During the mid semester break I didn't end up doing as much as I wanted but I still made some progress on the project. I worked a bit on trying to finalise my form.

I played around a lot with protoputty and although it is very interesting and fun to use, it has just been too difficult to get to work properly for me. As my target user group is families with young children, it's really important that the form not only looks good but is also durable and I don't think this can be achieved by making the entire prototype out of protoputty.

I've decided to not go with protoputty and make the outside out of laser cut acrylic with frosted glass paint to hide the insides but still let light through. I've been working on creating a template that I can cut out of wood first to check that it all works. I've also been looking at using a weather API to match the room temperature to.

Related Work

Now that I'm leaning toward using a laser cutter, I've been researching ways to make it look cooler than just a plain box. They did show us this method in the UQInnovate induction but I kind of forgot how cool etching looks! I think I could add some nice detailing to the form to create a bit more texture to the acrylic.