Design Changes

In our last lesson, Shae and I changed a lot of things in our design. In the cabins, we have decided to have the top storey leaning off the other side so that it will provide shade for the windows. Our resort is not going to be set in a particularly cold place; so more effort is being placed on cooling than heating. The windows will still be facing north-east or north-west, so sun can still heat the rooms during winter, and during summer the wood sunshades and the top storey can shade the windows.

We have also changed parts of the layout of our resort. We have decided to not include the mountain that was going to be in the top right corner, and have instead made the main cliff where the cabins will be bigger so that it covers most of the top half of the design. This was done so that we could make the cabins slightly bigger so that we could include more detail, while still focusing on the landscape to a certain extent.
This is an image of our new resort design:

Ideation

In our last lesson Shae and I finished drawing up our plan for the landscape and cabins in our resort. All ideas for the cabin design that were discussed in my last blog post are remaining the same, with a few additions. Our current design for the cabins can be seen below.


We have decided to make the cabins two storey, with a balcony hanging over the front and one of the sides. We have done this mostly for aesthetic purposes, although the balcony will slightly shield the front windows from the sun. We may choose to shift the top storey to the other side so that it can also shade the windows on the side of the building, but we are not sure of this yet. We are planning on making parts of the cabins out of bamboo, for instance the railings on the balcony and possibly the sliding shades for the windows, as it is very renewable and strong. We are not sure on most of the rest of the materials yet.

As we wanted to focus on the landscape as well as the design of the cabins, our resort model is going to be on a slightly smaller scale than most of the others. This is our design so far, with the rectangles symbolising the cabins:

Resort Design Progress

Shae and I have almost finalised the design of our resort, and will hopefully start making it during this week. We have decided to create the model of our resort on a smaller scale in order to focus more on the landscape, but large enough to get a good idea of what the buildings would look like. The resort will consist of several cabins surrounding a lake, with some mountains towards the back and streams leading into the lake. We are planning on placing a water wheel in one or two of the streams to provide some electricity.

The resort is going to be separated into several cabins. These will be designed to minimise the need for lighting during the day and the need for cooling or heating. This will be achieved by having the cabins facing north-east and north-west so that the sun will heat the rooms better in Winter. During Summer, the cabins can be shielded from the sun using sliding wood sunshades, which also allow breezes to flow through the room. Our idea for the design of the cabins came from the picture below.

In our next lesson, we are planning on drawing up the top view and side view of our resort and cabins, and when that is done I can upload the images of it. I am really liking our design so far and am looking forward to starting work on it.x

Time Management Plan

This is my time management plan that I made with Shae in yesterday's lesson. It is based around the requirements for our current task, which is to make a scale model of an environmentally sustainable resort. The green in the table shows the time that we have allowed for each task, red is when it is due and blue is for when we will not be at school. In our next lesson this week we are planning on beginning ideation, and are hoping to have this finished by the end of next week so we can start work on creating our resort.