Chris
Harrison

Design+Build: Fall 2001

This year's Ph.D. orientation included a new "Design+Build" event. Among many possible projects, we settled on making a backlit acrylic wall peppered with digital photo frames, highlighting research and fun things. This was to go in the new HCI Institue "foyer" space. Another team worked on an interactive "address book" wall projection (not seen here).

Over the course of two 6 hour sessions, Eric, Amy, Sauvik, Tawanna, Nesra and myself built six stand-alone columns that could be put together into the wall you see below. A substantial effort was laser-cutting all the 12x16 acrylic panels with prefabbed fastening and/or photo frame mounting points. We also decided to stilt the acrylic at slightly different levels to give a more three-dimensional appearance. Impossible to see in the photos are laser-etched HCI logos on some of the panels.

Before:

After:

© Chris Harrison