Monday, September 29, 2008
The Roaring of The World's Fastest Cars

Alas F1 has hit the shores of the buzzling crowd of Singapore, and the government has slammed the world with an impressive show yet to be done by anyone. Being the 1st country to hold their race in the night, in the middle of the CBD area, Singapore has set out to be the most ambitious country, other than China who held the Beijing Olympic. Everything looked good on the outside. The flyer was up and ready. The circuit with its Italian Nightlights was newly constructed. And seats all over the 5km circuit were ready for visitors for the past 3 days. This can be regarded as one of best money-making schemes Singapore has ever offered.

It was certainly an honour for me to be an usher for the Singtel Singapore Formula 1 GrandPrix. Being able to usher important VVIP guests was quite an experience, and at the same time, being close to the Racing cars. Working with a few of my church friend, our reporting venue was at the Grandstand down at the flyer. The construction they did was astounding. In less than 2 months, Singapore was able to erect multi-storied viewing galleries with laterns, stall, stages and a sweet grandprix ready for the cars to get on. As we were ushering guest into the suite, we were able to peep into the room to see the glamour and poshness of the layout of the room. The view was simply breath-taking. It was indeed a once-in-a-lifetime experience to be up there, "acting" like a VVIP yourself

During the ushering, the going wasnt really smooth-sailing. As the big word on the back of our t-shirt read "USHER", we were like magnets attracting nails to ourselves. Questions came flying from all directions, like where is their seats, where is the female toilet ( which was hidden behind the males toilet), where to get earplugs etc. Level 1 suffered the whole blunt of it. However, Level 3 was a lot more peaceful, with only managing the guests that were upstairs.

As the race started proper, I couldnt really watch the race, since I had to be at my position, which was being blocked by the rooms. Nevertheless, I was able to catch a few glimpse of the race through the small flat screen TV in the executive suites once the tinted glass doors opened for food and people to come in and out. It was quite disasterous for Ferrari in this race. Indeed, the Singapore race circuit proved to be an exciting and unexpected race with Alonso being 15th for the qualifying race clinching champion. There were plenty of actions, such as Rakkionien and Pique crashing which brought forth the safety car.

Overall, the experience was worth-while. The money was not too bad either. The next time Singapore has their F1, i would be the one spectating instead ;)

Monday, September 15, 2008
Constructing the wizard tower

A total of 3 weeks was taken to build a tower that stands at 2.2m. On top of the rest of the assignments,we were to discuss on the tower selected, generating 3 panels, build a prototype and build the actual tower. It was group work.

Initially, our tower selection ranged between Ravenclaw and Slytherin. Mine was for Ravenclaw, portraying a eagle hugging over the inner tower, hence coming out with the concept of "a tower within another tower" (Credits goes to Pastor for inspiring me with this idea). While my group members had their own ideas of what our tower should be, we have finally settled on working with Slytherin, working on my idea of the concept.

When that was settled, churning out 3 different designs for the tower was little difficulty. We allocated each other with job scopes. One of us were to do a panel each and a exploration of the model. Out of the 4 of us, the 1 guy would do our final decision of the tower. Sadly, none of the panels were up to standard for that day's presentation, and I have to admit that it was slightly sloppy and disorganised. The good thing was that we had an ingenious idea of how the tower should look like after the presentation. Credit goes to Farah for constructing a pop out tower with neat folds and joints. It had the gothic and authorative look suitable for the tower. There were other issues at hand, such as how the outer tower should be constructed, and that caused disagreements between the group. On one side of the table, there was talk about how flaps and a straight inner tower should be constructed so as to show the authorative figure of the tower. On the other hand, I was thinking of creating a spiral twirl up to the top of the tower, so as to break the angular shape of the tower and to promote the use of paper.

Although the situation wasn't resolved on the spot, construction of the inner tower began on Wednesday. KC and I spent roughtly about the whole day forming a super big piece of paper. We found most of these paper as scrap paper from Scalebar, the printing shop in SDE. After spray-gluing the papers together, we started measuring the dimensions of the inner tower. One of the problems we faced is the angular shape of the inner tower, and the slanted edge of the tower such that it looked like a pyramid from the Andes. We resolved that easily by folding the paper inside, such that we can achieved a nice smooth line. By the end of the day, we were able to probe it up, such that it was standing by itself. That by itself took a whole lot of effort constructing, studying the nature of the paper, and the pyramid was an achievement.

No work was done for the outer tower though, as the design for the tower was not finalised. This was delayed till Sunday when action finally took place. Sadly, there was little which I could do to help the situation on the weekend. People have their lives and commitment. We just have to make do with the circumstances.

I managed to come back to the studio at 8pm that Sunday night. Things didnt look too good. Apparently, the inner tower had flopped into a deflated piece of paper. What that looked like the construction of the outer tower looked like a wrecked car from an accident. Team members remain demoralised at this point of time, wondering how they could reconstruct the flaps. (In the end, the flaps idea was selected.) What that needed attention was the strengthening of the inner tower. Thank God I had some background in construction due to my involvement in Scouts. In about an hour, I was able to reconstructed a pioneering structure of what we used back in NPC, in a scaled down size. Satisfied with how firm the inner structure stand, we fitted the initial inner tower around the skeleton structure, almost like as if we were adding skin to our tower. With that, the inner tower was completed.

There was another round of discussion on how the flaps can be reconstructed. It was close to impossible for such a construction to be done on a big scale. When all things became desperate, we finally used the "spiral" concept. It isn't really a spiral as there wasnt a continuous chain twirling around the tower. It resembled more of chains, and in a certain way, scales of a snake. Tedious planning, measuring, drawing of circles and cutting was done to the new template. When it was up, however, there were some inaccuracies in the measurement. And since it was 4am, there was no way to redo the piece again.

Sometimes, I feel that more time should have been invested on the execution aspect. Although planning itself is important, if one is unable to understand the nature of the paper and how it would affect the outcome, the design by itself is a failure.

With 2 hours of sleep, we had our crit session with our teacher. While the rest of the group had been commented for their designs and purpose, ours was perhaps heavily criticised for its accuracies and worksmanship. It was pretty sad to see this happening before my eyes. It was afterall a very good concept which no one had ever thought of. However, due to the input of many different ideas, and the lack of foresight, it was not executed to its perfection. The end result was a shoddy piece of work.

I would regard this exercise as a failure. But it is from this failure that lessons can drawn out of this.
1. There must be an ample amount of effort on the execution phase. This is so as to be able to react to unforeseen circumstances that may not be seen during the planning phase, whereby necessary action can take place.
2. There should be a project leader in anything which we do. When 2 people give conflicting ideas of how a design should look, the design itself will lose its efficiency. However, the project leader should also accept feedback from the group members.
3. There should be constructive feedback. This means it should not be a personal attack on the design, but an improvement or a fault to the design aspect.
4. Fighting for your ideas means putting in effort in putting forth what you want to show. Whether if it is to show your idea through a model, or suggesting the change of idea at the right time, if you feel strongly for an idea, knowing that it would work under constrains, then its worth fighting for.

I would glady redo my tower again if given a chance. Sometimes, when things dont go according to plan, you fall from the experience, and you learn how to pick yourself up again.

Labels: Industrial Design