Author Archives: Ting Cui

We have entered the final two weeks of the EDAAC program, and the third stage of the engineering design process—prototyping. Last Monday, we met with our sponsors from the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and presented our top five designs. The museum preparators and conservators discussed the designs and how they addressed the most pressing concern—protection. In the end, they picked two designs for us to build. We had already formed a shopping list for each design, tweaking our design slightly to be viable with off-the-shelf materials. After deciding on the designs, we quickly placed our order for parts. We ran into some minor problems, such as certain companies not having our parts available at the time. Since we only had two weeks to finish our prototypes, we did not have the luxury of waiting for back orders. Fortunately, most of our parts arrived in a timely manner. We spent the last week building our designs. This has involved a lot of cutting and grinding, since many of the off-the-shelf parts were not exactly the measurements we needed or did not match up as we had hoped. Despite some setbacks, we are making progress and have been able to piece together one of the prototypes. Seeing the design completed, we can better understand the shortcomings and order new parts and return old parts to correct theses issues.

Today we began with a simple team building exercise. With 3 large envelopes deemed as rafts, we were challenged to cross a “river.” We took a few minutes to think over the process and decided to have one person hold all the rafts and forge the way. The first person stepped on one raft, laid down the second “raft” about 2 feet in front of her, put one foot on the second raft, and waited until the next person stepped onto the first raft before removing his/her foot and putting all of his/her weight on the second raft. Then we did the same process with the third raft, and everyone shifted up a raft, with the third person now on the first raft. The second person put a foot on the third raft, and the third person put a foot on the second raft so that the last person can have a foot on the first raft. With everyone on the rafts now, the first person can step off, and everyone starts moving up while making sure to have a foot touching a raft at all times. This way we successfully crossed the river!

After the team building exercise, we looked over the list of paintings that Wynne from the MFAH gave us. There were 28 works of art, so we had each person look into 7 art pieces and analyze the reason each art might need a travel frame. The art pieces ranged from the traditional oil and acrylic paints to photograph collages, and we were able to note a variety of reasons these pieces might be difficult to store.

In the afternoon, we had an orientation at the Fondren library where we learned how to use data bases such as JSTOR and EJournal Portal. This presentation was given by Jet M. Prendeville, Art & Architecture Librarian, and John Hunter, the Science & Engineering Librarian. It was very educational and we are looking forward to utilizing the Fondren Library resources in our background research.