[Fri Apr 20] More Lantern + Evaluation

Everyone was finishing up their lantern project at the beginning of the class. Essie and I decided to make a wooden lantern. Essie had to redraw the whole battery case design because the material changed...

We wanted to have a more complicated circuit with three lights in parallel, using switches and touch buttons to control them. Therefore, after assembling the battery case, we started to solder the legs of switches and touch buttons because they were too short and impossible to coil with. That took a while but it finally worked. Then we started to connect the devices on the top layer with wires coming from the bottom layer like we did with our acrylic model. However, there were too many devices and it was so messy that all the wires started to touch each other...

That didn't work out well... We were just going to stick with our acrylic model.

At 3pm, we started to present our projects and evaluate others' projects. Here are my own evaluation and feedback from others for our design:

Pros of our project:

1. It works consistently. Compared to one group who hasn't got the chance to figure out the battery connection and the other group whose lantern sometimes have trouble staying lit up, our lantern performs well consistently.

2. Durable. Our lantern is the strongest among all. I think that's partially due to the fact that it's hard core nailed in together and no moving hinges.

3. No hot glue. This is not necessarily a pro, but we were very set on having our design like puzzle pieces all fitting together instead of having to use glue.

Cons of our project:

1. We focused too much on the structure, which is not the most important thing for this project. Oscar said that many designs need flexibility and we focused too much on building the perfect case for the two AAA batteries that we lost the flexibility of the project because the structure here is not the most important thing.

2. We thought that our design is the smallest among all but it makes sense to say that because we used nails, we used up more space than necessary.

3. We used so many nails in such a small thing which some people might not like.

A couple things to take away from the evaluation process:

1. Try to be creative and don't stuck with old techniques. Essie and I both used nails in our box designs and we both liked it. (I didn't like it that much, but since we are making a box-shaped battery holder, I wasn't motivated enough to think of other designs that would give us the same duration as nail do.) Therefore, we kept using this in our lantern design. Oscar said that there is this kind of exercise that you are not allowed to use any of the old techniques you used before. I thought that must be very mind-opening.

2. Pay attention to the weaknesses of the design. Essie and I spent most of our time building the battery case. Therefore, our battery connection turned out to be the best of the three group. But as I said earlier, that could also be a constraint on our flexibility of the design. Also note that you never know at what stage you are going to fail...

Then we started to think about our final project. Kelsey found a cool video about a book with little designs that light up. It was really cute. Essie and I are still considering our screaming dice project, although we are not sure how feasible it is so we are still looking for more ideas.