EXTINCTION
IN MOTION
COURSE:
DESIGN 11: Visual Thinking
TEAM:
Mike Fleming, Jose-Angel Kairuz, Emma Zhao
TOOLS & SKILLS:
Fabrication, Sketching, Rapid prototyping
TIMELINE:
Winter 2024, 2 weeks
The Assignment:
How can we tell a story through simple mechanical movement?
In this project, we were challenged to design and build an automaton—a hand-cranked mechanical system—that brought a narrative scene to life. Our automaton needed to feature multiple distinct moving elements, all crafted from foam core, and communicate a clear theme through motion.
The project challenged us to engage the user using surprise, humor, beauty, or delight as tools of visual storytelling, using motion as the medium.
Before jumping into our final automaton systems, we began with a rapid prototype: a wellness automaton—a small, hand-cranked scene that told a personal story about how we care for our mental health. Our team created a sweet moment of a dog running through a sunflower field, inspired by our shared love of spending time outdoors with our own dogs.
For our final project, we set out to build a more complex automaton, and chose to depict the moment just before the extinction of the dinosaurs. We wanted the calm, routine movements of the Jurassic world—flying, grazing, living—to contrast with the sudden chaos closing in.
While we blocked out our mechanisms and movements in our sketches, it was when we started adding the little finishing touches to the project, like the texture of the grass and the skeletons along the side of the automaton, that the project really began to come to life.
