So today as I said in my last post was going to be about a continuation of our experiments from the other day- except we would move onto some of our other machine ideas like the hugging blanket and the machine ball. Despite waking up late, I managed to remember to bring my spinning circle lights and I foraged for a piece of fabric we could use to put over top of the massage spinning thing. I found a perfect offcut of a fluffy brown material that was already comforting to touch even without the massaging. I figured that would be a good material that was akin to a blanket. A material that really was the epitome of comfort. One of my team members was able to participate in the ‘hacking it’ workshop which is really useful because those entail the exact set of skills we’ll need to hack the circle lights. Once we got to work, we decided to start on the massage ball. I cut open the dome and we proceeded to place little ping pong balls atop the lights but then discovered that the main part that circled was the surrounding bit. We decided to take a step back from it for a bit because we realized we needed to elevate the ping pong balls to get the effect we desired.
The next machine we wanted to focus on was the ‘hugging’ machine. Me and my teammate began to scrounge around for large bits of cardboard after discovering our machine would be useless against the wall and to our delight found massive bits of cardboard in the industrial design classes. We took those (they were discarded, don’t worry) and then created a sort of booth like shape. Using rope and a pulley we’d brought in, we began to attempt to construct our machine. However things began to go a bit astray and this is where the actual logistics of comprehending the machine in its physicality began to seem like a distant dream. We once again took a step back and reviewed things after having some food and coffee. It turned out that maybe we were too focused on creating a physical hug. Turning back to the glove idea, we thought that we could abandon the blanket on the rod and instead blow up a ton of gloves and put them against the walls all over. A person would step in and be consumed by comforting hands. Maybe this is the type of comfort that is overwhelming. We are going to attempt this idea tomorrow once we bring our resources in. So all in all, despite being a day of failed attempts, we got something out of it.
