Project 3#Gravity

Tracie Yang
2019年11月3日
讀畢需時 3 分鐘

已更新：2020年1月9日

An experience of gravity in space.

Brief

Design an artefact that expresses the experiential qualities of gravity.

Research Method

Body Storming &Behavioural Mapping

Brainstorm

When it comes to gravity, it reminds us of how to show gravity. We want to find some physical items to show the existence of gravity, and to visualize gravity.

So we explored several different materials (candles, chocolates, marshmallows, soaps) and prepared experiments to explore the possibility of using these materials to express gravity.

Research

Body Storming

We need to choose materials that can melt at higher temperatures and solidify at normal temperatures to visualize gravity. For this purpose, we chose four different materials for melting: candles, chocolate, marshmallow, and soap. Then we poured these melted materials into hands and see how the materials solidify to see the effect.

The figure below shows the effect of different materials falling on the hand. Due to the higher temperature of the melted soap, we used an apple instead of hands for experiments.

Behavioural mapping

We lit the candle and poured melted wax from different heights. The resulting shapes are different from each other. We found that there is a certain tendency for candles falling from different heights. The lower the candle is dropped, the clearer the pattern will be. When the candle is dropped from a higher position, the pattern formed by the fall becomes more blurred.

After tutorial

Although we did a lot of work last week, we met a "so what" problem at the end of the week. We don't know what the next step should be and how to give meaning to the project. Everyone gets confused. Our tutor suggested that we can combine the performance of gravity with age. As people getting old, their skin will also be affected by gravity and gradually form wrinkles which are also caused by gravity.

Brainstorm

According to the suggestion from our tutors, we intend to try on the relationship between gravity and age. It reminds us to think about the relationship between gravity and age and the relationship between gravity and time. There was a time travel movie called Interstellar (2014).

In the movie, the father went near the black hole in a spaceship. And when he came back to earth, he found that her daughter is older than him.

We did a lot of research about the theory of the relationship between time and gravity based on this movie. We also asked some students in a physics major. Finally, we make it clear about the relationship between gravity and time, so we want to show this in our project.

Definition

According to Einstein's general theory of relativity, the greater the mass, the greater the gravity, and the slower the time passes. We used led lights to represent the relative velocity of time, and made two rooms to represent the earth and black holes.

Compared with black holes, the earth has a small mass and fast time flow, so people on the earth will quickly grow old.

Compared to the earth, black holes have a large mass and a slow time flow, so the movement of people around the black hole is almost stationary.

Plans

We made a plan to show the theory. At first, we will ask a question to the audience.

"When the gravity is greater, does the time flow faster or slower?"

Then we provide two buttons on each side of the led stripe for everyone to choose the answer.

The speed of the led light on the side with more people selected gradually becomes faster.

We told the audience that the running led lights represent the speed of time. Then we continued to show the impact of the speed of time through performance. Performing slow motion on the spaceship means that time passes slowly compared to earth. By wearing a wig on Earth, it means that people will get old quickly compared to the time next to a black hole.

Process

Erick and Sanjana focused on designing two rooms with cardboard boxes. I focused on realizing the led stripe with coding. I did some basic marquee effect coding with Arduino. And we went to Creative Technology Lab for help. With the help of the teacher, we completed the marquee effect that we want.