This course extended the discourse on plasticity in contemporary design by taking up the deeply functional device, 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.  The very act of translating a mathematical diagram from 2D analog drawing to 3D model and then to fabrication in thermoformed plastics was the foundation of the course.  

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 physical water tests to test and improve upon our assumptions about how water would move across the surface and into the hollow interior basin.