conditional design

week one – thursday 18th of july

task one: ‘hatching’
In a group of four we were given a set of rules to follow and create a design output. Each ‘player’ or team member had an assigned colour. The rules explained that on each players turn you would have to draw a dot no more than 10cm away from any other preexisting dot and then draw the smallest possible line between two dots within a designated angle of opportunity. Once a closed shape was formed the ‘closer’ had to fill in the shape with directional hatching to that of the closing line.

task two: ‘dot trapper 2000’
In our group we were now tasked with creating our own set of rules so that another group could create a desired design outcome. This task was interesting as we were able to see how the clarity of our rules impacted the outcome. We observed from the first task that having images to give us some indication of the final product helped in understanding the rules we had to follow.

task three: – independent study
The third task was to make a third conditional design set of rules and to test out these rules on new people outside of class. What I came up with was ‘Triangle Towers’ in which the aim was to create a tower of equilateral triangles to reach the other side of a sheet of paper before the other players.

When this was tested out on a group of three players what I discovered was that the players altered the directions of the stabiliser poles to what was convenient to their path than what would be more realistically stable. Another aspect that was the player altered (unintentionally) was that their equilateral triangles began to turn into isosceles triangles, this sped up gameplay but the patterns made weren’t as unique. Perhaps an addition to this game would be to say that only equilaterals may be used when building vertically and isosceles for horizontal.