Ryan Awdry
Interior & Set Designer
BOTHY CULTURE
A Collaboration between Product and Interior Design
'Atelier', the name of the module meaning 'workshop' incorporated the bright minds of the third year students across the classes of Interior & Environmental Design (IED), Product Design and Interaction Design.
As part of this module, the class separated into groups and mixing the disciplines. All groups were asked to form 'companies' to come up with a project based on a single word and how it can be interpreted.
The word given was 'Speaker'. Each group could take their own meaning of this and come up with any type of project that would be presented and exhibited at the end of the module.
Bothy Culture was formed with equal parts of (IED) and Product Design.
Before Bothy Culture, the 'company' we branded ourselves with was Studio PI, meaning Product and Interiors.
However, once we established our joint interest of Furniture Designs and outdoor spaces, we decided to rebrand when making the choice to create an interactive Bothy where passers-by could stop and share a story with strangers or leave one for those to come in future.
We wanted to replicate the interaction much in the same way as one would when hiking in the Scottish woodland areas and stopping off for a night in a Bothy.
As a group we sought to find a way to bring the outdoor experience of hiking in Scotland into the small structure we had in mind.
The idea of contours from the Scottish scenery from some of the groups favourite spots to hike was considered as a way to influence the exterior.
We also played around with the idea of the physical act of adding or removing a story, the same way one would add a log to the fire.
To illustrate these thoughts we drew up multiple sketches and formed them into the Card sketch model you can see to the left.
We took the ideas we had drawn out and crafted from sketch models into Sketchup to get a better understanding of how this may come together and what will be going inside.
We decided that this structure should be small enough for a 'cosy' capacity of two people to sit and listen to the stories emanating from the furnace.
The interaction would be the act of taking a story (a log) and placing it into the furnace allowing it to 'burn' which would emit the story.
Now the Bothy has a set of criteria to be created. The structure, the bench in which the listener sits and the furnace which reads the stories.
We spent a majority of the time in the workshop after the design had been conceived. We split into the two groups of two to make each element of the Bothy.
Two of us took on building the structure and the other two had the bench and the furnace. The Bench is simplistic and has the natural characteristics of wood fallen from a tree.
The furnace on the other hand, while it does look modest, it is much more complex. It is comprised of a Arduino board which was coded by two very talented members of our group to be able to read RFID tags which housed recordings from stories told by outdoor enthusiast and their experiences in Bothies and would play when placed into the opening on the front..
Another incredible effect which was coded into the furnace was the glowing light which emits while guests sit and listen to the crackling noises of the simulated wood burning.
The images above are the final presentation boards for the module submission while the structure was built and assembled ready for the exhibition.