HKU 2012 Summer Workshop – Day 10

The reason why there aren’t post of the workshop everyday is oblivious, i’m super overwhelmed by students coming to me with questions and request. We start our day at ten o’clock and I end up leaving school at eleven or twelve o’clock.

Laser cutting

Last year we have a big trouble when students need to laser cut models for their final project. When all students rush to me with incomplete files and broken drawings. This year, I have introduced a more complete training on how to prepare laser cut files. And we push students to cut files in an earlier date. The situation improved only by a little bit, while they still gave me files with overlapping lines, infinite circles (Which our laser cutter doesn’t like), wrong scale, unjointed lines, etc. These significantly increased my work load in cleaning up their files and converting curves. I believe I need to find another strategy for next year.

Using the tool

Some group demonstrated a good control on Grasshopper and successfully managed to creates scripts by themselves. Most students are able to create simple tools to assist their design, while some gave convincing explanation on the computational logic during the presentation. Despite the need that I’m providing them with some of the more complicated scripts, especially material simulation within Kangaroo. I’m still quite happy to see most of them being able to pick up most Grasshopper functions at the end of this course.

I try to focus on using Grasshopper as a geometry solver instead of a geometry generator. I don’t believe in bottom up geometry generation particular using Grasshopper. Unless you are super sophisticated in using the tool, I still find pen and paper more useful in figuring out a design. I would rather appreciate the use of Grasshopper as a solver for geometrical computation and digitization of understood models. By the tools that we have in Grasshopper, I still find it difficult to use it as a design explorer, but rather as an optionizer to find an optimized solution for a design’s parameter.

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