Express

Collaboration

Material Exploration

Material exploration:

Many structures, installations, and buildings are built without consideration for nature and the impact on the environment. With this project, we hope to experiment with smart materials behaviors and their reaction to natural factors in the environment to create more sustainable installations. The project started with background research and data collecting and eventually lead to us choosing memory alloy as the material of focus. Memory alloy is an alloy that can be deformed when cold but return to its original pre de-formed form when it's heated to its activation temperature. Electricity and fire were the two main methods we used to activate and reshape the memory alloy.

will include more when we finish the first prototype.

Research

I have been working on a material science research paper before this studio, so I was really excited to physically experiment and play with some materials. I learned a lot of new information because of the amount of research we have done, including new smart materials and architecture envelopes. We encountered some challenges when ordering the materials, which lead us to only focus on memory alloy. During the experiments, we had some great collaboration and experience and help us learn more about the material and physics (the electricity aspect we were using). Overall, I really enjoyed the project and learned a lot of new information. If I have more time in the future, I hope to continue this project and spend more time on the design aspect of the project.