SOAP

Project Description: We were asked to choose one important person in our life to express our love and appreciation by creating a beautiful design that would be on a small piece of soap. We will be using a silicone mold to create the soap and we will make at least 2 pieces of soap using the reusable silicone mold. We also are required to make a catchy tagline to it.

We will use the Design Thinking technique to research, brainstorm, CAD, prototype, test, and repeat the process to enhance our design. 

Project Guidelines: 

• Our design will be CADded in either TinkerCAD Codeblocks or Fusion 360

• Our project must be 2”- 3” in diameter and 1”- 1.5” tall. Remember that the default unit in Codeblocks is millimeters.

• You must not use any model from the TinkerCAD community library or anything that you found online.

• You need to keep an up-to-date portfolio to document the entire journey from idea creation to the final product. This project deserves a separate page on your site.

Procedure: I chose fusion to do my CADding and first started off by starting a sketch for a circle with a three inch diameter and extruded it by an inch. Then I selected the to face of the cylinder to insert my canvas(Screen shot of my final brainstorm) and created another sketch to start the tracing process. After tracing, it was time to extrude. Since there were many of the Rose pedals and I needed them to all stand out, I had to extrude the pedals so that the surrounding pedals will be on different levels. This resulted in all the pedals showing beautifully on the print. For the dim sum, I had to do the same thing. After extruding all sketches so that all details showed, I started printing my first prototype.

With the prototype finished i quickly identified several flaws in the design. It had a lot of details hidden in it that made it extremely hard for the mold to pick up successfully. Some of these were in the bao zi in the dim sum, where the details were too small for the mold to pick up without ripping the mold itself. Another flaw was in the Chinese characters where I made the cracks too deep, meaning the mold will have a possibility of breaking once pried out. The characters were also too thin.

To fix the flaws, I first inscreased. the thickness of the mold with a new tool called "Scale sketch" to increase the scale of the characters. I also re-drew the bao zi lines and the dim sum basket so that it would be easier for the mold to catch on to the details. To fix several details that were cut too deep into the soap, I had to adjust the extrusion. However, based on the time limit, I thought of an alternative choice that was more flexible to time, which was basically making small outlines in place of the cuts and extruding to the desired measurements. With all the flaws taken care of I re-printed.

I then started the mold making process, where we used silicon clay to start shaping our mold. Since we were using a different type of clay from a different brand we had only 5 minutes to make the mold instead of 10. In order to make the mold harden before the end of class, we also used a hair dryer to make the process faster.

After our molds were done, we then poured hot soap into the molds, with mine scented as vanilla, and waited for them to cool.

After the soap cooled, we popped them out and thought of catch phrases for them. Mine was "The Recipe Of Life" to represent the Dimsum side of my soap. We then sent them to the people we made them for!

Reflection - SOUL: 

S - Strength of your work. I think I managed my time much better than all the other projects I have done so far in both DE8 and CS8. I also feel like I executed the process extremely well, with the process taking not that long. The details were amazing and I feel like that my parents would like this present as a birthday gift or something.

O - Opportunities to improve your project. Some things I would like to improve on was probably the mold because i feel like I rushed the process as when the mold came out, even though all the necessary details were there, the walls of the soap was littered with holes as I didn't put enough pressure on to the walls. I also feel like i should've added food coloring as the mold details was hard to see on plain white soap.

U - Understanding what you learned through this project. Every tool I used in Fusion as well as the Printing process was sort of a review to me as I used all the tools in DE8 last year. However, I did learn one more tool in fusion, which was the scale tool to set the scale of a sketch which proved to be extremely helpful when adjusting the Chinese characters in my design when they didn't fit.

L - Limitations you encountered in this project. I encountered little limitations in this project except for the time as I didn't have time to revise my mold making attempt 1, which really hurt my mold making process as I didn't have a second attempt to fix my mold. The result was an Okay-looking mold with imperfections that could've been avoided with a second attempt.

WISCR - In the WISCR, the I and the C stood out to me in this project as I used Insightful and critical thinking to design my soap, making sure all details stood out using different levels of extruding. The C, Clear communicators, also showed, as I helped others in my class who needed assistance.