Our material is MDF and PVC flexible,  for the other 2 excises we used MDF only, so this time we wanted to do something different.

We started from thinking what is the biggest difference between these two material.  Well, one is hard, and the other is soft, and can be bent.

So we decided to use this property, and tried to form a sphere.

What we did is cutting a sheet, and then it could be stretched, then became a semi-sphere.

Then we used the joints we printed to connect 2 semi-sphere.

To provide the force to maintain the shape, we made a another bigger joint to hold a stick in the middle.

Working with cork and clay is a challenging task. We experimented with creating  a mixture of cork and clay, by pouring powdered cork into clay, but the result was not satisfying. We also tried to combine the two materials in bigger elements, but clay cracked and contracted after drying. Thus, we decided to work only with cork, making finger joints that were very stable and created an interesting lighting effect.

For the 3d printing excercise we created a platonic solid using the rhino polyhedron extension. We fabricated 8 joints, which were connestd with plastic sticks. The finishing of the holes in the joints was not accurate ( they needed to be a little bit melted) and we should consider making deeper holes, so that the model would be more stable.

For the milling excercise our team chose to test clay. We milled a foam mold to pour powder clay in it, creating twice an organic shape. The procedure helped us realize the challenges we had to face working with clay. The mold needed almost a week to dry and there was a small, but notable contraction on the fabricated design which was different for the two shapes we created, probably due to the different percentages of powder clay and water between the two molding procedures.

For the laser cutting excercise our team worked with 3mm cork sheet. The material in such  thickness is very flexible but quite brittle. We tried several designs, from which the one that could be synthesized in a sphere was this cutout sphere. However, the fabricated result was extremely unstable.

3d printing covered the design of small joints of powder. The exercise was designed to study the possibilities of connecting elements in the x, y, z axis using a single type of connector where you can connect elements only at an angle of 0 degrees or 90 degrees. By rotating these elements can be obtained very interesting shapes. On the other hand, as a result is obtained very fragile connectors and it was necessary to strengthen them with glue.