Evie LaComb

Nurture Yourself

Nurture yourself is the new way to measure how much you have nurtured yourself today. Simply follow the guide and add the charms that correlate to the things you have done today. Those charms are characterized into three groups, the blue charms for soul, green ones for mind, and pink ones for body. As you add charms to the baskets the flower on the right of the board moves up, symbolizing the flower inside yourself being nurtured. Nurture Yourself acts as a reminder that your health isn't a single attribute, but a more complex system involving things as deep as the soul. Each of the categories is equally important in this system, and thus need to be nurtured equally.

The system is purely mechanical without electronics integrated into its functionality. The three baskets are set on a pulley system, and are hung by rubber bands, as weight is added the baskets stretch the rubber bands and move down, pulling the string down and simultaneously pulling the flower up. The design of the board is meant to be whimsical and young. The materials used such as embroider thread and polymer clay give it a hand crafted look making it more approachable and soulful than a purely mechanical and technical piece. I imagine this work being displayed in a children's classroom or another public area where people can interact with it and explore its meaning.

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Process

Above is the final shot of my working illustrator board for this project. The first thing I did before prototyping was cutting out the peg board and engraving the title into it. Here you can see a few iterations of titles, colors and compositions. I decided for the board to be 23 inches long as to fit on a 24 by 24 inch acrylic with wiggle room. The peg board design allowed me to iterate as I knew I would be doing in the future. It also gave it a crafty look.

originally I wanted the board to be wall mounted, but I decided including standing feet would be a good way to move it around and display it in different places.

You can also see how I favored the offset layout heavily. I thought for a while that this had a better composition and a more fun look, but as I prototyped on the actual board I found that a straight across layout was easier to read.

The first prototype was a much simpler system then the final ended up becoming. With one string that split off into three, they all moved together as one unit, so adding weight to one basket would pull down the others as well. There was also only one rubber band being used at the stem of the flower.

My first hurdle was finding a spring or rubber band that was sensitive enough to record the small weight changes that I wanted it to. I used bolts as a measure for how much I wanted the charms to weigh. The Rubber bands I ended up using were larger ones I cut down the middle. I would have preferred a spring, but all the ones I tested were too hard to expand and didn't have enough expandability.

With some critique from Zach, we decided the device would be more easily readable if all three baskets could move independently, showing all their own weights. This added a new layer of components to design and test.

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One of the most difficult parts of this fabrication, and what I spent the most time on was balancing the system.

If things were too heavy the string would pull up the other pulleys

If the flower was too light the string wouldn't reset

if the pulleys had too much friction they would catch on the string

If the pulleys didn't have enough friction they would pop off the string entirely

I ended up reprinting the pulley wheels 3 times to optimize the design, and by making the string fall straight down instead of at an angle the wheels as significantly more to attach to.

Reflection

For this project I had to manage a lot of materials and fabrication techniques. I laser cut, 3D printed, crafted and sculpted all the components on this board and it was a real challenge trying to keep the vision intact. Simply put; It was hard to juggle the function of the piece with the aesthetics of the piece. I think in the end I did this well enough, and it is one of the reasons I think this project was so successful, but If I could do this again I would want to be even more intentional on my material choices and visual design considerations. I have a lot going on with the strings and pipe cleaners, plastic, acrylic, straws, bearings, etc... and I am torn weather I want it to be more simplified, or if I should have leaned into the chaos a bit more. I think the baskets in particular were rushed, I would have liked to make them soft with string, so you could see the charms inside and the size would expand depending on how many you had in there. The hard baskets took away a little bit from the design of the charms. I also wish I had made the charms of more equal size and weight, I was afraid they wouldn't be heavy enough and I think I ended up overkilling it on a few charms, especially the friendship one. Lastly I wish I had left enough room on the board to display or store all the charms so the extras wouldn't be loose on the table.

In this project I learned a lot about my own values on technology and mechanisms. when looking back at my last project, The Cube, I find it funny how it is the near opposite of this project: a mysterious device with invisible components that seems to purposely keep secrets, vs a childlike tool very open to what it does and how it does it. I think from both of my projects I have learned that deciding on physical vs electronic is integral to the personality of the object or art work you are creating. I have gotten some feedback that adding too much electronics to this piece in the future might take away from it, I am beginning to really believe that.

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