Architecture students toy with design

Students in a first-year architecture class this summer were offered the chance to apply their design and presentation skills to something besides roofs, windows, and porticos. The final project in Professor Vincent Hui's Architecture 175 (Experimental Courses) class had them creating new toys.

Each student or team of two set out to design "relatively low-tech" toys appropriate for children four to eight years old in one or more of five categories: tree house, sand box, playhouse, construction modules, or outdoor play gym.

They were also asked to take into account such factors as the cost and environmental friendliness of materials, the method of manufacture, how easy it would be to assemble the toy, how it would be packaged, and how it would it break down for transport from factory to retail store.

In all, 24 students — 18 from Hui's ARCH 175 class and six from other classes —completed projects.

Spin Master Toys, a Toronto company, and the fifth largest toy company in the world, was chosen to judge the competition primarily, Hui says, "because of its openness to what toys could potentially be. They understand that they are a children’s entertainment company as opposed to just a toy manufacturer. This integrative view of design, specifically that of 'play' in this context, is something architects are taught at UW. Architecture is more than just walls, floors, and roofs — it is also the experience and engagement that one has with the created environment."

The students presented their projects, including prototypes, to classmates, professors, and Spin Master executives on Monday, July 28 in the auditorium in the School of Architecture. The judging took place the following day at Spin Master's Toronto headquarters.

“We were very impressed by the calibre of the toy projects presented," says Tristan Gilman, the company's customer business development manager. "Being presented with toy ideas rooted in architectural concepts was quite thought-provoking. The projects surpassed any expectations we had.”

Prizes of $500, $250 and $100 were awarded for the top three judged projects. First prize went to Sun Hee Kim and Maria Bogdonova for "Super Slurry," their design for a kid-friendly mud pit. "The judges saw it as a refreshing take on what children fundamentally enjoy doing – making a mess," Hui says.

Joe Shi (in black shirt, above) and Ryan Yeung (striped shirt) won second prize for “Incontec,” a design for robots that transform into interconnecting pieces to construct an array of forms.

Ty Murray and Amrit Phull took third prize for “I-Boz,” a toy made up of interconnecting ball joints "that allowed for the creation of shapes with a full range of movement and even computer connectivity."

A book entitled Architects at Play — a compilation of students’ work — will be published at the end of the term.

Bringing new toys to market is a highly competitive process: Spin Master receives thousands of ideas each year from inventors. Will any of the students' designs ever find their way into children's hands? Well, possibly. After having seen all the presentations, Hui says, company executives expressed an interest in "potentially" seeing some of the ideas developed further.

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Sabbaticals: dominos and black holes

Close to two dozen UW faculty members will be starting sabbatical leaves as of September 1. Here’s a list of some of them, with their plans for the sabbatical months as reported to UW’s board of governors.

Timothy Brecht, computer science (12 months): “I plan to visit either EFPL in Lausanne, Switzerland, or the University of Calgary.”

Eric Fillion, chemistry (12 months): “The objective of the proposed sabbatical leave is to extend my studies on the design of domino processes for the expedient synthesis of architecturally complex and medicinally relevant compounds. It will be realized through initiating a research program on the stereo controlled synthesis of distinct types of polysubstituted cyclic compounds from a single multifunctional reagent based simply on catalyst selection.”

Shojaeddin Chenouri, statistics and actuarial science (6 months): “I plan to spend much of my sabbatical in Waterloo with possible short visits to McGill University, University of Texas at Dallas, Michigan State University and University of Washington. I will be continuing and expanding my research studies on multivariate nonparametric and robust statistics, high dimensional data analysis and computational statistics.”

George Freeman (left), electrical and computer engineering (12 months): “In automatic speech recognition, words are differentiated by a set of measurements on their acoustic signals which we call features. The features vary in their effectiveness at distinguishing between particular words. By various algorithms for grouping words and selecting effective features, we hope to improve accuracy, robustness, training speed and the ease of incorporating new words into a vocabulary.”

Robert Mann, physics and astronomy (4 months): “After seven years as Department Chair I will be taking time off in the fall to complete various research projects, to attend a conference on black holes in Banff and to visit the Department of Physics in Queensland, Australia, for a period of several weeks to collaborate with researchers there on quantum information in curved spacetime.”

Bryan Tolson, civil and environmental engineering (6 months): “I plan to complete three or four research projects that each require finishing a journal paper. Some of the sabbatical will also be spent here working closely on current and new projects with PhD students and perhaps a visiting scholar. In addition, I may spend four or six weeks in New Zealand collaborating on hydrologic model calibration research.”

Grant Weddell, computer science (12 months): “The leave will enable me to pursue more focused and intense research in several current areas of interest, particularly at the intersection of databases and of automated reasoning.”

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More architecture; another Olympian

This note from Rick Haldenby, director of the School of Architecture: "Projected Landscapes, a project by five fourth-year architecture students, has been selected from a large number of entries to be part of a digital art display at the Distillery District in Toronto. The works represent one of 20 artist projects that will be shown on the main screen, called the Fido Spot, every night through August from sunset until 11:30 p.m. The students — Evgenia Chevtchenko, Jordan Darnell, Alejandro Fernandez, Maryam Karimi and Veronica Lorenzo — completed Projected Landscapes as part of the requirement for Architecture 425: Theory and Design of Contemporary Landscape, taught by Toronto landscape architect Elise Shelley. The works are photographic recordings of tableaus evoking the memory of major modern art pieces using digital projection on the surfaces of the walled channel of the Grand River near the School of Architecture in Cambridge."

Correction: Keith Beavers is not the only UW-related person competing at the Beijing Olympics. Leigh Hobson (BA ’95, Geography and RLS), is a member of Canada's Olympic cycling team and will compete in the women's road race. Hobson (right) lives in Waterloo, where her home cycling club is the Waterloo Flying Dogs; she teaches at Galt Collegiate Institute. Earlier this year she placed second in the Canadian National Cycling Championships and third at the Montreal Women's Cycling World Cup. Her Beijing experience can be followed on her blog and on the CTV website.

A University of Waterloo — and Region of Waterloo — first happens today at 1 p.m., when the Waterloo Regional Police hold their Badge Ceremony at Village 1 — outdoors, weather permitting; otherwise, in the Great Hall. This will be the first time that the ceremony, in which new police officers receive their badges, will be hosted in the community. More than a dozen new officers are expected, as well as approximately 100 guests, police staff, and VIPs, including UW President David Johnston and Tom Galloway, UW's director of custodial and grounds services, who is also chair of the Waterloo Regional Police Services Board.

CPA staff

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