Process

Graham Galts

For my project I built a shelter that would collapse and help people survive after earthquakes. My first idea was to have the shelter inflatable but then I decided to move on to a design based on the Hoberman' sphere. This idea was better because it allowed the structures to be bigger and I decided to make it based off of the Hoberman's sphere after additional research. My first iterations were mainly focused on creating the box that would hold all of the pieces together at the top of the dome. All of this was done in cardboard and after several hours of changes I created a box that would fit all the pieces and allow them to move freely. For the cardboard model I used fasteners (the large ones because unfortunately we had run out of the smaller ones) but I decided to move on to screws instead because thet were more reliable and looked better. The next few days were spent cutting out pieces in wood and assembling. At the end we found there to only be one problem, It would collapse if we brought it out to far. My first idea was to create a base which would connect all the pieces and hold them in place. This would work but would take hours to assemble so I found another solution. while looking at the sphere that we had ordered earlier I realized that by adding little nubs that would prevent the pieces from folding too far.