As part of my final bout of experimentation with my mechanical arm I wanted to revisit clay as a material because it can be directly imbued with touch. The reason I wanted to re-explore touch based output was because of the connection between my capacitive textiles and touch input, I felt there was potential for some sort of poetic expression of touch from the input to the output of the entire process.
After mounting my motors the motion and velocity of the arm movement is more powerful and has more force behind it, although the range of movement has been reduced due to the fact that the motors are stationary. This has a limiting effect on the overall range of expression although makes the arm itself more stable. In future I would like to explore possible ways of mounting the motors on runners which would allow for a greater range of movement.
This iteration of the arm was designed with the intention of being used with a pen and drawing sequences, however it is still possible to use it to create physical imprints with clay. To get around some of the physical and design constraints of the arm I decided to give the arm clay tools to allow it to create a wider range of marks.
While running through the clay sequence with my data sets I realised that this arm design, while can still be used with clay, is not optimised for this purpose. It struggled to create clear imprints and had a tendency to launch the pieces of clay off its surface and across the room rather than exhibiting a smooth mark making process. This is an issue because this behaviour is not caused by the data sets which are driving the motors, rather the arm itself. In future when making mechanical arms or devices that are intended to work with clay and other malleable materials I realise that I need to design and incorporate this functionality throughout the fabrication process, multi-functionality and multi-expression is something I aim to build into future contraptions.
Amber Struthers IxD4 