There is a rich collection of cardboard furniture, toys and structures – I decided to go with the latter initially. I examined some of the structures I liked best and tried to take some inspiration for my own construction.
I liked the aesthetic of uniform interlocking pieces being used to make structures and began designing there. I couldn’t get to lab so I began my initial exploration in cardstock. Manually cutting pieces and seeing what worked.
My goals for this project were:
- Uniform initial pieces with versatile configurations
- Self-reinforcing (multiple points of connection if necessary)
- Minimize cardboard waste
I realized from this experiment that there was much more versatility if I made the initial shape teeth exactly the same length. Making the shape rectangular (instead of triangular) made more sense because the laser cutter could only create cuts at 90 degrees and it minimized cardboard waste. Someone later pointed out that this shape is the basic building block at CBA for much of their work on creating diodes and capacitors out of blocks.
Very little cardboard waste!
In parallel with my re-configurable cardboard design I wanted to make an animal bust out of cardboard. I decided on elephant – having recently visited some elephants. I figured a cardboard elephant head would be a nice wall hanging.
After I laser cut all of my pieces, I realized that I needed something to make with them. I thought it would be interesting to try and try to create with my blocks a similar elephant head. One created programmatically by slicer, and one made manually out of “blocks”.
