John James Marshall thesis.pdf - OpenAIR @ RGU - Robert Gordon ...

off with twenty two. I think that changed with the first version to twenty four.
But that is not really fixed it is slightly arbitrary. With the generative software
what I’ve ended up doing is giving it a window – I think that with the version we
have now it is anywhere between twenty two and twenty eight. Also, the
position of those isn’t terribly important. First of all, I started off positioning
them at random and then spreading the forms out and seeing how they looked.
Again, the positioning can be part of the programme.
I’m working with a software development tool which simply gives you a nice
little halfway house between programming and something that is a little easier
to work with as a lay person. What it is doing to start off with is positioning the
buttons at random. First of all it has already decided how many buttons there
are going to be and it is now trying to position them so it is dropping them into
place at random within the envelope of the back. If it clashes with one of them it
removes it and moves it to another position. It will do that until it has the right
number of buttons and then they’ll begin expanding.
One of the problems of working with rapid prototyping – I thought when I’d
moved to rapid prototyping that it would be great you’d have bureaus produce
endless samples for you and you would be able to do this as an iterative process.
But in fact the cost of the process means that very much you end up doing this
in one hit. With this chair we had structural implications with those springs in
the back to work out how stiff they needed to be. The whole thing had to be
done pretty much in one hit. We did talk with the University about doing this
with Finite Element Analysis to try and work out the stresses. But it is such a
complex problem in that the way you sit in this your weight is spread across the
entire back of the chair and it is a very difficult problem to work with.
Fortunately, it came out first hit.
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