Basins of Attraction
Washbasin - Prototype Design & Fabrication
UCLA Tech Studio
Instructor: Jason Payne
Team: Justin Rice, Vuki Backonja
This course extended the discourse on plasticity in contemporary design by taking up the washbasin as the object of study.
We worked in small groups to derive surface features from illustrations of familiar topological conditions. The more suggestive features culled from this material were isolated and re-imagined for successful work in thick plastics. As the class progressed, attention turned to physical construction.
This washbasin was initially derived from the Swallowtail catastrophe and was manipulated with special attention to the users experience of sound, touch, and visibility. The scope of the class didn’t include hooking any of the sinks up to water, but as a next step it would be useful to conduct water to test our assumptions about how water would move across the surface and into the hollow interior basin.