on a building by Steven Holl. I was really hoping to see and experience one of his spaces incorporating his ideas on phenomenology and parallax.

Rem's Righteous Rebels

IAT 233 Seattle Design Charette Day 3 - Pre-presentation

Well, it's 10am. Most of our team, Rem's Righteous Rebels, is running on about 1.5 hours of sleep. We're hoping we'll be presenting somewhat coherently and that our proposal is received well. Most of us are fried from the lack of sleep, as well as arriving at our final design concept for our urban space at a later point than we were hoping for.

IAT 233 - Urban Public Space Presentation - New York City / Piazza Navona

This week was supposed to be an "easy week" but our team still didn't finish our presentation preparation until this morning. I still found myself struggling to get through the work just because of other projects with IAT 222 and volunteering for my presentation during the same week as an interaction diagram assignment, just increasing the workload all on to this week. But at least all that is over, and I can focus on final projects for IAT 222 and IAT 235 now, plus 233.

Our IAT 233 project presentation this week was on Jan Gehl's ideas of urban space and design, primarily off the concepts of his book, Cities for People. We started off with Piazza Navona in Rome, Italy as our precedent of a space that works, then continued to use specific examples in New York City where new designs are making NYC more livable, as currently it's still a giant metropolis built from the top-down. My favourite part of our presentation was presenting a conclusion of using Coney Island as a case study where Gehl's concepts were present in its design, however it does not guarantee that it is successful as a public space.

It was also quite weird when we were waiting for Russell to comment at the end of our presentation. We waited for about 30 seconds while he was looking up some PublicEnemy (we mentioned him briefly in our presentation) on his laptop to play. Hahaha. Awesome!

We had a couple of oddities with our presentation. The first, going with a pizza for our citation page. We didn't get much of a response with that though. We were initially going to go with "Ehh, I'm walkin heres!" for our title slide. It's a little cliche about New Yorkers, but it was relevant to our presentation so it wouldn't have been out of context. But we decided against it and went with symbols for our title, (the symbols that we used for our iconographic representations of Gehl's concepts.

I'm also trying to attend all the other critique sessions now so I can see other people's presentations and understand more about the precedents that weren't assigned in my section. I was really surprised after seeing all the other groups' presentation style. It seemed like everyone else was giving a tour of the cities they were assigned and trying to relate Gehl's concepts to those spaces. We went with the opposite approach and started with Gehl's concepts and found examples within the city where the concepts were either there or not and if it worked.

I was really excited to know more about international cities that I haven't been to, as well as seeing some places I've visited but didn't really know about their histories (especially all the places I visited last year), including: Amsterdam, Lijnbaan and Schouwburgplein in Rotterdam, Covent Garden in London. It's also getting me interested in planning out places I want to go visit in the future, especially Milan, Rome, Stockholm and Copenhagen.

At the Schouwburgplein! (May 2010)

IAT 233 - Finish Model Presentation Day - Sarphatistraat + Section D102

As I wake up now late at night (I was unconscious as soon as I got home), I'm ecstatic about how our presentations went. Either way, if it was how our presentation went, I was so tired I couldn't help but walk around with a smile on my face the whole day just because I was incoherent and delusional. =D

I'm sure I'm as surprised as much as the rest of my team in how well we put our presentation together as we put together our slides in the wee hours of 4am in the morning and got our presentation talking points as little as 45 minutes before crit. It all came together beautifully though! (at least I thought so).

I'm happy we got to do this building, and even more so especially considering Russell, my prof, says that he probably won't be assigning this precedent ever again for IAT 233 as the amount of work required to get the details is ridiculous. =D

I will attach Attached are some photos of our model, and some of the others which were all pretty awesome! (I will post them tomorrow. I'm still sorting)


Our model! BOOYAH! Props to Henry Lin for taking the majority of these photos and helping us with the laser cutting.

Olympic Sculpture Park PACCAR Pavilion (Weiss/Manfredi)

Ara Pacis Museum (Richard Meier)

Land Formation One/LF1 (Zaha Hadid)

Koshino House (Tadao Ando)

I'm not sure why I didn't get photos of the Newton Public Library. I don't remember seeing it in the room...

Some other models from other sections:

Barnes House (Patkau Architects)

Olympic Sculpture Park PACCAR Pavilion (Weiss/Manfredi)

Two Houses in Borneo Sporenburg (MVRDV)

 Chapel of St Ignatius (Steven Holl)

I wasn't able to get a chance to see the models in the third section at all. Doh.