Assignment Week 3

Create two or more mechanical devices. Your devices should be made of appropriate materials to achieve the requisite precision and rigidity for proper functioning. Often this means wood. Do not limit yourself to working with the cardboard frame structures we used in class. There are many ways to structure and support a mechanical device. Explore them; they can be a source of interest for your piece.

While you are free to pursue any (mechanical) direction that interests you for this assignment, here are three strategies to consider:

1) Create a mechanism that drives some very interesting/beautiful/whimsical behavior, in the hopes that this interesting behavior will lead the user to want to investigate the mechanism responsible for it.

2) Create an interesting/non-intuitive/beautiful mechanism that celebrates the mechanism itself.

3) Use extreme contrasts of scale, and/or unusual combinations to create non-intuitive behaviors. (e.g. large light things with small heavy things, long arms with short arms, fast with slow, identical size but different weight, very close to the fulcrum with very far from the fulcrum, changes in direction of movement, large motion with small motion, etc.)