Designing

For the design of the final globe, the shape had to be considered in order to start any other aspects of the globe. Originally, we were skewing towards a polyhedron.

GLOBE STYLE EXPERIMENTATION

The lofi user testing gave us important information to base the rest of our project. The size of the globe and most importantly the function of the button. An idea was brought up by a user to have multiple buttons for basic media playback commands such as fast-forward, pause, and so on. This concept was then discussed within our duo and with an instructor and discarded due to it not aligning with the vision of the project. Specifically, an experience-based project rather than a standard video player.

DESIGNING AND PROTOTYPING THE INTERFACE

The feasibility of the design is also important. In making the upper model, we realized that laser etching the world onto 90+ individual tiles would be futile due to a lack of detail. Upon this realization, we agreed to settle for a sphere with 36 sides.

In order to have both a net of the tiles which would comprise our sphere, we also needed to transfer the world map onto these tiles for laser etching. Using Processing, I created a tool to assist me in the designing of the individual tiles

The script allows you to rotate and save the frames for each individual tile. These frames were then brought over to illustrator for the outlining of the earth

Aforementioned Processing script

Sphere pre and post texture wrap

As our user group is expats, and both my partner and I were at once, or currently are expats, we decided to form this user test as a survey so that we could send it to other expats we know. This allowed us to get both a diverse and relevant result when it came to their opinions. We divided our testing into two main parts, the testing for the video and the testing for the globe. As this was the first round of testing conducted with an excerpt from the final documentary, we chose to place a majority of our focus on the results for the video.

Using the information collected during the mapping of the collection, we were able to divide the documentary into certain parts most relevant to the netherlands. based on that, clips were sourced from Open Images and compiled to create the documentary.

As this was among my first times constructing with wood, it was very much a learning and experimental process. Once we laser-cut the tiles, we glued them together using canvas and wood glue as there was no possibility of using nails or staples due to the thickness of the wood.

Amongst the myriad of challenges, the warping due to the glue was amongst the largest. This also brings up an area where I would have done things very differently. If I were to do the project again, I would cut bevel the edges of all the tiles at an angle so that they would align with each other perfectly.

A stand for the globe was designed and made but eventually had to be discarded due to it not aligning with the globe anymore due to the warping.

The results of our user testing were relatively expected. There was a fair amount of disagreement when it came to the sound of the documentary but democracy voted to keep it the same. The final globe shape was selected and this lead to our implementation of this style over the older polyhedral style.