Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Material Experiment Aggregation

By: Natasha Harper, Katie Adee, James Baldauf








Aggregation Model 1:



this model takes a lattice connected with pivot connections and uses circles of varying circumfrences connected at their tangents. This deforms the original lattice and creates areas of more density and rigidity.








Beginning of Aggregation Model 2:



This takes a similar logic to the first model, but the lattice is less defined and can easily grow in the Z direction, and/or branch off in plan.

1 comment:

Michael Chen said...

The important issue here is responsiveness, so I would ask how you imagine this system changing in response to extrinsic variables in the environment, both at the level of the individual cell, and also at the level of the aggregated cells. Additionally, it's necessary to specify how changes in an individual cell will affect other cells.

The principal content of the model as described thus far is growth, but growth or even repetition and differentiation alone is not enough. You need a clear idea about what produces change in the system, to find reasons for the aggregation of cells to differentiate. Remember that in the pinup last week, we talked about the importance of the organization of cells to change. So it would be a good thing for you to find ranges of intensity at that level, and to think about how those ranges change the emergent behavior of the overall system.

So for instance, if one range of difference that you're working with is density as it relates to rigidity, and density is measured by a scale factor as it is currently, it seems that you would want to explore other methods for generating a comparable degree of density or rigidity within other organizations. Perhaps instead of each unit connecting only to adjacent units, a longer unit can be pinched to itself as well as to adjacent units. you may find that the local pucker of the system in this way cinches the entire aggregation, and so on.

Additionally, be sure to track feedback in the system. to what does this system respond, and how? Does that response change how it the system continues to perform? The logic that you're working with currently is that the system is some kind of collector and that it tightens and grows according to different factors.

1. What are those factors?
2. What exactly is the response of the system to changes in these variables?
3. How does this response change the way the system continues to perform?
4. What are the limits of the response and what are its effects?

Does the system fold upon itself to create a kind of polyp or a shell around a pocket of methane? Would this affect its ability to navigate certain types of terrain? Might it begin to slow the movement of the system or provide secondary and tertiary scales of density? Do you begin to get issues of bulk or surface tension?
You can afford to be a little more extreme here...with both the speculative angle as well as the geometry.