The Heart of the Lotus Flower (Trái Tim Của Hoa Sen)

For my Senior Visual Arts Project, I decided to create a mechanical lotus flower that blooms and closes in response to the user's heart rate. Inspired by the lotus flower's symbolism of resilience, wisdom, and optimism in Vietnamese culture and Buddhism, the goal of this project is to personify the act of a blooming flower by linking it to a more personal characteristic: the heartbeat.

Timeline

Early Sketches

Below: An early sketch of the mechanical lotus flower. Inspiration for the flower mechanism came from Ruforge, a designer and YouTuber who created a mechanical flower garden using a rack-and-pinion gear system.

Timeline

3D-modeling and fabricating the lotus flower proved to be the most challenging part of this project. To overcome this, I began the process of 3D fabrication early on to understand the 3D printer's capabilities in printing mechanical gears and organic shapes, such as the lotus petals. Professor Dominguez introduced me to Tommy Sharkey from the UCSD Design Lab, who was greatly helpful in providing me guidance on how I could go about creating a more realistic lotus petal shape on Fusion 360.

Early Prototypes

Early Sketches

Below: An early sketch of the mechanical lotus flower. Inspiration for the flower mechanism came from Ruforge, a designer and YouTuber who created a mechanical flower garden using a rack-and-pinion gear system.

Timeline

3D-modeling and fabricating the lotus flower proved to be the most challenging part of this project. To overcome this, I began the process of 3D fabrication early on to understand the 3D printer's capabilities in printing mechanical gears and organic shapes, such as the lotus petals. Professor Dominguez introduced me to Tommy Sharkey from the UCSD Design Lab, who was greatly helpful in providing me guidance on how I could go about creating a more realistic lotus petal shape on Fusion 360.

Early Prototypes

Softwares Used:

Autodesk Fusion 360, AutoCAD, Adobe Illustrator

Class:

VIS 160: Senior Computing in the Arts Project

Date:

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