Synthesis Studios

Talk about a class full of ideas!

Assignments from day one are going pretty well considering they’re not easy at all! Students are struggling a bit with the tolerances (and the annoyances) of the paper clock, and most haven’t even started the Sterling engine yet — we’ll see how it will all come together next week. One question that dogged me: “why build these clocks?” My answer is simple and it has to do with experience. This class is not one of mechanical engineers, so actually building something and following plans will help prime their imaginations for their final projects.

After a short conversation on escapements and how clocks worked, it was time for our first design exercise. I started the conversation with questions like:

• Sketch out a different source of energy
• Sketch out making our clocks really large or really small
• Sketch out a way of making the clock run for a long time

And my students came back with clocks that used people as the timing mechanism either to tell the “personal time” or “societal time” — or, try to average out all people and build a highly accurate clock over time. Others designed mechanisms to build a clock out of flowing water (both streams and rivers, and the flowing water into a toilet). And another team even sketched out a wonderful design to power an installation off of the ever increasing size of tree trunks! Next week’s design exercise, hopefully, will be just as much fun.

Lecture slides are up (both in PDF and as a Quicktime slideshow) so feel free to grab. On deck: seeing how our clocks all turned out.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 12th, 2006 at 2:07 pm and is filed under Synthesis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.