Week Summary - 3

Timepiece project

For this project, I tried to be looser when creating my initial silhouettes to get more variety in my designs. I decided to go for some kind of solar system model, which would be a more futuristic or alternate version of an orrery. For this, I thought the supernova-type shape would be appropriate, but felt I had definitely seen it used before somewhere, although I could not remember where.

I tried to push the shape farther and farther, using the initial silhouette as a starting point. This resulted in some interesting designs, but in the end I felt that the more simple silhouettes (marked in red) were the most effective. I briefly considered a device that would take up an entire room, projecting planets onto the ceiling and walls, but decided that a smaller, more personal object would be much more interesting.

Practicality is something I very much tried to keep in mind when working on these designs and on the previous project. The design, in my opinion, does not need to be completely feasible or able to be constructed in the real world, but it needs to make sense in the context of the world and be believable in that context in order to maintain the player's suspension of disbelief. In this case the setting is potentially futuristic, and draws from periods like the Renaissance and the Islamic Golden Age in its aesthetic and values. I moved forward thinking about how the device would be used, and decided that it would be useful for the user to be able to spin the display around so that they are able to see alignments, locations of planets, etc.

This resulted in two main lines of thought - a gyroscopic device, and one which uses magnetism to suspend the display. After playing with a lot of ideas I decided I found the magnetic device more appealing, because of its slightly more sci-fi look and because it would be easier for the user to see the sphere without the various axes of the gyroscope getting in the way. I want to do a lot more variations on these designs, and start making them much more detailed, with more reference to Islamic design and architecture in particular and its ornate patterns.