Relevant Skills
Polystyrene Fabrication
Circuit Design
Structural Design
Project Summary
Building an immersive art piece that can be fully disassembled and reassembled and placed in various locations across campus. This was done with a team of 6 Interphase students.
Small Scale Testing
The mechanism we need to be the most resistant to long term manipulation was the door. So we tested out a small scale version of the door to determine the amount of material we’d need to remove where the doors meet to ensure smooth opening and closing.
From here a few decisions were made based on a variety of small scale tests
- Adhesive type
- Supporting frame material
- Hinge type
Construction
We decided on the following designs to enable the infinity mirror placement within the walls, as well as allow the walls to slot into the floor and roof. These drawing were made by a teammate and acted as ground truth as we started building
To cut the decorative and structural slats evenly, we we built a spacing rig to attach to the table top hot wire cutter. Three of us then worked together to feed the material through and cut down the large Polystyrene sheets.
Then we attached the slats to the walls following our drawing, then sealed any dents and painted the surfaces Barbie pink
Wiring
To sell the idea that Barbis is bigger on the inside we incorporated this infinity mirror effect as seen in this old toy we found in storage on the left here. To do this we need wiring throughout the structure that doesn’t take away from the disassembly process.
Ed Moriarty was a great guide for us sorting out the details of this circuit!
Aesthetics & Assembly
Barbis in MIT President Kornbluths Office!
Barbis on MIT News
Barbis on NPR Boston
Main Takeaways and Reflections
- Conflict management: A fairly serious argument broke out between a few members of the team and it was my responsibility to clear up the situation. Luckily the team was able to pull ourselves together and move on. It was an opportunity for me to start developing my soft skills in a technical setting
- Project schedule: We ended up leaving much of the fabrication to the last few weeks of the program which resulted in increasingly long working hours as the deadline crept closer. Our hope to completely avoid running into problems resulted in us overplanning and delaying actual progess. This was a valuable lesson in failing early and often!