Final Summative Post ~ Marble Run

Crystal Hayes

The prompt was to make a musical installation to draw attention to our school. Also to have something that people could interact with. But we had some restrictions to think about like the classes that are near the entrance and we had to think about what times it could be used and how to attach it to the school without destroying anything. We need to draw people's  attention to our school by this.

My group is addressing this task by making a marble run for the entrance of the building.Our intervention is made with xylophone pieces and wood pieces to make different sounds. It is used by turning a lever to pick up the marble carry the marble up and lets the marble go and goes through the marble run back into the marble bowl at the bottom. We thought that a marble run would be a great way to draw people's attention because they look cool and they fit the requirements that we had and the restrictions.

Lessons from this prototype is that even if you have a good idea of what you want done it may not be as easy as it is in your head. For example i thought that making this installation was going to be so easy and it would be quick but I reallality it took a lot of work to plan the idea and how we wanted it to be able to have people to interact with it. It was a lot harder them I thought it was going to be. It was actually really hard to make what I was picturing. This project was a lot harder than I expected because I thought sense I knew how I wanted to build it and I had a picture of it in my head but to actually explain it and try to make it was a lot harder than it seemed to be in my head. 

Next steps we took was talking to my partner and figure out where to go from there and think what could keep us focused so we know what to do. We Ran into a lot of problems but we had to think about the restrictions everytime we changed something because the restrictions are important. Precedents that informed us was marble runs xylophones, music. We were just looking for ideas and thinking about what might be fun to use as a musical installation.So we were just thinking about marble run. we were also thinking about what kind of marble would sound best. When we needed to figure our next steps we thought that it was really important to stay on track with our partner and to always talk about what we could do to help each other or what we could do separately to help our group. Also always keep restrictions and requirements in our head was very helpful. Our next steps we should take is finding a way to put the xylophone keys on the marble run without cutting the edges of the boards because it takes to long and the saw broken so it doesn't work but i barely makes a sound when its not cut.