Burn Brilliant: UOCD Final Photos

I took a lot of pictures after my team's final UOCD final presentation. I thought about putting these in my UOCD reflection post (coming soon!), but there are a few too many, so here they all are! My team named itself the Mathemachickens, and our user group was recreational mathematicians. We designed Abacus, a space in which recreational mathematicians and other curious people could discover and design mathematical art and objects together.

The view walking into my studio. My team's space is in the back left corner of the picture.

We strung up some of our old material that we still needed to reference. This photo shows our personas, which we made in Phase I and modified at the beginning of Phase II.

Here's the rest of that "clothesline." The bigger poster is information from our codesigns, and the yellow poster is some mini product posters for our more developed ideas.

Our back wall. Up high are some of our user portraits and an interaction narrative. The very center is our draft product poster for Abacus. To either side of the Abacus poster are broad interaction maps for how some of our personas act at Abacus. You can also see parts of our raw ideas posters, some interaction narratives and interface ideas, and our areas of opportunity poster.

Here's our plastic pin board and the first clothesline. Everything on the pinboard is from our first design review, I think, and on the string are more user portraits.

This is the original Puzzle Kitchen model from the very beginning of Phase 2. It was one of our pet ideas from the beginning. We were complemented on the detail of this model but were told it wasn't very dynamic, meaning that we couldn't take it to a codesign and have a user help us change and improve it. Nevertheless, making it was probably one of the most important things that happened in Phase 2 because...

...we eventually arrived at this! Here is our final model of Abacus, a discovery and ideation space for recreational mathematicians and other people who are curious about rec math.

Here's the entrance to Abacus. The door is automatic and folds out, but there are always arrows point in. There's an interactive sculpture out front. The walls at the front of the building are glass so that people inside can write on them and so that people outside can see in and be intrigued.

Here's one view inside. The yellow center part is the discovery space, where people work on some build or design challenge together. Maybe it's making mathematical art that go in the sculpture garden upstairs. The ring outside is the design space. It has lounges (like the one near the front of the picture) and tessellating tables (back left) near whiteboards. You can also see the snack bar near the stairs.

Another view of the inside.

Here's an advertisement we made!

This is the final product poster! After our Phase 3 design review, the model mostly needed painting and cleaning up (though we completely redid the sculpture garden), which didn't take all of us, so we split up to do the work for the final presentation. I did most of the poster.

At the beginning of each phase, we had to do strategy setting, which basically involved having a discussion about what we wanted to do that phase and producing some deliverable based on that. Our Phase I deliverable was the cube, inspired by Rubik's cubes, but then we decided to stay with a Platonic solid theme.