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| Doomed - Photo: Darren Kall |
While designing the
sculptures I did for the Electra C. Doren library there were lots of open items
to research, track down, and resolve. There were unknowns and decisions that
would impact my final designs and, if unresolved, create risks to success. That
made me feel uncomfortable about quality and it made me anxious that it would
mean rework for me because the issues would reveal themselves too late in the
process to be mitigated - as they often do.
I was working with a whole new crew of fabricators, installers, and others. I tried to resolve open items through asking questions and proposing approaches but even that
didn't resolve all the issues with the design or with the process steps between
all the partner companies. We needed… an experiment!
All the players needed to walk through the process of building a sculpture to discover the
"gotchas". We needed to build a physical mock-up by the same process
we planned to use for the final sculptures. It needed to result in something we
could see and touch, so that we could decide about open issues.
For example; I'm
familiar with unpainted steel surfaces but not with unpainted sheet aluminum
surfaces. What would they look like? What would the ground surface treatment I
designed look like? I was told that the aluminum should be treated to preserve it since exposure to weather would impact
the aesthetics of the aluminum over time. Would a clear powder coat give me the luster of steel I wanted? There were stakeholders who questioned the combination of fence color,
sculpture color, pavers, concrete, and brick that will make up the terrace. We
brought samples together for an approximation and it convinced me that the
fence coating called "bronze" worked well with the paver colors and
raw aluminum. But there are stakeholders who were not there and reserving
judgment until they could see it. Another stakeholder recommended that a black
coating might work better and others started to question my choice of raw
aluminum.
I had a ton of other
questions like how much visible space is taken up by the mounting equipment?
How much of a border do I need to leave uncut in aluminum to have it support my
design? What would 1/4 inch aluminum look like in cutouts compared to 1/8 inch
steel? Would I have to change my design to accommodate the new thickness? What
format did the fabricator need my final artwork in? How accurate would the CAD
interpretation of my final artwork be? What does the cut edge of water-jet
cutting aluminum look like compared to laser cutting steel? Will it have burrs?
Will it be too sharp for safety? … I was boring everyone with questions they
couldn't answer.
I proposed that we
create a mock-up and walk through the whole build process end to end. In the
process I learned I wasn't the only one with questions. Stakeholders jumped on
the idea. The fabricator, the architects, and the library also wanted some open
items resolved. Mock-ups to the rescue for all of us!
Most notably
Ultra Aluminum, my fence fabricator partner, was very concerned about my unsupported ~ 4 foot lengths of rib patterns that made up the sky in my designs.
In steel they would be
no problem, but in aluminum the fabricator couldn't guarantee that these ribs
would be covered under warranty without adding in supports. They were concerned that the aluminum would
be susceptible to breaking if someone put too much weight on the aluminum. But
where to put supports in the design? It made the most sense to put the supports
between the ribs at the points where I was creating Sheeler-like sections of
the fractured sky. I was creating an illusion of a line but the supports would
be actual lines between these sections.
Adding supports to my
ribs would be a fundamental compromise of my design. It would be a step
backwards. I had
earlier sketches with supports and having
supports was just not as innovative a design as the one I created through
illusion. I made ribs that vary in thickness as they transition over the
different Sheeler-like sky fractures. By creating a transition between
thicknesses along an imaginary line it appears to observers that there is a
line there. Observers "construct" the line without thinking about it.
With supports the viewer won't have to "construct" the lines in their
perception; it will be easier for them to see the sections of the fractured
sky. To me this makes it less challenging and less interesting as a piece of
art. But this is not just art, it is also a fence.
Ultra Aluminum is a
subject matter expert and they know their material better than me, but I was
attached to my design. So together we decided that one of the mock-ups had to be
several 4 foot ribs of aluminum that could be tested for durability with supports.
I gave them a paper cutout of a handful of 4-foot ribs. They converted this to
a machine-readable CAD and checked the metal specs. It wouldn't work without
supports. If this sculpture were hanging on a gallery wall or suspended in a
window, there would be no need for supports. It is because it is an accessible
fence that people might hit accidentally that the ribs might fracture. The
library couldn't get the warranty they wanted unless there were supports added.
I compromised and gave into the design change. Next I needed to mitigate the
issue and reduce the impact on my design.
The first step was for
the Ultra Aluminum CAD specialist to simply add straight line supports along my
illusion lines. We started with 1/2 inch wide supports connecting my ribs. It
was a hard compromise but I went along to see the result. The 1/2 inch didn't
look too bad in the CAD drawing so the first mock-up was cut in metal.
Immediately after it was done, and before I could even see it, the fabricator
rejected it and cut another one but with 1/4 inch wide supports. The 1/2 inch
was just too thick aesthetically.
For this fundamental
compromise and all the other open items we designed two mock-ups and assembled
them into representative railing parts.
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| Mock-up of "sky bars" with 1/4 inch supports, edges not sanded, black powder coat |
The first was 1 ft H by
4 ft W with several 4 ft long ribs including 1/4 inch wide supports, with a black
coating, with no sanding of the edges of the water jet cut openings.
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| Mock-up of shapes, clear powder coat, sanded edges, hand-ground surface |
The second was 1 ft H by 1 ft W with a region showing a variety of cutout shapes
but no ribs, with a clear coating, and sanded cut out edges and a hand-ground
surface finish.
When the mock-ups
arrived I answered all my remaining open questions, made my final design
decisions, and prepared to present them to the Library Art Board to get their
final approval to produce the final artwork. More on that meeting in another
post.
Are we better off by
having walked the process and created a mock-up? Absolutely. Could we have
reached the same conclusions with the same level of risk reduction and
increased confidence without the mockups? No.
End-to-end process-created
mock-ups are the best time-saving and cost-effective way to resolve open risks.
