Adapting Someone Else's Design

When adapting someone else's design, who the author of the piece is can become confused. What makes the author the author? In many ways when multiple people work on a project, they all become the author and this has been the case with my work on public spaces. My group of collaborators and I were tasked with adapting the table below created by our peer, Nao Iyama.

My group really took this project on as our own and wanted to leave our own mark on it, while maintaining Nao's initial concept. The most immediate struggle was tackling the engineering issues of a piece like this. Concrete is extremely heavy, which makes it very difficult to attach to other objects securely, so we had to create a shape that would grip a circular surface like a lamp post or tree really well.

We attempted a couple of designs with curved surfaces on the back that would match the curvature of the lamp posts, however this limited the amount of scenarios that the piece would work in and we felt the variety of use was at the core of Nao's work. We instead opted to use a v-shape cut out on the back to allow for good contact with as many different objects as possible while using ratchet straps.

The model above is a 1 to 1 scale foam test that demonstrates many of the angles that we decided upon for our final outcome. The different angles provide strength as well as a more visually striking presence. Below is the final 3D model that my group created in CAD software to help visualise our design and measure different angles.