Nibiru Panneflek-Cook ATCM 3355 F23: Final Project Prosthetic Accessory

Prosthetic Accessory: MemLocs

Concept

“Dreadlock” is a term that — contrary to popular belief — predates Rastafarian use, first having been coined by British colonists during their initial encounters with Kenyan warriors in the 19th century as an exonym that implied aversion to an incredibly narrow understanding of otherness. Envisioned as hybrid cranial and neuroprosthetics that utilize deep brain stimulation to fulfill their intended purpose of external mental storage, MemLocs offer an afrofuturist outlook on a posthuman time to come and substitute the racist etymology of their nominal antecedent for computer science wordplay. Guided by insights from social psychology, these bionic enhancements go beyond the functionality of their medical and cosmetic predecessors by granting their wearers pseudo-telepathic abilities in the form of remote synaptic connectivity with each other, resulting in heightened semantic interference thresholds, more efficient processing, and improved recall. Equal parts treatment, fashion, and media, this technology is well-suited to an exceedingly wide range of applications encompassing cranioplasty, cosmesis, and cooperative data management.

Protective styling is a tradition that emerged within African societies millennia ago. Historical evidence suggests that communities such as the Akan, Bantu, and Senegalese and their members practiced this to preserve their natural hair texture, reduce the need for daily manipulation, safeguard against the elements, express themselves, and organize as early as 3500 BC. In Ancient Egypt, the sidelock of youth affirmed wearers' status as children, a fashion they exchanged for other – often gendered – ones after undergoing rites of passage. During the transatlantic slave trade, displaced peoples of the Black diaspora continued this traditional form of haircare despite colonists engaging in tactics of cultural erasure (e.g., forced shaving), even serving as a tool to escape captivity, allowing recently freed individuals to store and communicate information such as maps and signs charting the Underground Railroad network to each other safely. In contemporary African-American culture, the acts of braiding, twisting, and rolling hair as they exist outside the market remain highly respected and intimate customs, creative processes that take vulnerability as given, often performed individually, with close friends, blood relatives, romantic interests, or other loved ones. Not only do the physiological and aesthetic outcomes of doing so remain desirable, but protective hairstyles are a way of presenting Blackness as beautiful and strong in an ideological environment that to this day holds it to be unruly and dangerous.

Shared experiences, in conjunction with the concurrent acts of recording and transmitting them, are at the core of efforts to construct identity, develop consensus reality, and (dis)articulate perceived contradictions within both. In 1985, Dr. Daniel Wegner put forth a novel theory of group mind he dubbed "differentiated transactive memory." This phenomenon, as described by Wegner, involves the interdependent encoding, storage, and retrieval of information within collectives, where individuals rely on the expertise and knowledge of others to supplement their cognitive capacities, forming an analog peer-to-peer network; look to the Underground Railroad for a topical example.

Reference(s)

Sidelock of Youth

 

Contemporary Example

 

Processes

At the outset of this project, I imported prototype drawings I made in Procreate into Rhino 8 using the "picture" command. To create the base plates for the implants, I used my gesture lines as guides to draw curves around the circumference of a premade head model provided to the class by Professor Scott, turned them into surfaces using the "patch" command, and offset them by 0.75 units. Next, I generated cylindrical primitives, filleted them, and manipulated their scales and positions to mirror the Bantu knot nodes as depicted in my sketches. For expediency, I repaired (over 9000 non-manifold edges) and used a SketchFab asset to help articulate the braided cords. Afterward, I placed toruses at the base of each protrusion to imbue the sum of their parts with polish and elegance.

Deliverable(s)

Black Ghosted Image

 

Color Ghosted Image

 

Render w/Inspiration Sketches

 

Render w/2D Ortho

 

Materials

I sourced two textures from Google Images to create custom skins for the nodes and braids, one of a circuit board and one of some mesh fabric. Conversely, the toruses are assigned Rhino's default copper material with some light adjustments for aesthetic consistency. The head mesh and associated facial features were already color-treated, so I did not make any alterations to them.

Brittany Han: Prosthetic Accessory

 Concept Inspiration:

    My inspiration came from the cute Ranchu Goldfish. I wanted to capture the known silhouette of a goldfish with this mask. I combined the smooth scales of the fish with a functional mask to make a soft on the skin mask. I thought it would be cute to walk around with little fins.

Process:

    I used the provided female face to model my mask onto. I used a combination of curve extrusions as well as premade shapes to get the desired look onto one half of the face. I boolean differenced any unwanted geometry, then I mirror these shapes to the other half of the face. I then used boolean union to join the two halves together.

Model 3/4

Model Side

Model Front

Model Top

Rendering and Materials:

    For my materials I choose to go with items that would feel soft and cool against the skin, like fish scales should. For the main mask section and the straps, I went with a leather material. The lips and fins are made of a durable plastic. and the vents are made out of a hi-dense foam to help with air circulation.

Render 3/4 View

Render Side View

Lauren Barbieri:Week 5: Prosthetic sketch

Concept

I wanted to work primarily with an abstracted shape and create something that would Have a really nice silhouette from all angles. And after a little playing around I settled on waves of water. washing around the leg.

 There are a lot of holes in this object and I will want to remember this is hypothetically something someone would wear so It will be part of the challenge to make the curvature of the leg in such a way that it is at least a little practical, that it won't catch on objects too easily. Depending on how durable the cover has to be a panel of see-through plastic could be added over the holes. The Prosthetic cover would attach by unscrewing the ankle joint and sliding it up over the pipe. the thickness will increase near the bottom and top. 

inspiration

Modelling

Im envisioning most of the modeling I will be doing as subtractive. Possibly also working off of projected and extruded curves to create the see through sections

Materials

I imagine a hard rubber plastic with mixed blue/sea-green and lightening at the edges. Slightly see-through and reflective. 

