I was brought on to the company's design engineering team to assist with optimizing production of seven large sculptures, each composed of thousands of individual oak tile pieces. The team had already developed a system to generate the base geometry for the topographic maps, but they still required a lot of additional information in order to produce the tiles efficiently, and meet tight deadlines for the project. My tasks involved creating scripts that performed various operations, such as generating CNC files, creating databases, and simulating prototypes.
SPM Design
Topographic Wood Tile Maps
Due to the huge scale of each continent, and the sheer number of unique tiles for each installation, efficiency in the shop was of upmost importance. For this, our team developed a library of jigs and gauges to be used for cutting and drilling. Each continent had its own set of CNC-cut pieces that fit into larger, re-usable sleds and mounts. This allowed the shop workers to produce an enormous amount of parts in a short period of time--and with very high accuracy. In order to keep track of everything, I also developed a series of functions that generated detailed information for each map: map-wide tile counts & labeling, assembly-level section tile counts, locations, thicknesses, and information relating to installation.
Some of my contributions to the project:
- developed a series of scripts to parametrically gather data for all ocean and land tiles as they are updated
- generated tile-count spreadsheets & used data to produce per-panel information used in PDF directives and install documentation
- created a script to generate CNC linework for the production of shop jigs & gauges
- aided team in developing strategy to resolve Africa's unique grid & used script-assisted modeling to produce graphics for Antarctica prototypes
- utilized scripts to provide quality control, and help catch errors in the map geometry
The project was a success and everything was installed on-schedule; I was very pleased to be involved with such a large-scale project, and highly efficient design team. It was great to utilize my parametric design skills for such a beautiful and detailed project. I feel like I thrive in this kind of environment, as I love solving these types of challenges.
