Inside Iowa State

Feb. 10, 2006

Demonstration as difficult as its design

Faculty teaching Architecture 202 this spring (a design studio for second-year students) asked their students to (in teams) design and construct a wearable device that would adapt a bodily motion into a mechanism capable of scribing, scrawling or otherwise marking an architectural surface (floor, wall or ceiling).

Pictured above is Tony Sims pogo-ing. A pair of bellows (adapted from toilet plungers) powered by the up-and-down motion of the jumping pump a yellow fluid from a reservoir mounted on Sims' back. Other devices captured laughing, eating, the process of losing and regaining one's balance, and the abstract concept of uncertainty. Photo by Heather Sauer.