Check out these student projects from Neri Oxman and Meejin Yoon’s course, “Design Across Scales”. For this exercise, students were asked to make something that enables a person to make something, and then to use this tool to make that something. These tools are intended to perform highly specific functions — any scale, any material, any function — as long they reflect the synergy between the tool and the thing created.As Yoon and Oxman write,
“The term fabricate comes from the Latin fabricare which means to make, construct, fashion, or build. The term can also be used to mean a falsehood, forgery or fiction. This play on the word to fabricate suggests a rich and nuanced relationship between the concept and the construct and the translation of imagination into physical reality.”
These projects feature a variety of tools and technologies — from the simple to the complex, the temporal to the permanent, the useful to the useless. They include devices for painting and weaving to making empanadas.
See also: Designing Representational Systems
Students in the class Design Across Scales design inventive infographics to communicate complex information