Sketching

Expression

Collaboration

Abstract Play is a architecture project that focuses on connecting the community together. This project was created for an overgrown section of Lederman Park which is across from MGH and next to the Museum of Science. The idea was specifically built around the community and abstraction which gave many structures for this project. Nonetheless, the final project was a layout of the site and a close-up of one of the playground areas. The structures in the play area were based off of basic shapes so that the users could choose how to play on them without set rules. This brings a feeling of creativity and independence while also connecting the community.

In this studio, I focused on research and sketching. These included writing out multiple zoning diagrams for my site while also having sketches of each structure with measurements. For the zoning diagrams, we needed to research how people used the space and how it looked. While doing this project, I also had growth in my collaboration and expression. This increased both the amount of work we delegated to each member and how well we provided the feeling of creativity and community into our project. In the future these skills may come to use when I want to connect with the users or work with people I have never had a project with.

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Research

Engage & Persist

Collaborate

Physical Fabrication

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Growth Paragraph

Material Exploration



This project was incredibly beneficial, and I feel I strengthened my technical and conceptual skills considerably. This project contained many points of growth and firsts for us students and NuVu as a whole. My experience was notably beneficial in terms of growth through working on client interaction, project scope, and time management. I also greatly valued the experience of integration into the

Kroka community and loved the time I spent on campus. Further, the hands-off coaching technique our coach employed greatly improved my learning experience with client interaction like no other system. The ability to learn by failure and persevere through hard problems was an incredibly effective learning method that greatly reinforced my project management skills.

The Kroka Collaboration was a project focusing on the designing of multiple installations for the organization Kroka Explorations, a wilderness survival school over 100 miles away from NuVu. I pursued the creation and design of three solutions to problems ranging from boat lifting systems to drying firewood with solar kilns. Later on, our team made a series of excursions ranging up to multiple days to install our prototypes on the Kroka campus. Through the three weeks that we spent collaborating with Kroka, we installed a 7:1 pulley system that vastly increased the efficiency of their boat lifting system, a rocket stove capable of boiling waters on multiple burners, and schematics for a 24-cord bandwidth solar kiln.

Collaborate

Physical Fabrication

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This was a client-based project that worked with Kroka Expeditions in Marlow, New Hamshire. Kroka is a non-profit wilderness school that incorporates Waldorf education with its unique outdoor, wilderness nature. This project aimed to help Kroka by helping them with a series of technical and mechanical challenges that would enhance their campus. This involved designing a pulley system to lift 400-pound boats in their boat house, constructing a three-stove rocket stove in their shop village, and a solar kiln to improve their wood drying.

I don't completely know how to feel after this open innovation. The project ended up working and the final presentation went great, but I feel like a lot of time was spent not knowing exactly what to do. I don't completely know what it is, but I can't seem to fix the eventual slump I get in all of my projects. For this project, it was somewhere in between the first and second week. Even though I was doing work during that time, it didn't feel like the most productive work I could've been doing. A big part of that I think, has to do with the group dynamic. A four-person group made it so that the first part of the studio was very volatile and our ideas were constantly changing. And I find that my most successful projects are either solo, or when I'm the team lead, and when I have less control over where the project is going, I find I'm not as clear on what we should be doing, especially the first week. I kind of felt that way in this project. That's enough talking about the bad though. There was a lot of good that happened in this project. For one, working with Kroka was awesome. We built something that a client would use. How often does that happen at high school? We also worked on many technical skills, and I got a lot better at Fusion 360 while working on this project. Another huge element was collaboration. Working with Kroka, NuVu staff, and the four of us, the project was a constant state of communication. As I mentioned earlier, actually implementing something was huge. Giving Kroka a fire stove that they could use and a successful pulley system was huge and was what really made this project successful.

Empathize

Material Exploration

Envision

Colaborate

Giving/Receiving Feedback

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Research

Kroka Expeditions X NuVu Innovation School is a student-facilitated and led collaboration, engineered to maximize impact and learning. Over the span of four weeks, our group brainstormed and implemented an improved pulley system and created a rocket stove for the staff village. In addition, we proposed a major improvement to Kroka's firewood drying process, which would drastically increase efficiency, both in time to dry and in carbon release when burned.

Our Kroka collaboration is the first project where I felt like I was truly self-driven. I pioneered the relationship with a multi-million-dollar client organization and followed through on (most) of what we said we would do. As a group, we overcame massive logistical challenges related to working with a client over 100 miles away. I improved most, if not all of my project management skills related to time management and logistics. In addition, I utilized and expanded my researching skills while experimenting with different concepts, each of which was bounced off of the client and other coaches at NuVu. I also learned to appreciate the difficulty in masonry work by building systems designed to last. All in all, this was a successful project for both the client, my group and myself.

Collaborate

Engage & Persist

Fabrication

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Concept Development

PEV is a 2 wheeled electrified scooter project dedicated to moving car users to adopt smaller, fully electric, non-polluting transportation. The story we want to tell with this project is creating a form of micro-transportation for city car users to ride instead of driving around small distances in their gas cars that pollute the air. We are deciding between a gokart syle motor which would have more power or a scooter hub motor better efficiency and practicality. Our end goal for this project is to have a solid 1:1 scale chassis and body that rolls and to have the mount points for a motor and battery pack. We made progress to getting to that 1:1 scale by scaling everything down a lot and creating/learning about how everything works and connects so we are more prepared for creating the 1:1 scale.

in this studio I saw growth in a few areas I did not expect. I grew in the aspect of collaborating with my team and getting our parts of the project finished and completed. I also thought I grew in the area of prototype creating and fidelity. It was sturdy and did not fall apart easily. I was pretty happy with how it turned out and the process that it was created with.

