LASER-CUT WOODEN BOWLS
I made these wooden bowls as gifts for my family after seeing a similar item in a museum gift shop for around $100. I realized I could make these super quick and for free using Northeastern's makerspace laser cutters!
Using Adobe Illustrator to create the design, I perfected the concentric shapes after a few attempts and was able to cut approximately twenty rings from a single sheet of plywood. I placed each ring at a slight rotation, each resting on top of the next smallest ring. After adhering them in place with a thin layer of wood glue, the result was this beautiful geometric bowl! I made the first bowl as a Christmas gift for my grandfather because he has his own wood shop, and my mom enjoyed it so much I made her one for Mother's Day.
RELIQUARY DESIGN SCULPTURE
I created this sculpture as a "reliquary of myself" for my Form and Structure class, representing a container that could embody or contain my personal character within a structurally-sound, laser-cut product with interlocking pieces which did not require glue or drilling through the wood for assembly.
Aesthetically, I tend to like vintage items that I find thrifting or in antique stores, and after some introspection I realized that another formative part of my character is that I tend to be overly ambitious, sometimes putting in lots of time and effort into difficult or even impossible tasks, just to see the final result either topple and collapse, or barely hold together as an impressive feat. This culminated in the design concept in which three vintage console televisions, modeled after my grandmother's TV from my childhood, were stacked corner-to-side in a gravity-defying manner. The "screens" open up like cabinet drawers, the perfect size to hold small memorablia like jewelry or knick-knacks.
My grandmother's vintage console television was the inspiration for the project
My professor encouraged us to use TinkerCAD to develop the models for our sculptures, but I chose to use SolidWorks to develop my skills and awareness with the program even though it made the project more difficult since I was not allowed to use plug-ins. Because of this, I learned how to do the difficult geometry work manually; creating the latching between each cabinet was challenging, due to the irregular position of each piece pulling and leaning at strange angles. To finish the sculpture, I detailed the face of each cabinet to resemble my grandmother's TV, which was applied with the laser cutter by raster engraving, gluing black fabric inside the cabinet to give the illusion of speakers, and lining each drawer with a different vintage fabric. If I were to edit one part of the final version, I would round out the drawer corners to look more like the rounded TV screen to make it more instantly recognizable.