Wednesday July 1, 2009. Rolling down hills, laughing until our stomachs hurt and 2 design projects. What a way to start this month! I was having so much fun I forgot to take pictures. [I’ll just steal Brenda’s]
The 6 of us split into groups of 3 the day before and we decided to keep those teams. Around 9 a.m. we were assigned 2 design projects. One team was to design a shelter for at least 6 people. The other was to design a bench. It sounds a whole lot easier than it was.
The only materials we were allowed were 12’ wooden sticks and zip ties. Furthermore, we had to build without sketching out ideas. Each team could design one project at a time. Team Fabulous[Brenda, Andrea, and Shareka] chose to work on the bench, and Team SAT [Salman, Aldair, and Tamanna] picked the shelter.
Constructing the shelter was frustrating. Salman and I argued almost the entire time. We had trouble communicating our ideas to each other. The arguing and yelling actually helped us get our points across. The structure we built was half of a dome and was attached to the branches of the trees from behind. We designed the structure with the intent that someone sitting inside would not miss that the front contoured with the slope of the trees on the hills.
Later that afternoon, we swapped projects. Team SAT tackled the bench project, while Team Fabulous busied themselves with the shelter. For the first 3 hours, we went no-where with the bench. It was definitely a lot more challenging than the shelter. The bench needed to be stable enough to sit on.
Another 3 hours and 47 minutes later we finally engineered a way to make the bench sturdy. 6 hours of blood, sweat, arguing, laughing, failing and salvaging for the limited amount of wood, we finished! Of course, we could not have done it without the help of Alex. Thanks Alex for not killing us when we cut the wood pieces too short, and thanks for being patient and helping us put together about 30 pieces of wood with probably 100 zip ties. Today was a blast. Go Team SAT [Super, Awesome and Terrific]
Posted on July 1st, 2009 at 3:15 pm by publicworkshop in Our Work