Express

Collaborate

Physical Fabrication

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Material Exploration

This project is a modular terrain board made of the cheapest, yet aesthetically pleasing materials possible, to be accessible for students, hobbyists, and the like. A terrain board is used for tabletop games such as D&D, or in our case, Warhammer, to enhance the experience and immerse the players. The board is under $100 to build, assuming you have access to basic workshop tools (e.g., a saw, screws) and basic materials (e.g., acrylic paint, dirt). This makes it much more accessible than just buying terrain boards, since they are usually quite expensive. This board is also much more customizable than most, an added plus to making your own terrain.

Our project required a lot of collaboration and time management, deciding who does what and when. I think the entire group improved in that area, and we all worked very well together. We did not have the time to make more modules other than enough to fill the board, but we still effectively conveyed the idea even if we didn't exactly have enough to really make it customizable. We produced over a hundred blocks and managed to make them all look good, so I think we did super well in the area of physical fabrication. I also think that we did a good job at material exploration, even if we didn't use all of our ideas. For example, we were going to have a forest, and experimented with making trees out of real twigs, paper, and a combination of air-dry clay and twist ties. However, the clay would not dry at all, and it took too much time to make them, so we completely scrapped the idea of trees and replaced them with ruins.

Engage & express

Express

Sketching & Drawing

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This project is an installation based on and designed for the corner studio, displaying and visualizing creativity and the play between mechanical and organic elements. When picking out potential sites, we wanted to fill up the corner studio with more lively and creative energy, since the new work space was feeling quite empty and dull. Combining Cole Krivak's abstract and geometric design, with Lalita Bellach's interest in organic and floral shapes and patterns, the final mural design incorporated the best of both worlds and created a creativity-filled side profile with visualizing creative thoughts and process. The installation is made up of laser cut wood, then painted with acrylic.

Growth Paragraph

I think over the course of open innovation, I was able to expand on my communication and collaboration with my group members, and other students in the nuvu community. Another part of my growth was creating a more finalized piece with a lot of physical fabrication, and designing. Sketching and incorporating user feedback also really helped our brainstorming and our overall process, and combining different conceptual elements to then lead us to have a more finalized and thought-out piece.

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Physical Fabrication

Collaborate

Engage & Persist

Sketching & Drawing

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Core Skill

Pass-through is a short story about an unorthodox family dealing with loss and grief, two years after the death of Andrew, the father, son, and husband of the rest of the family. Pass-through takes place in a big, crumbling house in Vermont or New Hampshire over the course of two days in October 2023. The denizens of the house - a woman named Catherine, her two children and mother-in-law fight frequently as they try to collectively come to terms with the death of Catherine's erratic husband two years prior. They rarely talk about him and have not cleaned out his office yet at the start, but when they do a whole lot of unwelcome feelings and memories will be coming at the family very quickly. I focused on illustration and editing, while project partners Bridget and Zahra both took the lead in writing and editing each other's work. We all collaborated on the brainstorming and combined our styles of storytelling to craft this world.

This studio was difficult for me-- I was the only person in the whole group who had ever done OI before, that it was very stressful on top of the fact I didn't know anything about Bridget or Zahra before this whole thing started. Chris had noticed this, and was able to help me understand how to best be a good teammate to both of them-- I took his feedback to heart, even if it was difficult at times to input it into practice. I was a bit overeager to share and create at the beginning of the studio, and it was not giving either of them the chance to share their own ideas. This changed over the course of the studio, and we all learned how to work well with each other-- eventually bringing us to a point where writing and designing was easy.

Express

Collaborate

Concept development

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Sketching and drawing

The goal of our project was to add a lively feel to the corner studio and make it feel less empty, by creating a mural/art installation for NuVu. We began working this by sketching our ideas and surveying the NuVu students about what they wanted included in the mural. We then pitched our ideas to the C.E.O of NuVu, Saeed, and got feedback for next steps. One of the ways I contributed to this project specifically was doing lots of the survey and feedback work with the coaches and peers. We then came up with some strong conceptual ideas and got more feedback. Using the feedback we were able to iterate on the ideas and come up with a clear final concept. We then Lo-fi prototyped the concept using laser-cut cardboard and paint. After that we then made finalized Rhino files for all of the pieces, and then assembled and painted everything.



During the fall OI I grew by collaborating more with not only my teammates but also with the community. I was able to get lots of feedback on our project from NuVu staff and other NuVu students by doing surveys with them and using the feedback to change our ideas. I also grew in concept development when our group had to come up with a brand new idea for a mural. We had to change our concept a lot because of all the feedback we got, and in the end came with a really well thought out concept.

Express

Empathy

Physical Prototyping

Unerasable is a series of monuments celebrating the solidarity, defiance, and resilience that the queer experience holds. We do this by gaining individual perspectives from Queer People of Boston through interviews. We are using silhouettes aesthetically inspired by the work of Kara Walker. These stories that are small and unnoticeable, thus making these stories hidden. We are bringing them forward and making them Unerasable

Over the last couple of weeks, I have increased my skills in physical prototyping. We made our final by using a stencil laser cut out of cardboard, which we then spray chalked over. Our plaque was made by painting a board and then engraving it into the wood with the laser cutter. I grew in the ways I express, as well as experience empathy. I had to take multiple people's perspectives, with likely internal bias, and combine them all into one unbiased writing. I was also tasked with distilling how our client felt, and expressing that in street art. I have been challenged with rapid prototyping while our idea is also rapidly changing. I also greatly improved in time management due to our ideas changing many times, and us adapting with even less time. I think that this OI was very beneficial to my growth both as a NuVu student and as a community member.

Concept Development