Shivani's SAS Blog

The top three insights about writing I got from the workshop today were on imagery, character development and theme. Firstly, for imagery, we talked about how important it was to describe the setting using imagery, because it sets a visual picture in your reader's mind. In addition, imagery can also set the tone of your writing, because how you describe your setting could be indicative of your narrative's tone. Secondly, character development was talked about for both the narratives we workshoped in class. Especially if you are the main character and the narrator, it's important to choose your diction well. This is because how you talk about things can be attributed to your character's identity. For example, in Zeina's narrative, her as the child is the narrator. We talked about how you should try to imagine what a child would notice, especially when she (as a child) described her mother. We told Zeina to focus on colours and patterns instead of brand names because

     Retrofuturism is defined as "the practice of looking back to see how yesterday viewed the present." Also referred to as techno-archaeology, it's a process of looking back to find past miracles that never happened. An example of this is the cover page of the Byte Magazine:      This picture shows a tiny computer as a wrist watch, with the entire QWERTY keyboard and a small screen. This picture was created to make fun of future technology, because the editorial in the magazine pointed out this wasn't supposed to be a serious depiction. However, some people still believed this was the direction technology was heading in. Imagine having a keyboard so small it would fit on your watch... it raises questions about it's usability, because how is someone supposed to type when the keys are 1mm wide. In addition, the screen is also tiny, leading one to question what they thought people could do on that wrist-computer. One thing to point out is that smart watches

After my previous drawbacks and the terrible concrete object, I decided to do it again. This time, instead of trying to get the edges as straight as I could with plaster-board and balsa wood, I decided to 3D print an inverted mold to use. Lem and Mr. Williams taught me how to turn my sketchup model into a software file that could be sent to the 3D printer. I needed to turn my sketchup file into an stl file, and then use Cura (software) to turn it into a gcode file (which can be sent to the 3D printer). After doing all this, the printer printed out my mold and looked like this: The edges of this mold are much cleaner than what I made previously. I also inverted my design to create this mold, which is why the center triangle has been extended much higher than the rest. I then used plaster-board to create the same triangular prism I created before, and placed this 3D printed mold inside, facing upwards. This is a picture of my mold after I poured the concrete in and let it dry, bu

Now that I have my CAD program set and a solid idea, I started creating the mould to pour my concrete in. I used the same material from our last project, plaster-board, to create the outside of my mold. Since I was making this triangle object, I created a triangular prism without the top as my external mold. Next, I created small pieces for each of the side triangles (rectangles attached to triangles that would fold over) and placed them in each corner of the triangular prism. Since this plaster board had ridges, I needed a way to cover up the holes that resulted from folding the board over, so Mr. Williams suggested I use small strips of balsa wood. I just used the glue gun to glue these strips into place, and I was done with my mold. This is what it looked like before pouring concrete into it: After the concrete dried, I cut open the mold to reveal my object. I haven't taken any pictures of it yet, but it didn't look very good. The inner corners were very uneven be

Before I start my reflection, I wanted to split my blog posts into 3 parts: designing, trial 1, trial 2. My blog posts will go chronologically from step 1 to step 2 to step 3. I spent quite a bit of time on the brainstorm/design stage during this project. Initially, I had numerous ideas for a concrete object, and many of my ideas were very complex. After a few classes of sketching and planning different objects, I finally simplified it to the object I carried out the rest of the project on. I made the CAD image for several ideas I was considering: (This one was extremely complicated, and I didn't really know how to create this out of concrete. In addition, it didn't really have a specific function.) (This one was an idea I really liked, however I realized it would still be really hard to make this structure out of concrete. However, the function for this concrete piece would be a stand of some sort - I was thinking something to do with displaying jewelry) These two ide