With each consecutive week, I have begun feeling more and more useless to my group. I feel as though I play a large part in the planning, organizing, brainstorming, dividing up work, and scheduling , however, that shouldn't be my main goal. I love working with all these disciplines, however, everyone knows a lot more about the different aspects of the projects than I do. The engineers end up working on the programming, for they have been studying that for a good amount of time, the architects work on digital project, and the other art and design student, has thus far, been an extension of the engineer/piece of the projects.

I have a lot to learn when it comes to fabrication, having only taken one class that truly focused us in that direction. I in part, took this class in order to learn much more about these things, however, we have gotten to a point, where those who are very efficient in one thing will just branch off and take care of that, instead of really wanting to wait around on anyone. This is understandable, for our limited time for each project. I just constantly feel as though I am begging for jobs!

I say this only half heartedly, for I do play a large role in the decision making and the brainstorming. We have been having really good brainstorming sessions, where one idea multiplies into many that branch in all directions. You can see the excitement in people's faces, and the support from the rest of the group. Although we started on shaky ground, we have become much closer and much more open to each others ideas.

This weekend I went out to Joe Trumpey's house, to help adobe, and saw his huge solar panel system. It is a beautiful application for the things we have been learning how to do via arduino-ing, etc. A huge plane of solar panels set up in the sky by a pole. The plane follows the sun from sunrise to sunset, and if it cannot make a shadow, the solar panels become inactive until it can generate a reading. He also showed us the readings inside the home, so the family can see how their energy use is, and whether they are in the negative or positive for the time being. We saw the 30 batteries powering the machine, as well.

This was incredible to see, especially now having created a machine that does the same movements. I have been looking a lot into heliotropic instances in nature, as well as watching some Ted Talks about design, nature, scalability (thanks in part to Brieana).

This weekend, we all got together to start testing materials and structure out. We worked with different sized material and different shaped bubbles. We had a hard time making decisions that would allow us to move forward more quickly, however, we all got a much clearer view of the plans, and how to make this function while reformulating and redesigning a bit in the process.

As for the Future of Design conference. I really liked the 15 minute/speaker set up. It allowed focus to come more easily. I was not entirely moved or inspired, overall, however, a few speakers did stick out. One woman spoke of trash as our biggest renewable energy, which I found fascinating, and I have been thinking about since hearing her on Friday. Also, I find that I really want to work with my hands and not just working on graphics at a computer. The man from Readymades, I found extremely intriguing, in his work with an elite first world consumer and a hard working third world producer (in some cases).

I am very excited to find out much more about what our final projects will entail and get started. It is hanging over our heads, we know something big is coming, but NEED MORE INFORMATION.