David Rake - Week 5 - Prosthetic Sketch

Concept:

I bike regularly so in a situation, where I lost a leg, it would be of high priority for myself to regain the ability to bike. The Prosthetic has 4 sets of gears resembling the gears on the bike. The top row has 16 teeth each and the bottom row has 12 teeth each. Each set has a chain in-between the the two gears.

Technique:

I plan to use polar array for rough placement of the gears and chains. Duplication will be used heavily to create the chain links and gears. Manipulation of individual pieces will be used to conform the object to the shape of the leg.

Materials:

Planned to ideally use metal parts, like gears and chains now, but metal 3d printing is not quite affordable and readily available.

Thomas Perugini: Midterm Prosthetic Accessory

Concept: The idea behind this project is to emulate medieval leg and foot armor. While it draws from European armors of history, it remains within the proportions of the human leg, creating a more streamlined, and less bulky aesthetic. Inspiration mainly comes from sets of German Gothic knight armor. The name "Sabaton" is derived from the name of a knights foot armor, the sabatons.

Strategies: The general forms of the shin and foot were created with curve networks. The buckles are filleted curves that were extruded, and circles fixed on either side. The strap is two rectangles that were swept along a rail on the back of the boot. The purple plates on top of the base shape were made from larger versions of the leg/foot, but with many portions trimmed away. The bolts on the sides are spheres.

Materials: To keep with the lightweight and easily accessible material, much of the prosthetic is hard plastic. The belt is leather, and buckles are a rough brass metal.

Austin Bower - Prosthetic Accessory

Gundam MK1 concept: I got the idea for this model for one of favorite TV shows as a kid.  I wanted to design one prosthetic more robotic then the others. This model was designed to fit tightly on the knee joint of the prosthetic and not to be removed

Spiral concept: This model was partially inspired by the old glass coke-cola, but otherwise I was just going for a nice spiral look so the prosthetic would not have sharp edge.  

The Knight concept: The original thought behind was based off a MTG card, then I was just going for a knight's armor look.

The Warrior concept: This model started out as just trying to be a stream line design, but i did not like how it turn out so i changed it for more of a samurai style. The other idea is that each side can be switch around for an asymmetrical  look

Technique: I created all models in Maya. Most of the models where does the a series of extrudes, blend deforms and twist deforms. One was mold form several planes by moving vertices into place.  Then I moved them to Rhino to apply the materials 

Christopher Clark: "Elements" Prosthetic Accessory

Concept- For this model, I wanted to create a prosthetic that was inspired by nature and the elements. I attempted to incorporate the elements of earth fore water and air into my model. The rugged stone and vines with flowers represent earth, the red glass piece represent air, the base represents water, and the side openings represent air.

Modeling Techniques- I attempted to use a varied set of techniques for each element. Though there was a lot of using pipes alond with boolean union and difference to get the textered crevices I wanted. Projection was also used on the red piece as well as extrude curve for the middle gem.

Materials- Textures weren't too hard to consider due to the desire to match the elements. The base stone is a gravel texture, while the center piece is red and yellow glass. The remaining elements are different consistencies and colors of plastic.

Travis Fowler: Prosthetic Accessory

Concept:

I wanted to make a design that would be simple and elegant but still meet the design requirements and serve as a functional piece, not just a spectacle that someone might keep on display more than on their leg. The initial inspiration for the design came from the depiction of clouds in ancient Asian tapestry: loose spirals that create a form with depth. Each spiral holds a particular form or muscle group of the leg. The design shifted away from very tight spirals to more even spirals that twisted with the form of the leg. The actual model design was a big far off from what my drawings indicated but I didn't foresee the world of problems that I would encounter making such a long detailed single curve.

Technique:

I used almost every technique in my toolbox for this one. I began by importing some standard-sized leg references into Rhino and I began to create a loose leg-last for the spirals to be projected onto. I knew that great detail would be hard to capture with the spirals while keeping the flow of the curve smooth, so I used a loose fit loft to generate a fairly smooth last. From that point I wanted to just project the spirals onto the leg and get cracking but the spirals didn't cooperate very well so I only used the initial projections as a starting point. I used the rebuild command to make the curve more manageable and then proceeded to remove any major kinks in the curve. The curve was long and had many inflection points and turn so I needed to use many cross sections to guide the sweep extrusion. It took me upwards of 50 tries to finally sort out the curve and cross-sections into something I liked. I am now the Sweep1 master. Aligning seams of a cross-section in a sweep is a disaster when you have about 30 cross sections. I used a simple Boolean subtract to create the prongs that attach the spirals to the inner post. I added circular pads in the center of each spiral to add to the durability and to provide the hooks a solid place to connect to the spirals.

Materials:

I made it a point to keep the two spirals separate as solid pieces. The goal was to allow the prosthetic user to have a variety of different options for material but after I added the flex-clamp attachment system the materials that are viable in the design were drastically reduced. The material must be able to bend enough to slip onto the inner pole yet be rigid enough to retain its shape. Metals that bend but retain shape and flexible plastics are the best bet for materials that suit the attaching design. Matte copper or some other kind of textured metal is my preference but the huge variety of plastic colors and combinations of the two spirals leave the final choice for material up to the user.