Form vs Play
The task for this project was to design a children’s play area inside the building space provided.
A main consideration for designing the space is that the play space is a temporary installation. We needed to consider children/parent circulation and safety.
We were also told to accommodate play structure or areas that would engage these verbs:
Climb Crawl Jump HideRoll Slide Explore Assemble
In my design I chose to mainly focus on jump, crawl, slide, assemble, and climb.
Design:
My conceptual design started as a an idea encompassing the idea of going to the sky as well as going underground. As I started ro build this idea in SketchUp I soon remembered the considerations of the assignment that it was supposed to be temporary, alas I could not cut a hole in the floor. From there it evolved more too if i could cut circle holes INTO the floor then I should use them by having them come OUT of the floor. This idea then developed the main structure in my play space. Using these circles rising from the floor at different heights children can crawl and climb and jump off the created structure. This main design evolved into the assemble play space as well. Using the free circles children can choose to stack them on any of the existing pole and other circles.
Modeling:
This was the first experience I'd ever had with the SketchUp program. It was difficult at first to switch my brain from the Rhino interface mode to the SketchUp interface, but I would say SketchUp is generally an easy software to pick up on. I think I made this assignment more difficult on myself by designing using circles rather than square and rectangle geometries which are better suited for SketchUp modeling. But the push/pull tool made the developing of my circle 2D forms into 3D form quite easy. The scene tabs were also very useful when setting views so if you got too deep into a wall or rotated out of place you can just go right back to a specific view.
Process of building the dome structure.
Illustartor:
After exporting 2D graphics (a jpg file and a dwg file) from SketchUp I opened the files into Illustrator and continued to work on the graphics. I used the Adobe Illustrator image trace tool for better quality graphics compared to the exported 2D graphics from SketchUp. As you can see in the below images the quality of the graphics after using this technique is recommended.
Final Thoughts:
Overall I enjoyed this project and could this program being useful when wanting to get an overall design idea across quickly, but the details may need to be refined elsewhere. I can see someone using this program to create graphics on the interior of spaces built in SketchUp. I think the perspective view and look around tools (seen in the photo below) are very useful when you want to image what it would really feel like in the space. I think these interior views would be a cool way to begin design video game graphics.
